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The multitude was now roused, and a contest seemed threatening. The lictors had taken their stand around Icilius; they did not, however, proceed beyond threats, while Appius said that it was not Verginia who was being defended by Icilius, but that, being a restless man, and even now breathing the spirit of the tribuneship, he was seeking an opportunity for creating a disturbance.
Several acts of his even during his tribuneship are mentioned, which betray the very opposite of demagogic designs.
I wish he were ejected from the bedchamber, that he might again appear to you to be a fool. Has a man been exalted to the tribuneship? All who meet him offer their congratulations; one kisses his eyes, another the neck, and the slaves kiss his hands. He goes to his house, he finds torches lighted. He ascends the Capitol; he offers a sacrifice on the occasion.
For when, in the consulship of Lucius Lentulus and Marcus Marcellus, you, on the first of January, were anxious to prop up the republic, which was tottering and almost falling, and were willing to consult the interests of Caius Caesar himself, if he would have acted like a man in his senses, then this fellow opposed to your counsels his tribuneship, which he had sold and handed over to the purchaser, and exposed his own neck to that axe under which many have suffered for smaller crimes.
But I gathered from your letters that you are in somewhat too great a hurry: and at the same time I wondered why you despised the profits of a military tribuneship, especially as you are exempted from the labour of military duty.
For in such cases as this, it is not the mere knowledge of such actions that ought to excite the mind, but the recollection of them also. Although we must at once go into the middle of them, lest otherwise we should be too long in coming to the end. He was very intimate with Clodius at the time of his tribuneship; he, who now enumerates the kindnesses which he did me.
The crimes which had disgraced the stormy tribuneship of Shaftesbury had been fearfully expiated. The blood of innocent Papists had been avenged more than tenfold by the blood of zealous Protestants. Another great reaction had commenced. Factions were fast taking new forms. Old allies were separating. Old enemies were uniting.
Standing at his judgment-seat, Virginius, seeing that he could do nothing to save his child from the clutch of the villainous judge, plunged his dagger in her heart. This was the signal for another revolt of the people, which extorted the consent of the upper class to the sacred laws and the restoration of the tribuneship.
We do not know what primarily gave occasion to his soliciting the tribuneship of the people for 666, and on its account renouncing his patrician nobility; but he seems to have been by no means rendered a revolutionist through the fact that he, like the whole middle party, had been persecuted as revolutionary by the conservatives, and to have by no means intended an overthrow of the constitution in the sense of Gaius Gracchus.
Caius Gracchus was in Spain at the time of his brother's murder. On his return to Rome he lived in quiet retirement for some years. The senate thought he disapproved of his brother's laws. They did not know him. At length he offered himself as a candidate for the tribuneship, and so convincing was his eloquence that the people supported him in numbers, and he was elected to the office.
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