ed by force, it still needed force
to maintain its ground against its numerous secret and open foes.
It was opposed not by any single party with objects clearly
expressed and under leaders distinctly acknowledged, but by a mass
of multifarious elements, ranging themselves doubtless
under the general name of the popular party, but in reality opposing
the Sullan organization of the commonwealth on very various grounds
and with very different designs. There were the men of positive
law who neither mingled in nor understood politics, but who detested
the arbitrary procedure of Sulla in dealing with the lives
and property of the burgesses. Even during Sulla's lifetime,
when all other opposition was silent, the strict jurists resisted
the regent; the Cornelian laws, for example, which deprived various
Italian communities of the Roman franchise, were treated
in judicial decisions as null and void; and in like manner the courts
held that, where a burgess had been made a prisoner of war and sold
into slavery during the revolution, his franchise was not forfeited.
There was, further, the remnant of the old liberal minority
in the senate, which in former times had laboured to effect
a compromise with the reform party and the Italians, and was now
in a similar spirit inclined to modify the rigidly oligarchic
constitution of Sulla by concessions to the Populares.
There were, moreover, the Populares strictly so called,
the honestly credulous narrow-minded radicals, who staked property
and life for the current watchwords of the party-programme,
only to discover with painful surprise after the victory
that they had been fighting not for a reality, but for a phrase.
Their special aim was to re-establish the tribunician power, which Sulla
had not abolished but had divested of its most essential prerogatives,
and which exercised over the multitude a charm all the more mysterious,
because the institution had no obvious practical use and was
in fact an empty phantom--the mere name of tribune of the people,
more than a thousand years later, revolutionized Rome.

Transpadanes
Freedmen
Capitalists
Proletarians of the Capital
The Dispossessed
The Proscribed and Their Adherents

There were, above all, the numerous and important classes
whom the Sullan restoration had left unsatisfied, or whose political
or private interests it had directly injured. Among those
who for such reasons belonged to the opposition ranked the dense
and prospe