The opportunity for active opposition had at last arrived, and the senate was emboldened to repeat the measure which four years earlier had swept the aliens out of Rome. Perhaps in consequence of powers given by the law of Pennus, the consul Fannius was empowered to issue an edict that no Italian, who did not possess a vote in the Roman assemblies, should be permitted within five miles of Rome at the time when the proposal about the franchise was to be submitted to the Comitia.[676] Caius answered this announcement with a fiery edict of his own, in which he inveighed against the consul and promised his tribunician help to any of the allies who chose to remain in the city.[677] The power which he threatened to exercise was probably legal, since there is no reason to suppose that the tribunician _auxilium_ could be interposed solely for the assistance of members of the citizen body;[678] but he must have known that the execution of this promise was impracticable, since the injured party could be aided only by the personal interposition of the tribune, and it was clear that a single magistrate, burdened with many cares, and living a life of the most varied and strenuous activity, could not be present in every quarter of Rome and in a considerable portion of the surrounding territory. Even the cooperation of his ardent colleague Flaccus could not have availed for the protection of many of his Italian friends, and the course of events so soon taught him the futility of this means of struggling for Italian rights that when, somewhat later in the year, one of his Italian friends was seized by a creature of Fannius before his eyes, he passed by without an attempt at aid. His enemies, he knew, were at the time eager for a struggle in which, when they had isolated him from his Italian supporters, physical violence would decide the day: and he remarked that he did not wish to give them the pretext for the hand-to-hand combat which they desired.[679] One motive, indeed, of the invidious edict issued by the consul seems to have been to leave Gracchus to face the new position which his latest proposal had created, without any external help; but as external help, if successfully asserted, could only have taken the form of physical violence, there was reasonable ground for holding that the decree excluding the Italians was the only means of preventing a serious riot or even a civil war. The senate could scarcely have feared the moral influence of the Italians on the voting populace of Rome, and they knew that, in the present state of public sentiment, the constitutional means of resistance which had failed against Tiberius Gracchus might be successfully employed against his brother. The whole history of the first tribunate of Caius Gracchus proves the frank recognition of the fact that the tribunician veto could no longer be employed against a measure which enlisted anything like the united support of the people;