Both towns stood on the top ledges of precipices, and were hardly accessible.  Each was blockaded and each was eventually surrendered by a traitor.  But at Tauromenium the defenders held out, it is said, till all food was gone, and they had eaten the children, and the women, and some of the men.  Cleon’s brother Comanus was taken here; all the prisoners were first tortured, and then thrown down the rocks.  At Enna Cleon made a gallant sally, and died of his wounds.  Eunous fled and was pulled out of a pit with his cook, his baker, his bathman, and his fool.  He is said to have died in prison of the same disease as Sulla and Herod.  Rupilius crucified over 20,000 slaves, and so quenched with blood the last fires of rebellion.

Besides the dangers threatening society from the discontent of the poor, the aggressions of the rich, the multiplication and ferocious treatment of slaves, and the social rivalries of the capital, the condition of Italy and the general deterioration of public morality imperatively demanded reform.  It has been already said that we do not know for certain how the plebs arose.  But we know how it wrested political equality from the patres, and, speaking roughly, we may date the fusion of the two orders under he common title ‘nobiles,’ from the Licinian laws. [Sidenote:  The ‘nobiles’ at Rome.] It had been a gradual change, peaceably brought about, and the larger number having absorbed the smaller, the term ‘nobiles,’ which specifically meant those who had themselves filled a curule office, or whose fathers had done so, comprehended in common usage the old nobility and the new.  The new nobles rapidly drew aloof from the residuum of the plebs, and, in the true parvenu spirit, aped and outdid the arrogance of the old patricians.  Down to the time of the Gracchi, or thereabouts, the two great State parties consisted of the plebs on the one hand, and these nobiles on the other. [Sidenote:  The ‘optimates’ and ‘populares.’] After that date new names come into use, though we can no more fix the exact time when the terms optimates and populares superseded previous party watchwords than we can when Tory gave place to Conservative, and Whig to Liberal.  Thus patricians and plebeians were obsolete terms, and nobles and plebeians no longer had any political meaning, for each was equal in the sight of the law; each had a vote; each was eligible to every office.  But when the fall of Carthage freed Rome from all rivals, and conquest after conquest filled the treasury, increased luxury made the means of ostentation more greedily sought.  Office meant plunder; and to gain office men bribed, and bribed every day on a vaster scale.  If we said that ‘optimates’ signified the men who bribed and abused office under the banner of the Senate and its connections, and that ‘populares’ meant men who bribed and abused office with the interests of the people outside the senatorial pale upon their lips, we might do injustice to many good men on both