The senate approved his conduct, and even made it an instruction afterwards to the governors of Asia that they should take as their model the principles of Scaevola's administration; but the equites, although they did not venture to meddle with that highly aristocratic and influential statesman himself, brought to trial his associates and ultimately (about 662) even the most considerable of them, his legate Publius Rufus, who was defended only by his merits and recognized integrity, not by family connection. The charge that such a man had allowed himself to perpetrate exactions in Asia, almost broke down under its own absurdity and under the infamy of the accuser, one Apicius; yet the welcome opportunity of humbling the consular was not allowed to pass, and, when the latter, disdaining false rhetoric, mourning robes, and tears, defended himself briefly, simply, and to the point, and proudly refused the homage which the sovereign capitalists desired, he was actually condemned, and his moderate property was confiscated to satisfy fictitious claims for compensation. The condemned resorted to the province which he was alleged to have plundered, and there, welcomed by all the communities with honorary deputations, and praised and beloved during his lifetime, he spent in literary leisure his remaining days. And this disgraceful condemnation, while perhaps the worst, was by no means the only case of the sort. The senatorial party was exasperated, not so much perhaps by such abuse of justice in the case of men of stainless walk but of new nobility, as by the fact that the purest nobility no longer sufficed to cover possible stains on its honour. Scarcely was Rufus out of the country, when the most respected of all aristocrats, for twenty years the chief of the senate, Marcus Scaurus at seventy years of age was brought to trial for exactions; a sacrilege according to aristocratic notions, even if he were guilty. The office of accuser began to be exercised professionally by worthless fellows, and neither irreproachable character, nor rank, nor age longer furnished protection from the most wicked and most dangerous attacks. The commission regarding exactions was converted from a shield of the provincials into their worst scourge; the most notorious robber escaped with impunity, if he only indulged his fellow-robbers and did not refuse to allow part of the sums exacted to reach the jury; but any attempt to respond to the equitable demands of the provincials for right and justice sufficed for condemnation. It seemed as if the intention was to bring the Roman government into the same dependence on the controlling court, as that in which the college of judges at Carthage had formerly held the council there. The prescient expression of Gaius Gracchus was finding fearful fulfilment, that with the dagger of his law as to the jurymen the world of quality would lacerate itself.
Livius Drusus
An attack on the equestrian courts was inevitable. Every one in the government party who was still alive to the fact that governing implies not merely rights but also duties, every one in fact who still felt any nobler or prouder ambition within him, could not but rise in revolt against this oppressive and disgraceful political control, which precluded any possibility of upright administration. The scandalous condemnation of Rutilius Rufus seemed a summons to begin the attack at once, and Marcus Livius Drusus, who was tribune of the people in 663, regarded that summons as specially addressed to himself. Son of the man of the same name, who thirty years before had primarily caused the overthrow of Gaius Gracchus(11) and had afterwards made himself a name as an officer by the subjugation of the Scordisci,(12) Drusus was, like his father, of strictly conservative views, and had already given practical proof that such were his sentiments in the insurrection of Saturninus. He belonged to the circle of the highest nobility, and was the possessor of a colossal fortune; in disposition too he was a genuine aristocrat--a man emphatically proud, who scorned to bedeck himself with the insignia of his offices, but declared on his death-bed that there would not soon arise a citizen like to him; a man with whom the beautiful saying, that nobility implies obligation, was and continued to be the rule of his life. With all the vehement earnestness of his temperament he had turned away from the frivolity and venality that marked the nobles of the common stamp; trustworthy and strict in morals, he was respected rather than properly beloved on the part of the common people, to whom his door and his purse were always open, and notwithstanding his youth, he was through the personal dignity of his character a man of weight in the senate as in the Forum. Nor did he stand alone. Marcus Scaurus had the courage on occasion of his defence in the trial for extortion publicly to summon Drusus to undertake a reform of the judicial arrangements; he and the famous orator, Lucius Crassus, were in the senate the most zealous champions of his proposals, and were perhaps associated with him in originating them. But the mass of the governing aristocracy was by no means of the same mind with Drusus, Scaurus, and Crassus. There were not wanting in the senate decided adherents of the capitalist party, among whom in particular a conspicuous place belonged to the consul of the day, Lucius Marcius Philippus, who maintained the cause of the equestrian order as he had formerly maintained that of the democracy(13) with zeal and prudence, and to the daring and reckless Quintus Caepio, who was induced to this opposition primarily by his personal hostility to Drusus and Scaurus. More dangerous, however, than these decided opponents was the cowardly and corrupt mass of the aristocracy, who no doubt would have preferred to plunder the provinces alone, but in the end had not much objection to share the spoil with the equites, and, instead of taking in hand the grave and perilous struggle against the haughty capitalists, reckoned it far more equitable and easy to purchase impunity at their hands by fair words and by an occasional prostration or even by a round sum. The result alone could show how far success would attend the attempt to carry along with the movement this body, without which it was impossible to attain the desired end.