Page:Roman Constitutional History, 753-44 B.C..djvu/193

Rh seems to have provided that the list of senators should be included in the general panel of jurors. It was soon repealed, and the knights remained the controlling judicial power.

Revival of the Democratic Party. — The democratic opposition soon revived, but had no leader of ability. In the year 120 L. Opimius was impeached by a tribune for violating the Sempronian law concerning appeal He was acquitted. The next year the tribune Gaius Marius carried a law enacting that the bridges (pontes), or passages, along which the voters went to the ballot boxes (cistae), should be made narrower, in order to make it more difficult for the nobles to stand by and influence the votes of their dependents. A new and more severe law on extortion (lex Servilia repetundarum), passed some years afterward, was the work of the subsequent democratic leader, Gaius Servilius Glaucia.

When, in the negotiations and the war with Jugurtha, the representatives of the oligarchy had displayed a venality and incompetence unexampled in Roman annals, the democratic party had an excellent opportunity to regain the ascendency; but, being without a real leader, it attacked individual oligarchs and not the faulty system, the oligarchy, which was sure to produce the same results in the future. By a Mamilian law a special commission was established in 109 for trying those implicated in the Jugurthine conspiracy. It condemned L. Opimius, three other ex-consuls, and a member of a priestly college. How ineffectual this procedure was, is indicated by the fact that the corrupt Scaurus became one of the presidents of the commission, and not only escaped, but was elected censor about this time. The Numidian affairs exposed, therefore, both the corruption of the government and the incapacity of the opposition.