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It was on this occasion that the consul Gaius Piso attempted from Rome to prevent the levies which Marcus Pomponius, the legate of Pompeius, instituted by virtue of the Gabinian law in the province of Narbo an imprudent proceeding, to check which, and at the same time to keep the just indignation of the multitude against the consul within legal bounds, Pompeius temporarily reappeared in Rome.
The moderate Optimates declared themselves for the Manilian proposal, because after the Gabinian law resistance in any case was vain, and far-seeing men already perceived that the true policy for the senate was to make approaches as far as possible to Pompeius and to draw him over to their side on occasion of the breach which might be foreseen between him and the democrats.
While the senate felt less pressing anxiety about enforcing the laws regarding the lending of money than about the levy; for now it was announced that the enemy, having marched from Præneste, had encamped in the Gabinian territory; meanwhile this very report rather aroused the tribunes of the commons to the struggle commenced than deterred them; nor did any thing else suffice to allay the discontent in the city, but the approach of hostilities to the very walls.
Where, when there was no one to meet them, not even an unarmed person, and they passed through every place destitute not only of troops, but even of the cultivation of the husbandman, they reached as far as the third stone on the Gabinian road.
The Domitian highway after long preparations furnished a secure land-route from Italy to Spain, and was closely connected with the founding of Aquae Sextiae and Narbo; the Gabinian and the Egnatian led from the principal places on the east coast of the Adriatic sea the former from Salona, the latter from Apollonia and Dyrrhachium into the interior; the network of roads laid out by Manius Aquillius immediately after the erection of the Asiatic province in 625 led from the capital Ephesus in different directions towards the frontier.
He based his proposal once more on that by which he had eleven years before laid the foundations of his power, the price of bread in the capital, which had just then as previously to the Gabinian law reached an oppressive height.
These laid waste all the countryaround Praeneste and Gabii: from the Gabinian territory they turned their course toward the heights of Tusculum; great alarm was excited in the city of Rome also, more from the suddenness of the affair than because there was not sufficient strength to repel the attack.
The Parties in Relation to the Gabinian Laws The democracy, discontented as its leaders might be in secret, could not well come publicly forward against the project of law.
Accordingly their leaders the praetor Lucius Quinctius, the same who seven years before had exerted himself for the restoration of the tribunician power, and the former quaestor Gaius Caesar supported the Gabinian proposals.
Where he exhibited the semblance of action, the questions to which his action applied had, as a rule, just reached their solution; thus he came forward in the trial of Verres against the senatorial courts when they were already set aside; thus he was silent at the discussion on the Gabinian, and acted as a champion of the Manilian, law; thus he thundered against Catilina when his departure was already settled, and so forth.
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