not know what primarily
gave occasion to his soliciting the tribuneship of the people for 666,
and on its account renouncing his patrician nobility; but he seems
to have been by no means rendered a revolutionist through the
fact that he, like the whole middle party, had been persecuted as
revolutionary by the conservatives, and to have by no means intended
an overthrow of the constitution in the sense of Gaius Gracchus.
It would rather seem that, as the only man of note belonging to
the party of Crassus and Drusus who had come forth uninjured from
the storm of the Varian prosecutions, he felt himself called on
to complete the work of Drusus and finally to set aside the still
subsisting disabilities of the new burgesses--for which purpose he
needed the tribunate. Several acts of his even during his tribuneship
are mentioned, which betray the very opposite of demagogic designs.
For instance, he prevented by his veto one of his colleagues from
cancelling through a decree of the people the sentences of jurymen
issued under the Varian law; and when the late aedile Gaius Caesar,
passing over the praetorship, unconstitutionally became a candidate
for the consulship for 667, with the design, it was alleged, of getting
the charge of the Asiatic war afterwards entrusted to him, Sulpicius
opposed him more resolutely and sharply than any one else. Entirely
in the spirit of Drusus, he thus demanded from himself as from
others primarily and especially the maintenance of the constitution.
But in fact he was as little able as was Drusus to reconcile things
that were incompatible, and to carry out in strict form of law the
change of the constitution which he had in view--a change judicious
in itself, but never to be obtained from the great majority of the
old burgesses by amicable means. His breach with the powerful
family of the Julii--among whom in particular the consular Lucius
Caesar, the brother of Gaius, was very influential in the senate--
and withthesectionof the aristocracy adhering to it, beyond doubt
materially cooperated and carried the irascible man through personal
exasperation beyond his original design.

Tendency of These Laws

Yet the proposals brought in by him were of such a nature as
to be by no means out of keeping with the personal character and
the previous party-position of their author. The equalization of
the new burgesses with the old was simply a partial resumption of
the proposals drawn up by Drusus i