ation,
the terms of which--the marching off of the Roman army under the yoke,
the immediate evacuation of the whole Numidian territory, and the
renewal of the treaty cancelled by the senate--were dictated by
Jugurtha and accepted by the Romans (in the beginning of 645).

Dissatisfaction in the Capital

This was too much to be borne. While the Africans were exulting and
the prospect--thus suddenly opened up--of such an overthrow of the
alien domination as had been reckoned scarcely possible was bringing
numerous tribes of the free and half-free inhabitants of the desert
to the standards of the victorious king, public opinion in Italy was
vehemently aroused against the equally corrupt and pernicious governing
aristocracy, and broke out in a storm of prosecutions which, fostered
by the exasperation of the mercantile class, swept away a succession
of victims from the highest circles of the nobility. On the proposal
of the tribune of the people Gaius Mamilius Limetanus, in spite of the
timid attempts of the senate to avert the threatened punishment, an
extraordinary jury-commission was appointed to investigate the high
treason that had occurred in connection with the question of the
Numidian succession; and its sentences sent the two former commanders-
in-chief Gaius Bestia and Spurius Albinus as well as Lucius Opimius,
the head of the first African commission and the executioner withal
of Gaius Gracchus, along with numerous other less notable men of the
government party, guilty and innocent, into exile. That these
prosecutions, however, were only intended to appease the excitement
of public opinion, in the capitalist circles more especially, by the
sacrifice of some of the persons most compromised, and that there was
in them not the slightest trace of a rising of popular indignation
against the government itself, void as it was of right and honour,
is shown very clearly by the fact that no one ventured to attack
the guiltiest of the guilty, the prudent and powerful Scaurus; on
the contrary he was about this very time elected censor and also,
incredible as it may seem, chosen as one of the presidents of the
extraordinary commission of treason. Still less was any attempt even
made to interfere with the functions of the government, and it was
left solely to the senate to put an end to the Numidian scandal in a
manner as gentle as possible for the aristocracy; for that it was
time to do so, even the most aristocratic aris