Such were Gaius Servilius Glaucia, called by Cicero the Roman Hyperbolus, a vulgar fellow of the lowest origin and of the most shameless street-eloquence, but effective and even dreaded by reason of his pungent wit; and his better and abler associate, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, who even according to the accounts of his enemies was a fiery and impressive speaker, and was at least not guided by motives of vulgar selfishness. When he was quaestor, the charge of the importation of corn, which had fallen to him in the usual way, had been withdrawn from him by decree of the senate, not so much perhaps on account of maladministration, as in order to confer this--just at that time popular--office on one of the heads of the government party, Marcus Scaurus, rather than upon an unknown young man belonging to none of the ruling families. This mortification had driven the aspiring and sensitive man into the ranks of the opposition; and as tribune of the people in 651 he repaid what he had received with interest. One scandalous affair had at that time followed hard upon another. He had spoken in the open market of the briberies practised in Rome by the envoys of king Mithradates--these revelations, compromising in the highest degree the senate, had wellnigh cost the bold tribune his life. He had excited a tumult against the conqueror of Numidia, Quintus Metellus, when he was a candidate for the censorship in 652, and kept him besieged in the Capitol till the equites liberated him not without bloodshed; the retaliatory measure of the censor Metellus--the expulsion with infamy of Saturninus and of Glaucia from the senate on occasion of the revision of the senatorial roll--had only miscarried through the remissness of the colleague assigned to Metellus. Saturninus mainly had carried that exceptional commission against Caepio and his associates(6) in spite of the most vehement resistance by the government party; and in opposition to the same he had carried the keenly-contested re-election of Marius as consul for 652. Saturninus was decidedly the most energetic enemy of the senate and the most active and eloquent leader of the popular party since Gaius Gracchus; but he was also violent and unscrupulous beyond any of his predecessors, always ready to descend into the street and to refute his antagonist with blows instead of words.
Such were the two leaders of the so-called popular party, who now made common cause with the victorious general. It was natural that they should do so; their interests and aims coincided, and even in the earlier candidatures of Marius Saturninus at least had most decidedly and most effectively taken his side. It was agreed between them that for 654 Marius should become a candidate for a sixth consulship, Saturninus for a second tribunate, Glaucia for the praetorship, in order that, possessed of these offices, they might carry out the intended revolution in the state. The senate acquiesced in the nomination of the less dangerous Glaucia, but did what it could to hinder the election of Marius and Saturninus, or at least to associate with the former a determined antagonist in the person of Quintus Metellus as his colleague in the consulship. All appliances, lawful and unlawful, were put in motion by both parties; but the senate was not successful in arresting the dangerous conspiracy in the bud. Marius did not disdain in person to solicit votes and, it was said, even to purchase them; in fact, at the tribunician elections when nine men from the list of the government party were proclaimed, and the tenth place seemed already secured for a respectable man of the same complexion Quintus Nunnius, the latter was set upon and slain by a savage band, which is said to have been mainly composed of discharged soldiers of Marius. Thus the conspirators gained their object, although by the most violent means. Marius was chosen as consul, Glaucia as praetor, Saturninus as tribune of the people for 654; the second consular place was obtained not by Quintus Metellus, but by an insignificant man, Lucius Valerius Flaccus: the confederates might proceed to put into execution the further schemes which they contemplated and to complete the work broken off in 633.
The Appuleian Laws
Let us recall the objects which Gaius Gracchus pursued, and the means by which he pursued them. His object was to break down the oligarchy within and without. He aimed, on the one hand, to restore the power of the magistrates, which had become completely dependent on the senate, to its original sovereign rights, and to re-convert the senatorial assembly from a governing into a deliberative board; and, on the other hand, to put an end to the aristocratic division of the state into the three classes of the ruling burgesses, the Italian allies, and the subjects, by the gradual equalization of those distinctions which were incompatible with a government not oligarchical. These ideas the three confederates revived in the colonial laws, which Saturninus as tribune of the people had partly introduced already (651), partly now introduced (654).(7) As early as the former year the interrupted distribution of the Carthaginian territory had been resumed primarily for the benefit of the soldiers of Marius--not the burgesses only but, as it would seem, also the Italian allies--and each of these veterans had been promised an allotment of 100 -jugera-, or about five times the size of an ordinary Italian farm, in the province of Africa. Now not only was the provincial land already available claimed in its widest extent for the Romano-Italian emigration, but also all the land of the still independent Celtic tribes beyond the Alps, by virtue of the legal fiction that through the conquest of the Cimbri all the territory occupied by these had been acquired de jure by the Romans. Gaius Marius was called to conduct the assignations of land and the farther measures that might appear necessary in this behalf; and the temple-treasures of Tolosa, which had been embezzled but were refunded or had still to be refunded by the guilty aristocrats, were destined for the outfit of the new receivers of land.