For the moment the power of the optimates seemed restored.  The spectre of monarchy had made the men of riches coalesce with their old rivals the men of rank; and the mob, ungrateful for an unexecuted corn-law, chafed at Italian pretensions.  Metellus, the aristocrat, was recalled to Rome amid the enthusiasm of the anti-Italian mob, and P. Furius was torn to pieces for having opposed his return. [Sidenote:  Marius falls into disrepute.] Marius slunk away to the East, finding that his treachery had only isolated him and brought him into contempt; and there, it is said, he tried to incite Mithridates to war.  Sextus Titius indeed brought forward an agrarian law in 99 B.C.  But he was opposed by his colleagues and driven into exile.  Two events soon happened which showed not only the embittered feelings existing between the urban and rural population, but also the sympathy with the provincials felt by the better Romans, and, as an inference, the miserable condition of the provincials themselves. [Sidenote:  The Lex Licinia Minucia.] The first was the enactment, in 95 B.C., of the Lex Licinia Minucia, which ordered Latins and Italians resident at Rome to leave the city. [Sidenote:  and the prosecution of Rutilius Rufus foreshadow the Social War.] The second was the prosecution and conviction of Publius Rutilius Rufus, nominally for extortion, but really because, by his just administration of the province of Asia, he had rebuked extortion and the equestrian courts which connived at it.  Though most of the senators were as guilty as the equites, the mass, like M. Scaurus, who was himself impeached for extortion, would ill brook being forced to appear before their courts, and be eager to take hold of their maladministration of justice as a pretext for abrogating the Servilian law.

[Sidenote:  Drusus attempts a reform.] One more attempt at reform was to be made, this time by one of the Senate’s own members, but only to be once more defeated by rancorous party-spirit and besotted urban pride.  Marcus Livius Drusus was son of the man whom the Senate had put forward to outbid Caius Gracchus.  He was a haughty, upright man, of an impetuous temper—­such a man as often becomes the tool of less courageous but more dexterous intriguers.  M. Scaurus had been impeached for taking bribes in Asia, and it is said that in his disgust he egged on Drusus to restore the judicia to the Senate.  Drusus was probably one of those men whom an aristocracy in its decadence not rarely produces. [Sidenote:  Attitude of Drusus.] He disliked the preponderance of the moneyed class.  He could not feel the vulgar Roman’s antipathy to giving Italians the franchise, for he saw it exercised by men who were in his eyes infinitely more contemptible.  He disliked also and despised the vices of his own order.  Mistaking the crafty suggestions of Scaurus for a genuine appeal to high motives, flattered by it, and by the confidence of the Italians, he thought that he could educate his party, and by his personal