epublicans.(10)

New Exceptional Measures Resolved on

It became necessary to take serious steps against this opposition,
which was powerless indeed, but was always becoming more troublesome
and audacious. The condemnation of Gabinius, apparently,
turned the scale (end of 700). The regents agreed to introduce
a dictatorship, though only a temporary one, and by means of this
to carry new coercive measures especially respecting the elections
and the jury-courts. Pompeius, as the regent on whom primarily devolved
the government of Rome and Italy, was charged with the execution
of this resolve; which accordingly bore the impress of the awkwardness
in resolution and action that characterized him, and of his singular
incapacity of speaking out frankly, even where he would and could
command. Already at the close of 700 the demand for a dictatorship
was brought forward in the senate in the form of hints,
and that not by Pompeius himself. There served as its ostensible ground
the continuance of the system of clubs and bands in the capital,
which by acts of bribery and violence certainly exercised
the most pernicious pressure on the elections as well as
on the jury-courts and kept it in a perpetual state of disturbance;
we must allow that this rendered it easy for the regents to justify
their exceptional measures. But, as may well be conceived,
even the servile majority shrank from granting what the future dictator
himself seemed to shrink from openly asking. When the unparalleled
agitation regarding the elections for the consulship of 701
led to the most scandalous scenes, so that the elections
were postponed a full year beyond the fixed time and only took place
after a seven months' interregnum in July 701, Pompeius found
in this state of things the desired occasion for indicating
now distinctly to the senate that the dictatorship was the only means
of cutting, if not of loosing the knot; but the decisive
word of command was not even yet spoken. Perhaps it would have
still remained for long unuttered, had not the most audacious
partisan of the republican opposition Titus Annius Milo
stepped into the field at the consular elections for 702
as a candidate in opposition to the candidates of the regents,
Quintus Metellus Scipio and Publius Plautius Hypsaeus, both men
closely connected with Pompeius personally and thoroughly devoted to him.

Milo
Killing of Clodius

Milo, endowed with physical courage, with a certain