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A master of this sublime art, if placed at a supper below a magistrate, displays in his countenance a surprise and indignation which Cato might be supposed to feel when refused the praetorship.
From this time, however, the feud with the Metelli began; for he ordered L. Caecilius Metellus, the consul, to be cast into prison for resisting his ballot-law, though, as the Senate yielded, the order was not carried into effect. In 115 he gained the praetorship, and an absurd charge of bribery trumped up against him indicated a rising disposition among the nobles to snub the aspiring plebeian.
This took place in my praetorship, five years before I was elected consul, which shows that the cause was successfully maintained more by the merits of the case than by the prestige of the highest office.
His tenure of the urban praetorship seems to have been marked by reforms which materially improved the condition of the freedmen in matters of private law, and limited the right of patrons to impose burdensome conditions of personal service as the price of manumission.
II. III. Censorship, the Magistrates, Partition and Weakening of the Consular Powers II. III. Laws Imposing Taxes I. VI. Class of Metoeci Subsisting by the Side of the Community I. V. The Housefather and His Household, note II. III. Praetorship II. III. Praetorship, II. V. Revision of the Municipal Constitutions, Police Judges II. VII. Subject Communities
The interval between his bearing the office of Quaestor and that of Tribune of the People, and even the year of his Tribuneship, he passed in repose and inactivity; as well aware of the spirit of the times under Nero, when sloth and heaviness served for wisdom. With the like indolence he held the Praetorship, and in the same quiet and silence.
One of these laws was manifestly leveled at Marcus Octavius, who, at the instigation of Tiberius, had been deprived of his tribuneship. The other touched Popilius, who, in his praetorship, had banished all Tiberius's friends; whereupon Popilius, being unwilling to stand the hazard of a trial, fled out of Italy.
Moreover, it was now settled that the offices of state to which these hereditary privileges were attached should include neither the lower nor the extraordinary magistracies nor the tribunate of the plebs, but merely the consulship, the praetorship which stood on the same level with it, and the curule aedileship, which bore a part in the administration of public justice and consequently in the exercise of the sovereign powers of the state.
It was agreed between them that for 654 Marius should become a candidate for a sixth consulship, Saturninus for a second tribunate, Glaucia for the praetorship, in order that, possessed of these offices, they might carry out the intended revolution in the state.
But more often they were of an independent character, the result of his knowledge or his prejudices; and too often he departed widely from them in the course of his year of office. Moreover, the praetor was seldom a veteran lawyer, but generally a man of moderate experience and ambitious views, who used the praetorship merely as a stepping-stone to the higher offices of state.
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