e
for the great liberator; the mob carried the body to the senate-house,
and set the building on fire. Thereafter the multitude proceeded
to the front of Milo's house and kept it under siege, till his band
drove off the assailants by discharges of arrows. They passed
on to the house of Pompeius and of his consular candidates,
of whom the former was saluted as dictator and the latter as consuls,
and thence to the house of the interrex Marcus Lepidus, on whom
devolved the conduct of the consular elections. When the latter,
as in duty bound, refused to make arrangements for the elections
immediately, as the clamorous multitude demanded, he was kept
during five days under siege in his dwelling house.

Dictatorship of Pompeius

But the instigators of these scandalous scenes had overacted
their part. Certainly their lord and master was resolved to employ
this favourable episode in order not merely to set aside Milo,
but also to seize the dictatorship; he wished, however, to receive it
not from a mob of bludgeon-men, but from the senate. Pompeius brought
up troops to put down the anarchy which prevailed in the capital,
and which had in reality become intolerable to everybody;
at the same time he now enjoined what he had hitherto requested,
and the senate complied. It was merely an empty subterfuge,
that on the proposal of Cato and Bibulus the proconsul Pompeius,
retaining his former offices, was nominated as "consul without
colleague" instead of dictator on the 25th of the intercalary
month(12) (702)--a subterfuge, which admitted an appellation labouring
under a double incongruity(13) for the mere purpose of avoiding
one which expressed the simple fact, and which vividly reminds us
of the sagacious resolution of the waning patriciate to concede
to the plebeians not the consulship, but only the consular power.(14)

Changes of in the Arrangement of Magistracies and the Jury-System

Thus in legal possession of full power, Pompeius set to work
and proceeded with energy against the republican party which was
powerful in the clubs and the jury-courts. The existing enactments
as to elections were repeated and enforced by a special law;
and by another against electioneering intrigues, which obtained
retrospective force for all offences of this sort committed
since 684, the penalties hitherto imposed were augmented.
Still more important was the enactment, that the governorships,
which were by far the more important and esp