were crowded by a pack
of cowardly and dissolute nobles; nevertheless there sat in it Scipio
Aemilianus, Gaius Laelius, Quintus Metellus, Publius Crassus, Publius
Scaevola and numerous other respectable and able men, and an observer
favourably predisposed might be of opinion that the senate maintained
a certain moderation in injustice and a certain decorum in
misgovernment. This aristocracy had been overthrown and then
reinstated; henceforth there rested on it the curse of restoration.
While the aristocracy had formerly governed for good or ill, and for
more than a century without any sensible opposition, the crisis which
it had now passed through revealed to it, like a flash of lightning
in a dark night, the abyss which yawned before its feet. Was it any
wonder that henceforward rancour always, and terror wherever they
durst, characterized the government of the lords of the old
nobility? that those who governed confronted as an united and compact
party, with far more sternness and violence than hitherto, the non-
governing multitude? that family-policy now prevailed once more, just
as in the worst times of the patriciate, so that e. g. the four
sons and (probably) the two nephews of Quintus Metellus--with a
single exception persons utterly insignificant and some of them called
to office on account of their very simplicity--attained within fifteen
years (631-645) all of them to the consulship, and all with one
exception also to triumphs--to say nothing of sons-in-law and so
forth? that the more violent and cruel the bearing of any of their
partisans towards the opposite party, he received the more signal
honour, and every outrage and every infamy were pardoned in the
genuine aristocrat? that the rulers and the ruled resembled two
parties at war in every respect, save in the fact that in their
warfare no international law was recognized? It was unhappily only
too palpable that, if the old aristocracy beat the people with rods,
this restored aristocracy chastised it with scorpions. It returned
to power; but it returned neither wiser nor better. Never hitherto
had the Roman aristocracy been so utterly deficient in men of
statesmanly and military capacity, as it was during this epoch
of restoration between the Gracchan and the Cinnan revolutions.

Marcus Aemilius Scaurus

A significant illustration of this is afforded by the chief of the
senatorial party at this time, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus. The son of
highly arist