While the ordinary citizen did not have a chance to speak in the official processes of government, a certain amount of gossip circulated and some of this gossip eventually had its effect even on the rich and powerful.

Publius Scipio Nasica, the light of political power, who as consul had declared war on Jugurtha, who with his own sacred hands received the Idaean Mother from her home in Phrygia when she came to our home, who crushed many dangerous seditions by the force of this authority, in whose leadership the senate had gloried for many years, was seeking the aedileship in his younger days, and took firm hold of a farmer's roughened hand in the way candidates do. As a sort of joke he asked him whether he tended to walk on his hands. Once bystanders heard this remark, it flowed...