ad whom
the Samnites left on the field. In Campania the smaller townships,
which the Samnites still occupied, were wrested from them by Sulla,
and Nola was invested. The Roman general Aulus Gabinius penetrated
also into Lucania and gained no small advantages; but, after he had
fallen in an attack on the enemy's camp, Lamponius the insurgent
leader and his followers once more held almost undisturbed command
over the wide and desolate Lucano-Bruttian country. He even made an
attempt to seize Rhegium, which was frustrated, however, by the Sicilian
governor Gaius Norbanus. Notwithstanding isolated mischances the Romans
were constantly drawing nearer to the attainment of their end; the fall
of Nola, the submission of Samnium, the possibility of rendering
considerable forces available for Asia appeared no longer distant,
when the turn taken by affairs in the capital unexpectedly gave fresh
life to the well-nigh extinguished insurrection.

Ferment in Rome
The Bestowal of the Franchise and Its Limitations
Secondary Effect of the Political Prosecutions
Marius

Rome was in a fearful ferment. The attack of Drusus upon the
equestrian courts and his sudden downfall brought about by the
equestrian party, followed by the two-edged Varian warfare of
prosecutions, had sown the bitterest discord between the aristocracy
and the bourgeoisie as well as between the moderates and the ultras.
Events had completely justified the party of concession; what it had
proposed voluntarily to bestow, men had been more than half compelled
to concede; but the mode in which the concession was made bore, just
like the earlier refusal, the stamp of obstinate and shortsighted
envy. Instead of granting equality of rights to all Italian
communities, they had only expressed the inferiority in another form.
They had received a great number of Italian communities into Roman
citizenship, but had attached to what they thus conferred an offensive
stigma, by placing the new burgesses alongside of the old on nearly
the same footing as the freedmen occupied alongside of the freeborn.
They had irritated rather than pacified the communities between the
Po and the Alps by the concession of Latin rights. Lastly, they had
withheld the franchise from a considerable, and that not the worst,
portion of the Italians--the whole of the insurgent communities
which had again submitted; and not only so, but, instead of legally
re-establishing the former treaties annulled