of the spirit, as well as of the letter, of the enactment whose author they had just pronounced an outlaw. For there could be no question that the Gracchan law, which no one dared assail, was meant to cover just the very acts of which Opimius had been guilty after the slaughter of the Gracchans in the streets had ended. The right to kill in an _emeute_ might be a questionable point; but the power of establishing a military court for the trial of captured offenders was notoriously illegal, and could under very few circumstances have been justified even on the ground of necessity. The decision of the people also seemed to give a kind of recognition to the utterance of the senate which had preceded Opimius's display of force. It is quite true that no successful defence of violence could ever be rested on the formula itself. This "ultimate decree of the senate" was valued as a weighty and emphatic declaration of the existence of a situation which demanded extreme measures, rather than as a legal permit which justified the disregard of the ordinary rights of the citizen. But formulae often have a power far in excess of their true significance; they impose on the ignorant, and furnish both a shield and a weapon to their cunning framers. The armoury of the senate, or of any revolutionary who had the good fortune to overawe the senate, was materially strengthened by the people's judgment in Opimius's favour.[755] 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;[756] 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. Yet the step was an advance on their previous action; for they were now actually rescinding a legal judgment of their own, and approving of the actions of a court which had been established by the senate on its own authority without any previous declaration of the outlawry of its victims--a court whose proceedings were known to have directed the tenor of that law of Caius Gracchus, the validity of which was still unquestioned.