This was the fiercest challenge that he had yet flung to the senate. There might be a difference of opinion as to the right of a magistrate to put a question to the people without the guidance of a senatorial decree; the assignment of land was unquestionably a popular right in so far as it required ratification by the commons; even the deposition of Octavius was a matter for the people and would avenge itself. But there were two senatorial rights--the one usurped, the other created--whose validity had never been questioned. These were the control of finance and the direction of provincial administration. Were the possibility once admitted that these might be dealt with in the Comitia, the magistrates would cease to be ministers of the senate; for it was chiefly through a system of judicious prize-giving that the senate attached to itself the loyalty of the official class. There was perhaps less fear of what Gracchus himself might do than of the spectre which he was raising for the future. For in Roman history the events of the past made those of the future; there were few isolated phenomena in its development. From this time the attacks of individual senators on Gracchus became more vehement and direct. They proceeded from men of the highest rank. A certain Pompeius, in whom we may probably see an ex-consul and a future censor, was not ashamed of raising the spectre of a coming monarchy by reference to the story of the sceptre and the purple robe, and is said to have vowed to impeach Gracchus as soon as his year of magistracy had expired;[384] the ex-consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus, of Macedonian fame, reproached Tiberius with his rabble escort. He compared the demeanour of the father and the son. In the censorship of the former the citizens used to quench their lights at night, as they saw him pass up the street to his house, that they might impress the censorial mind with the ideas of early hours and orderly conduct; now the son of this man might be seen returning home amidst the blaze of torches, held in the stout arms of a defiant body-guard drawn from the neediest classes.[385] These arrows may have Missed the mark; the one that hit was winged by an aged senator, Titus Annius Luscus, who had held the consulship twenty years before. His wit is said to have been better established than his character. He excelled in that form of ready altercation, of impaling his opponent on the horns of a dilemma by means of some innocent question, which, both in the courts and the senate, was often more effective than the power of continuous oratory. He now challenged Tiberius to a wager (_sponsio_), such as in the public life of Rome was often employed to settle a disputed point of honour or of fact, to determine the question whether he had dishonoured a colleague, who was holy in virtue of his office and had been made sacrosanct by the laws. The proposal was received by the senators with loud cries of acclamation.