gesses, so it witnessed also the emergence of a demagogism that
flattered the populace alongside of the respectable and useful party
of opposition. Cato was already acquainted with men who made a trade
of demagogism; who had a morbid propensity for speechifying, as others
had for drinking or for sleeping; who hired listeners, if they could
find no willing audience otherwise; and whom people heard as they
heard the market-crier, without listening to their words or, in the
event of needing help, entrusting themselves to their hands. In his
caustic fashion the old man describes these fops formed after the
model of the Greek talkers of the agora, dealing in jests and
witticisms, singing and dancing, ready for anything; such an one was,
in his opinion, good for nothing but to exhibit himself as harlequin
in a procession and to bandy talk with the public--he would sell his
talk or his silence for a bit of bread. In reality these demagogues
were the worst enemies of reform. While the reformers insisted above
all things and in every direction on moral amendment, demagogism
preferred to insist on the limitation of the powers of the government
and the extension of those of the burgesses.

Abolition of the Dictatorship

Under the former head the most important innovation was the practical
abolition of the dictatorship. The crisis occasioned by Quintus
Fabius and his popular opponents in 537(61) gave the death-blow to
this all-along unpopular institution. Although the government once
afterwards, in 538, under the immediate impression produced by the
battle of Cannae, nominated a dictator invested with active command,
it could not again venture to do so in more peaceful times. On
several occasions subsequently (the last in 552), sometimes after
a previous indication by the burgesses of the person to be nominated,
a dictator was appointed for urban business; but the office, without
being formally abolished, fell practically into desuetude. Through
its abeyance the Roman constitutional system, so artificially
constructed, lost a corrective which was very desirable with reference
to its peculiar feature of collegiate magistrates;(62) and the
government, which was vested with the sole power of creating a
dictatorship or in other words of suspending the consuls, and
ordinarily designated also the person who was to be nominated as
dictator, lost one of its most important instruments. Its place
was but very imperfectly supplied