The Gracchan colonists had
disappeared. The Syllan military proprietors had disappeared--one by one
they had fallen to beggary, and had sold their holdings, and again the
country was parcelled into enormous estates cultivated by slave-gangs. The
Italians had been emancipated, but the process had gone no further. The
libertini, the sons of the freedmen, still waited for equality of rights.
The rich and prosperous provinces beyond the Po remained unenfranchised,
while the value of the franchise itself was daily diminishing as the
Senate resumed its control over the initiative of legislation. Each year
the elections became more corrupt. The Clodius judgment had been the most
frightful instance which had yet occurred of the depravity of the law
courts; while, by Cicero's own admission, not a single measure could pass
beyond discussion into act which threatened the interests of the
oligarchy. The consulship of Caesar was looked to with hope from the
respectable part of the citizens, with alarm from the high-born
delinquents as a period of genuine reform. The new consuls were to enter
office on the 1st of January. In December it was known that an agrarian
law would be at once proposed under plea of providing for Pompey's troops;
and Cicero had to decide whether he would act in earnest in the spirit
which he had begun to show when the tribunes' bill was under discussion,
or would fall back upon resistance with the rest of his party, or evade
the difficult dilemma by going on foreign service, or else would simply
absent himself from Rome while the struggle was going on.
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