Their possessors
had from the outset been mostly numbered among the popular party;
but since the departure of Caesar, who alone understood how to impress
the democracy, and alone knew how to manage it, all discipline
had departed from them and every partisan practised politics
at his own hand. Even now, no doubt, these men fought with most pleasure
under the banner of freedom; but, strictly speaking, they were neither
of democratic nor of anti-democratic views; they inscribed on the--
in itself indispensable--banner, as it happened, now the name
of the people, anon that of the senate or that of a party-chief;
Clodius for instance fought or professed to fight in succession
for the ruling democracy, for the senate, and for Crassus. The leaders
of these bands kept to their colours only so far as they inexorably
persecuted their personal enemies--as in the case of Clodius
against Cicero and Milo against Clodius--while their partisan
position served them merely as a handle in these personal feuds.
We might as well seek to set a charivari to music as to write the history
of this political witches' revel; nor is it of any moment
to enumerate all the deeds of murder, besiegings of houses,
acts of incendiarism and other scenes of violence within a great capital,
and to reckon up how often the gamut was traversed from hissing
and shouting to spitting on and trampling down opponents,
and thence to throwing stones and drawing swords.

Clodius

The principal performer in this theatre of political rascality
was that Publius Clodius, of whose services, as already mentioned,(2)
the regents availed themselves against Cato and Cicero.
Left to himself, this influential, talented, energetic and--
in his trade--really exemplary partisan pursued during his tribunate,
of the people (696) an ultra-democratic policy, gave the citizens
corn gratis, restricted the right of the censors to stigmatize
immoral burgesses, prohibited the magistrates from obstructing
the course of the comitial machinery by religious formalities,
set asidethe limitswhich had shortly before (690), for the purpose
of checking the system of bands, been imposed on the right
of association of the lower classes, and reestablished the "street-clubs"
(-collegia compitalicia-) at that time abolished, which were nothing
else than a formal organization--subdivided according to the streets,
and with an almost military arrangement--of the whole free
or slave proletariate of the