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There, however, the fear of Rome arrested their progress; they applied anew for lands, but Silanus, the Governor, answered them haughtily, that the commonwealth had neither lands to give nor services to accept from barbarians. He attacked them and was defeated. Three consuls, L. Cassius, C. Servilius Caepio, and Cn. Manlius, sent in all haste against them, successively experienced the same fate.
Such were the transactions this year at home and abroad. The Roman games were thrice repeated in full by the curule aediles, Cneius Servilius Caepio and Servius Cornelius Lentulus. In the same manner the plebeian games also were once repeated entire by the plebeian aediles, Manius Pomponius Matho and Quintus Mamilius Thurinus.
His wife Livia, seeing him in this perplexity: "Will you take a woman's counsel?" said she. "Do as the physicians do, who, when the ordinary recipes will do no good, make trial of the contrary. By severity you have hitherto prevailed nothing; Lepidus has followed Salvidienus; Murena, Lepidus; Caepio, Murena; Egnatius, Caepio. Begin now, and try how sweetness and clemency will succeed.
A number of tribunes of the people favourable to the opposition, with Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Gaius Norbanus at their head, proposed in 651 to appoint an extraordinary judicial commission in reference to the embezzlement and treason perpetrated in Gaul; in spite of the de facto abolition of arrest during investigation and of the punishment of death for political offences, Caepio was arrested and the intention of pronouncing and executing in his case sentence of death was openly expressed.
Caepio is the first exponent of a fresh phase of the new conservatism which had animated the elder Drusus.
The consuls then cast lots for their provinces: Bruttium fell to the lot of Caepio, Etruria to the lot of Servilius Geminus. The provinces of the praetors were then put to the lot. Paetus Aelius obtained the city jurisdiction; Publius Lentulus, Sardinia; Publius Villius, Sicily; Quinctilius Varus, Ariminum, with two legions which had served under Lucretius Spurius.
Lastly the urban quaestor, Quintus Caepio, the son, it may be presumed, of the general condemned three years before, and like his father a vehement antagonist of the popular party, with a band of devoted partisans dispersed the comitia by violence.
The investigation could not be prevented, and the warfare of prosecutions pursued its course in 651 as it had done six years before; Caepio himself, his colleague in the supreme command Gnaeus Mallius Maximus, and numerous other men of note were condemned: a tribune of the people, who was a friend of Caepio, with difficulty succeeded by the sacrifice of his own civic existence in saving at least the life of the chief persons accused.
I should have assigned the same post to Q. Caepio, if he had not been so violently attached to the Equestrian Order, as to set himself at variance with the Senate. I have also remarked, that Cn. Carbo, M. Marius, and several others of the same stamp, who would not have merited the attention of an audience that had any taste for elegance, were extremely well suited to address a tumultuous crowd.
There are not materials for deciding the point with entire certainty, but the great preponderance of probability is in favour of the former year; partly because it was nearer to the disastrous events in Gaul, partly because in the tolerably full accounts of the second tribunate of Saturninus there is no mention of Quintus Caepio the father and the acts of violence directed against him.
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