[Sidenote:  Corn-law of Saturninus.] Another law of Saturninus either renewed the corn-law of Caius Gracchus, or went farther and made the price of grain merely nominal.  This law was no doubt meant to recover the favour of the city mob, which he had forfeited by his agrarian law.  But Caepio, son, probably, of the hero of Tolosa, stopped the voting by force, and the law was not carried. [Sidenote:  Law of treason.] The third law of Saturninus was a Lex de Majestate, a law by which anyone could be prosecuted for treason against the State, and which was not improbably aimed specially at Caepio, who was impeached under it.  It seems at any rate certain that of these laws the agrarian was the chief, and the others subsidiary; in other words, that he and Glaucia were working together on an organized plan, and striving to admit the whole Roman world into a community of rights with Rome.  They thought that with the Marian soldiers at their back they would be safer than Gracchus with his bands of reapers; and so they may have taken the initiative in violence from which, both by past events and the acts of men like Caepio, it was certain that the optimates would not shrink.  It is difficult to apportion the blame in such cases. [Sidenote:  Civil strife.  Saturninus seizes the Capitol.] But when Glaucia stood for the consulship of 99, and his rival Memmius, a favourite with the people, was murdered, an attack was made on Saturninus, who hastily sent for aid to his rural supporters and seized the Capitol.  He found then that in reckoning on Marius he had made a fatal blunder.  That selfish intriguer had been alarmed by the popular favour shown to an impostor named Equitius, who gave out that he was the son of Tiberius Gracchus, and who, being imprisoned by Marius, was released by the people and elected tribune.  He may have been jealous too of the popularity of Saturninus with his own veterans, and at the same time anxious to curry favour with the foes of Saturninus—­the urban populace. [Sidenote:  Marius turns on his friends.] So, instead of boldly joining his late ally, he became the general of the opposite party, drove Saturninus and his friends from the Forum, and, when they had surrendered, suffered them to be pelted to death in the Curia Hostilia where he had placed them. [Sidenote:  Death of Saturninus and Glaucia.] Saturninus, it is said, had been proclaimed king before his death.  If so he had at least struck for a crown consistently and boldly; and even if his attempt for the moment united the senatorial party and the equites, while the city mob stood wavering or hostile, he might nevertheless have forestalled the empire by a century had Marius only had half his enterprise or nerve.  In an epoch of revolution it is idle to judge men by an ordinary standard.  How far personal ambition and how far a nobler ideal animated Saturninus no man can say.  Those who condemn him must condemn Cromwell too.