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When this Sulpicius, in quality of Praetor, was celebrating the public shews in honour of Apollo, died the Poet Ennius, in the Consulship of Q. Marcius and Cn. Servilius, after exhibiting his Tragedy of Thyestes.
The consul conducting the election was by no means a mere returning officer; he could still, e. g. by virtue of his old royal prerogative reject particular candidates and disregard the votes tendered for them; at first he might even limit the choice to a list of candidates proposed by himself; and what was of still more consequence when the collegiate consulship was to be supplemented by the dictator, of whom we shall speak immediately, in so supplementing it the community was not consulted, but on the contrary the consul in that case appointed his colleague with the same freedom, wherewith the interrex had once appointed the king.
In general, admission to the senate was thrown open to persons belonging to the ruling families without distinction as to ability, while not only were the poorer and humbler ranks of the population utterly precluded from access to the offices of government, but all Roman burgesses not belonging to the hereditary aristocracy were practically excluded, not indeed exactly from the senate, but from the two highest magistracies, the consulship and the censorship.
He was a political party leader, raised to distinction by his efforts to limit the power of the senate; indignant at the government in consequence of the aristocratic intrigues concocted against him during his consulship; carried away, through a doubtless justifiable opposition to their beaten track of partisanship, into a scornful defiance of tradition and custom; intoxicated at once by blind love of the common people and equally bitter hatred of the party of the nobles; and, in addition to all this, possessed with the fixed idea that he was a military genius.
So Cato and his friends in return supported the candidature of Milo for the consulship; even Cicero could not avoid recommending one who had been his enemy's enemy and his own protector during many years; and as Milo himself spared neither money nor violence to carry his election, it seemed secured.
For the popular magistracy, as it represents the ignorance, and stupidity, and capricious tyranny of the multitude, and their unfitness for rule, is subjected to the criticism of the true consulship, on the one hand, while the military usurpation of the chair of state, and the law of Conquest, is not less severely criticized by the true Tribune the Tribune, whose Tribe is the Kind on the other; and it was not necessary to produce, in any more prominent manner, just then, the fact, that both these offices and relations were combined in that tottering estate of the realm, that 'old riotous form of military government, which held then only by the virtual election of the stupidity and ignorance of the people, and which, this Poet and his friends were about to put on its trial, for its innovations in the government, and suppressions of the ancient estates of this realm, for its suppression of the dignities and privileges of the Nobility, and its suppression of the chartered dignities and rights of the Commons.
The consequence was, of course, that candidates for election to magistracies took every opportunity of giving them; and Cicero himself in his consulship inserted a clause in his lex de ambitu forbidding candidates to give such exhibitions within two years of the election.
As proofs of his integrity, may be mentioned his consulship, in which he conducted himself with so much honor, his honorable administration of his province; his refusal to be one of the twenty commissioners; and, during the civil wars, which fell with great severity on his times, his uprightness of mind, which was never swayed, either by hope or by fear, from adhering to the better party, or the supporters of the commonwealth.
But a general who desired a triumph had to wait outside the gates of the city till it was voted to him, while a candidate for the consulship must lose no time in beginning to canvass the people. Caesar, having to make his choice between the two, preferred power to show. He stood for the consulship, and was triumphantly elected.
The declaration which he made after his Consulship, in the speech for Sulla, that up to the time of Catiline's first conspiracy forensic duties had not allowed him to devote himself to party politics, is entitled to belief: we know, indeed, that it was so.
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