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The next two consuls, Marcus Fabius Ambustus a second time, and Marcus Popillius Lænas a second time, had two wars on their hands. The one with the Tiburtians was easy, which Licinius managed, who drove the enemy into their city, and laid waste their lands. The Faliscians and Tarquinians routed the other consul in the commencement of the fight.
The favourable situation was immediately used to effect the recall of Publius Popillius Laenas. His restoration was proposed to the people by Lucius Bestia a tribune; and the people which had just sanctioned Opimius's judicial severities, did not betray the inconsistency of continuing to resent the far more restricted persecution of Popillius.
Prisoners of war, deserters, and hostages were delivered up, and the stipulated sum of money was mostly paid, when in 615 the new general Marcus Popillius Laenas arrived in the camp.
It might have been argued that customary law protected the consul who directed the proceedings of the court which doomed the supporters of Tiberius Gracchus; but the argument, if used, was of no avail. Popillius was to be the witness to all men of the reality of this reassertion of the palladium of Roman liberty.
It was a mere act of revenge, which assigned retrospective effect to the last-mentioned law and thereby compelled Publius Popillius the aristocrat who after the death of Nasica, which had occurred in the interval, was chiefly obnoxious to the democrats to go into exile.
The senate not only returned a gracious answer to the ambassadors, but also sent as ambassadors to the king, with presents, Lucius Genucius, Publius Paetelius, and Publius Popillius. The presents they carried were a purple gown and vest, an ivory chair, and a bowl formed out of five pounds of gold.
And even as to the horrors attaching to his restoration, the proscriptions and confiscations are they, compared with the doings of Nasica, Popillius, Opimius, Caepio and so on, anything else than the legal embodiment of the customary oligarchic mode of getting rid of opponents?
The conspirator started in alarm, but was relieved by the next words, "Where will you find money for the expenses of the ædileship?" The man evidently referred to an expected office. Another senator, Popillius Lænas, hit the mark closer. "You have my good wishes; but what you do, do quickly," he said to Brutus and Cassius.
In it he told the people that they now had the chance they had so long and so passionately desired; and that, if they did not avail themselves of it, they would lay themselves open to the charge of caprice or of ungoverned temper. Popillius anticipated the sentence by voluntary retirement from Rome.
As early as 622 the consul of that year, Publius Popillius, the same who directed the prosecutions of the adherents of Tiberius Gracchus, recorded on a public monument that he was "the first who had turned the shepherds out of the domains and installed farmers in their stead"; and tradition otherwise affirms that the distribution extended over all Italy, and that in the formerly existing communities the number of farms was everywhere augmented for it was the design of the Sempronian agrarian law to elevate the farmer- class not by the founding of new communities, but by the strengthening of those already in existence.
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