s not inconsistent with the view
given above; for the proposal proceeded as usual from several tribunes
of the people (ad Herenn. i. 14, 24; Cic. de Or. ii. 47, 197), and,
as Saturninus was already dead when the aristocratic party was in a
position to think of retaliation, they fastened on his colleague.
As to the period of this second and final condemnation of Caepio,
the usual very inconsiderate hypothesis, which places it in 659,
ten years after the battle of Arausio, has been already rejected.
It rests simply on the fact that Crassus when consul, consequently
in 659, spoke in favour of Caepio (Cic. Brut. 44, 162); which, however,
he manifestly did not as his advocate, but on the occasion when
Norbanus was brought to account by Publius Sulpicius Rufus for his
conduct toward Caepio in 659. Formerly the year 650 was assumed for
this second accusation; now that we know that it originated from a
proposal of Saturninus, we can only hesitate between 651, when he was
tribune of the people for the first time (Plutarch, Mar. 14; Oros,
v. 17; App. i. 28; Diodor. p. 608, 631), and 654, when he held that
office a second time. There are not materials for deciding the point
with entire certainty, but the great preponderance of probability is
in favour of the former year; partly because it was nearer to the
disastrous events in Gaul, partly because in the tolerably full
accounts of the second tribunate of Saturninus there is no mention
of Quintus Caepio the father and the acts of violence directed against
him. The circumstance, that the sums paid back to the treasury in
consequence of the verdicts as to the embezzlement of the Tolosan
booty were claimed by Saturninus in his second tribunate for his
schemes of colonization (De Viris Ill. 73, 5, and thereon Orelli,
Ind. Legg. p. 137), is not in itself decisive, and may, moreover,
have been easily transferred by mistake from the first African to
the second general agrarian law of Saturninus.

The fact that afterwards, when Norbanus was impeached, his impeachment
proceeded on the very ground of the law which he had taken part in
suggesting, was an ironical incident common in the Roman political
procedure of this period (Cic. Brut. 89, 305) and should not mislead
us into the belief that the Appuleian law was, like the later
Cornelian, a general law of high treason.

24. The view here presented rests in the main on the comparatively
trustworthy account in the Epitome of Livy (where