only the one principle, ‘salus populi suprema lex,’ is incontrovertible.  When we think of him so eloquent, resolute, and energetic, conceiving such great projects and executing them in person, making the regeneration of his country his lodestar in spite of his ever-present belief that he would, in the end, fall by the same fate as his brother, we think of him as one of the noblest figures in history—­a purer and less selfish Julius Caesar.

[Sidenote:  Machinations of the nobles.] As the petty acts of the nobles had brought out into relief the large policy of Tiberius, so it was now.  They resorted to even lower tricks than accusations of tyranny, and found in the fatuity or dishonesty of Drusus a tool even more effective than Nasica’s brutality.  The plantation of a colony at Carthage was looked at askance by many Romans.  It was the first colony planted out of Italy, and the superstitious were filled with forebodings which the Senate eagerly exaggerated.  Such colonies had repeatedly out-grown and overtopped the parent state.  The ground had been solemnly cursed, and the restoration of the town forbidden.  When the first standard was set up by the colonists a blast of wind, it is said, blew it down, and scattered the flesh of the victims; and wolves had torn up the stakes that marked out the site.  Such malicious stories met with readier credence, because, if it is true that Caius had called for colonists from all Italy, and Junonia was to be a Roman colony, he was evading the decree of the people against extending the franchise; and he was thus admitting to it, by a side-wind, those to whom it had just in the harshest manner been refused.  For, when the vote had been taken, every man not having a vote had been expelled from the city, and forbidden to come within five miles of it till the voting was over.  Caius had come to live in the Forum instead of on the Palatine when he returned to Rome, among his friends as he thought; and still even in little matters he stood forward as the champion of the poor against the rich.  There was going to be a show of gladiators in the Forum, and the magistrates had enclosed the arena with benches, which they meant to hire out.  Caius asked them to remove the benches, and, on their refusal, went the night before the show and took them all away.  Anyone who has witnessed modern athletic sports, and observed how a crowd will hem in the competitors so that only a few spectators can see, although an equally good view can be obtained by a great number if the ring is enlarged, will perceive Caius’s object, and be slow to admit that he spoiled the show.  But though such acts pleased the people, all of them had not forgiven him the proposition about the franchise; and his popularity was on the wane. [Sidenote:  Drusus outbids Caius.] The Senate had suborned one of his colleagues, M. Livius Drusus, to outbid him.  Either Drusus thought he was guiding the Senate into a larger policy when he was himself merely the Senate’s puppet, and this his son’s career makes probable, or he was cynically dishonest and unscrupulous.