rban and rural population, but also the sympathy with
the provincials felt by the better Romans, and, as an inference, the
miserable condition of the provincials themselves. [Sidenote: The Lex
Licinia Minucia.] The first was the enactment, in 95 B.C., of the Lex
Licinia Minucia, which ordered Latins and Italians resident at Rome
to leave the city. [Sidenote: and the prosecution of Rutilius Rufus
foreshadow the Social War.] The second was the prosecution and
conviction of Publius Rutilius Rufus, nominally for extortion, but
really because, by his just administration of the province of Asia, he
had rebuked extortion and the equestrian courts which connived at it.
Though most of the senators were as guilty as the equites, the mass,
like M. Scaurus, who was himself impeached for extortion, would ill
brook being forced to appear before their courts, and be eager to take
hold of their maladministration of justice as a pretext for abrogating
the Servilian law.

[Sidenote: Drusus attempts a reform.] One more attempt at reform was
to be made, this time by one of the Senate's own members, but only to
be once more defeated by rancorous party-spirit and besotted urban
pride. Marcus Livius Drusus was son of the man whom the Senate had put
forward to outbid Caius Gracchus. He was a haughty, upright man, of
an impetuous temper--such a man as often becomes the tool of less
courageous but more dexterous intriguers. M. Scaurus had been
impeached for taking bribes in Asia, and it is said that in his
disgust he egged on Drusus to restore the judicia to the Senate.
Drusus was probably one of those men whom an aristocracy in its
decadence not rarely produces. [Sidenote: Attitude of Drusus.] He
disliked the preponderance of the moneyed class. He could not feel the
vulgar Roman's antipathy to giving Italians the franchise, for he saw
it exercised by men who were in his eyes infinitely more contemptible.
He disliked also and despised the vices of his own order. Mistaking
the crafty suggestions of Scaurus for a genuine appeal to high
motives, flattered by it, and by the confidence of the Italians, he
thought that he could educate his party, and by his personal influence
induce it to do justice to Italy. But this conservative advocate of
reform was not wily enough tactician for the times in which he lived,
or the changes which he meditated. His attempts to improve on the
devices of Saturninus and Gracchus were miserable failures; and the
senator