Rome was in a fearful ferment.  The attack of Drusus upon the equestrian courts and his sudden downfall brought about by the equestrian party, followed by the two-edged Varian warfare of prosecutions, had sown the bitterest discord between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie as well as between the moderates and the ultras.  Events had completely justified the party of concession; what it had proposed voluntarily to bestow, men had been more than half compelled to concede; but the mode in which the concession was made bore, just like the earlier refusal, the stamp of obstinate and shortsighted envy.  Instead of granting equality of rights to all Italian communities, they had only expressed the inferiority in another form.  They had received a great number of Italian communities into Roman citizenship, but had attached to what they thus conferred an offensive stigma, by placing the new burgesses alongside of the old on nearly the same footing as the freedmen occupied alongside of the freeborn.  They had irritated rather than pacified the communities between the Po and the Alps by the concession of Latin rights.  Lastly, they had withheld the franchise from a considerable, and that not the worst, portion of the Italians—­the whole of the insurgent communities which had again submitted; and not only so, but, instead of legally re-establishing the former treaties annulled by the insurrection, they had at most renewed them as a matter of favour and subject to revocation at pleasure.(20) The disability as regarded the right of voting gave the deeper offence, that it was—­as the comitia were then constituted—­politically absurd, and the hypocritical care of the government for the unstained purity of the electors appeared to every unprejudiced person ridiculous; but all these restrictions were dangerous, inasmuch as they invited every demagogue to carry his ulterior objects by taking up the more or less just demands of the new burgesses and of the Italians excluded from the franchise.  While accordingly the more clear-seeing of the aristocracy could not but find these partial and grudging concessions as inadequate as did the new burgesses and the excluded themselves, they further painfully felt the absence from their ranks of the numerous and excellent men whom the Varian commission of high treason had exiled, and whom it was the more difficult to recall because they had been condemned by the verdict not of the people but of the jury-courts; for, while there was little hesitation as to cancelling a decree of the people even of a judicial character by means of a second, the cancelling of a verdict of jurymen bythe people appeared to the betterportion of the aristocracy as a very dangerous precedent.  Thus neither the ultras nor the moderates were content with the issue of the Italian crisis.  But still deeper indignation swelled the heart of the old man, who had gone forth to the Italian war with freshened hopes and had come back from it reluctantly, with the consciousness of