make
too much of the fact that he appealed to force, because violence
was the order of the day, and submission to the law simply meant
submission to the law of force. But there are some parts of his career
apparently so inconsistent as almost to defy explanation which in any
case can be little more than guesswork.

[Sidenote: Sulpicius.] Publius Sulpicius Rufus was now in the prime of
life, having been born in 124 B.C. He was an aristocrat, an orator of
great force and fire, and a friend of Drusus, whose views he shared
and inherited. Cicero speaks of him in no grudging terms. 'Of all the
speakers I have heard Sulpicius was the grandest, and, so to speak,
most tragic. Besides being powerful, his voice was sweet and resonant.
His gestures and movements, elegant though they were, had nothing
theatrical about them, and his oratory, though quick and fluent, was
neither redundant nor verbose.' [Sidenote: Financial crisis at Rome.]
The year before his tribunate had been a turbulent one at Rome. The
Social War and Asiatic disturbances had brought about a financial
crisis. Debtors, hard pressed by their creditors, invoked obsolete
penalties against usury in their defence, and the creditors, because
the praetor Asellio attempted to submit the question to trial,
murdered him in the open Forum. The debtors responded by a cry for
_tabulae novae_, or a sweeping remission of all debts. Of these
debtors many doubtless would belong to the lower orders; but, from a
proposal of Sulpicius made the next year, it appears probable that
some were found in the ranks of the Senate. War had made money
'tight,' to use the phraseology of our modern Stock Exchange, and
reckless extravagance could no longer be supported by borrowing.

[Sidenote: Sulpicius the successor of Drusus.] Sulpicius inherited the
policy of Drusus, which was to reconstruct the Senatorial Government
on an Italian basis. Like Drusus he had to conciliate prejudices in
order to carry out his design. Plutarch says that he went about with
600 men of the equestrian order, whom he called his anti-Senate. No
doubt it was to please these equites, who would belong to the party of
creditors, that he proposed that no one should be a senator who owed
more than 2,000 denarii. No doubt, too, he would have filled the
vacancies thus created by the expulsion of reckless anti-Italian
optimates, from the ranks of these equites, just as Drusus had done.
[Sidenote: He attempts to remodel the gove