and neither irreproachable character, nor rank, nor age longer furnished protection from the most wicked and most dangerous attacks.  The commission regarding exactions was converted from a shield of the provincials into their worst scourge; the most notorious robber escaped with impunity, if he only indulged his fellow-robbers and did not refuse to allow part of the sums exacted to reach the jury; but any attempt to respond to the equitable demands of the provincials for right and justice sufficed for condemnation.  It seemed as if the intention was to bring the Roman government into the same dependence on the controlling court, as that in which the college of judges at Carthage had formerly held the council there.  The prescient expression of Gaius Gracchus was finding fearful fulfilment, that with the dagger of his law as to the jurymen the world of quality would lacerate itself.

Livius Drusus

An attack on the equestrian courts was inevitable.  Every one in the government party who was still alive to the fact that governing implies not merely rights but also duties, every one in fact who still felt any nobler or prouder ambition within him, could not but rise in revolt against this oppressive and disgraceful political control, which precluded any possibility of upright administration.  The scandalous condemnation of Rutilius Rufus seemed a summons to begin the attack at once, and Marcus Livius Drusus, who was tribune of the people in 663, regarded that summons as specially addressed to himself.  Son of the man of the same name, who thirty years before had primarily caused the overthrow of Gaius Gracchus(11) and had afterwards made himself a name as an officer by the subjugation of the Scordisci,(12) Drusus was, like his father, of strictly conservative views, and had already given practical proof that such were his sentiments in the insurrection of Saturninus.  He belonged to the circle of the highest nobility, and was the possessor of a colossal fortune; in disposition too he was a genuine aristocrat—­a man emphatically proud, who scorned to bedeck himself with the insignia of his offices, but declared on his death-bed that there would not soon arise a citizen like to him; a man with whom the beautiful saying, that nobility implies obligation, was and continued to be the rule of his life.  With all the vehement earnestness of his temperament he had turned away from the frivolity and venality that marked the nobles of the common stamp; trustworthy and strict in morals, he was respected rather than properly beloved on the part of the common people, to whom his door and his purse were always open, and notwithstanding his youth, he was through the personal dignity of his character a man of weight in the senate as in the Forum.  Nor did he stand alone.  Marcus Scaurus had the courage on occasion of his defence in the trial for extortion publicly to summon Drusus to undertake a reform of the judicial arrangements; he and the famous orator, Lucius Crassus, were in