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Campania and the great city of Capua is reserved. An army is being got together against yourselves, against your liberty, against Cnæus Pompeius. Capua is set up against this city; bands of desperate ruffians against you; the ten chiefs against Pompey."

When once the bill was put in its true light, as an act of war on Pompey, public opinion declared against it. Cicero was listened to with marked favour by the multitude.—"They gave up to him," says Pliny, "the Agrarian Law, that is to say, their own bread." One of the other tribunes announced that he would veto the bill, and its chances were so hopeless that Rullus presently withdrew it of his own accord.

The next nine months may be passed lightly over. The consul is recorded to have pacified by a conciliatory speech the popular resentment against Roscius Otho, who four years previously had restored to Cicero's friends, the Knights, their reserved seats in the theatre. A little later we find him resisting an attempt to remove the political disabilities with which Sulla had affected the children of those who had been put to death in the great Proscription. Cicero acknowledged that the proposal was humane and righteous, but he succeeded in persuading not only the people but the very victims of the existing law themselves, that it was ill-timed. Strange to say, the same considerations seem to have kept Cæsar during his consulship and the triumvirs during their period of supremacy