of the hopes, which had brought to the Gracchi their most faithful
adherents, had in the meanwhile been recognized as illusory, and there
had sprung up in many minds a misgiving that this Gracchan agitation
tended towards an issue whither a very large portion of the discontented
were by no means willing to follow it. In fact, amidst the chase and
turmoil of twenty years there had been rubbed off and worn away very
much of the fresh enthusiasm, the steadfast faith, the moral purity
of effort, which mark the early stages of revolutions. But, if the
democratic party was no longer what it had been under Gaius Gracchus,
the leaders of the intervening period were now as far beneath their
party as Gaius Gracchus had been exalted above it. This was implied
in the nature of the case. Until there should emerge a man having
the boldness like Gaius Gracchus to grasp at the supremacy of the state,
the leaders could only be stopgaps: either political novices, who gave
furious vent to their youthful love of opposition and then, when duly
accredited as fiery declaimers and favourite speakers, effected with
more or less dexterity their retreat to the camp of the government
party; or people who had nothing to lose in respect of property and
influence, and usually not even anything to gain in respect of honour,
and who made it their business to obstruct and annoy the government
from personal exasperation or even from the mere pleasure of creating a
noise. To the former sort belonged, for instance, Gaius Memmius(5) and
the well-known orator Lucius Crassus, who turned the oratorical laurels
which they had won in the ranks of the opposition to account in the
sequel as zealous partisans of the government.

Glaucia
Saturninus

But the most notable leaders of the popular party about this time were
men of the second sort. 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withdrawn from him by decree of the senate, not so much perhaps on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 maladmi