n these were less tangible, and therefore
more difficult to be terrified or corrupted than the direct organs
of government and administration. The holders of power encountered
here, especially in the popular elections, the tough energy
of a close oligarchy--grouped in coteries--which is by no means
finally disposed of when its rule is overthrown, and which is
the more difficult to vanquish the more covert its action.
They encountered here too, especially in the jury-courts,
the repugnance of the middle classes towards the new monarchical rule,
which with all the perplexities springing out of it they were
as little able to remove. They suffered in both quarters a series
of defeats. The election-victories of the opposition had,
it is true, merely the value of demonstrations, since the regents
possessed and employed the means of practically annulling any magistrate
whom they disliked; but the criminal trials in which the opposition
carried condemnations deprived them, in a way keenly felt,
of useful auxiliaries. As things stood, the regents could neither
set aside nor adequately control the popular elections
and the jury-courts, and the opposition, however much it felt itself
straitened even here, maintained to a certain extent the field of battle.

Literature of the Opposition

It proved, however, yet a more difficult task to encounter
the opposition in a field, to which it turned with the greater zeal
the more it was dislodged from direct political action. This was
literature. Even the judicial opposition was at the same time
a literary one, and indeed pre-eminently so, for the orations
were regularly published and served as political pamphlets.
The arrows of poetry hit their mark still more rapidly and sharply.
The lively youth of the high aristocracy, and still more energetically
perhaps the cultivated middle class in the Italian country towns,
waged the war of pamphlets and epigrams with zeal and success.
There fought side by side on this field the genteel senator's son
Gaius Licinius Calvus (672-706) who was as much feared
in the character of an orator and pamphleteer as of a versatile poet,
and the municipals of Cremona and Verona Marcus Furius Bibaculus
(652-691) and Quintus Valerius Catullus (667-c. 700) whose elegant
and pungent epigrams flew swiftly like arrows through Italy
and were sure to hit their mark. An oppositional tone prevails
throughout the literature of these years. It is full of indignant