he could give by ballot, they were dependent on the suffrages of the mob.  Neither dared they till seventeen years later make an attempt to interfere with the selection of the judices from the equestrian order, and even then the attempt failed.  The scheme of taxation in the province of Asia was also left untouched.  But what they dared to do they did.  They prosecuted the adherents of Gracchus.  They recalled Popillius from exile.  When Opimius was arraigned for ‘perduellio,’ or misuse of his official power to compass the death of a citizen, they procured his acquittal.  But when Carbo was accused of the same crime, they remembered that he had been a partisan of Tiberius, though since a renegade, and would not help him.  So while Opimius got off, the champion of Opimius was driven to commit suicide—­a fitting close to a contemptible career.

[Sidenote:  Reactionary legislation.] But they soon assailed measures as well as men.  The Lex Baebia appears to have secured those who had actually established themselves at Carthage in their allotments; but the Senate annulled the colonies which Caius had planned in Italy, and, with one exception, Neptunia, broke up those already settled. [Sidenote:  The agrarian law annulled.] Then by three successive enactments it got rid of the agrarian law, and plunged Italy again into the decline from which by the help of that law she was emerging. 1.  The occupiers were allowed again to sell their land.  Tiberius had expressly forbidden this, and now the rich at once began to buy out the small owners, whom they often evicted by means more or less foul. 2.  A tribune named Borius, or Thorius, prohibited any further distribution of land, thus knocking on the head the permanent commission.  These two laws were tantamount to handing over to the rich in the city and the country the greater part of the public land, giving them a legal title to it instead of the possession on sufferance with which the Gracchi had interfered.  The mouths of the farmers were stopped by the pernicious but tempting permission to sell their land.  The people were cajoled by the vectigalia, which Drusus had abolished, being reimposed, and the proceeds divided among them. 3.  Encouraged by the general acquiescence in these insidious aggressions they induced a tribune, whose name is conjectured to have been C. Baebius, to do away with the vectigalia altogether. [Sidenote:  Lex Thoria.] The date of this law, usually called the Thorian law, was 111 B.C.  The real Thorian law was probably carried in 118 B.C.  Between these dates the rich would have been getting back the land from the poor occupiers, and so, when the Senate abolished the vectigalia, it was really pocketing them, and once for all and by a legal form turning the public into private land.  This law, which is here called the Baebian law, Cicero ascribes to Spurius Thorius, who, he says, freed the land from the vectigal.  But as Appian says that Spurius Borius imposed the vectigal, it is assumed