in public the democrats described the absent general
as the head and pride of their party and seemed to direct
all their arrows against the aristocracy, preparations
were secretly made against Pompeius; and these attempts
of the democracy to escape from the impending military dictatorship
have historically a far higher significance than the noisy agitation,
for the most part employed only as a mask, against the nobility.
It is true that they were carried on amidst a darkness, upon which
our tradition allows only some stray gleams of light to fall;
for not the present alone, but the succeeding age also
had its reasons for throwing a veil over the matter. But in general
both the course and the object of these efforts are completely clear.
The military power could only be effectually checkmated by another
military power. The design of the democrats was to possess
themselves of the reins of government after the example of Marius
and Cinna, then to entrust one of their leaders either with the conquest
of Egypt or with the governorship of Spain or some similar
ordinary or extraordinary office, and thus to find in him
and his military force a counterpoise to Pompeius and his army.
For this they required a revolution, which was directed immediately
against the nominal government, but in reality against Pompeius
as the designated monarch;(8) and, to effect this revolution,
there was from the passing of the Gabinio-Manilian laws down to
the return of Pompeius (688-692) perpetual conspiracy in Rome.
The capital was in anxious suspense; the depressed temper
of the capitalists, the suspensions of payment, the frequent bankruptcies
were heralds of the fermenting revolution, which seemed as though it must
at the same time produce a totally new position of parties.
The project of the democracy, which pointed beyond the senate
at Pompeius, suggested an approximation between that general
and the senate. But the democracy in attempting to oppose
to the dictatorship of Pompeius that of a man more agreeable to it,
recognized, strictly speaking, on its part also the military government,
and in reality drove out Satan by Beelzebub; the question of principles
became in its hands a question of persons.

League of the Democrats and the Anarchists

The first step towards the revolution projected by the leaders
of the democracy was thus to be the overthrow of the existing
government by means of an insurrection primarily instigated
in Rome b