But even on the swell of this anti-Gracchan tide the nobility had still to steer its course with caution and circumspection. Personal prejudices were stronger than principles with the masses. They might sanction outrages which already had the blessing of men who represented, externally at least, the more respectable portion of Roman society; but they continued to detest individuals whose characters seemed to have grown blacker rather than cleaner by participation in, or even justification of, the recent acts of violence. One of our authorities would have us believe that even the aged Publius Lentulus, once chief of the senate, was sacrificed by his peers to the fate which had attended Scipio Nasica. He had climbed the Aventine with Opimius's troops and had been severely wounded in the ensuing struggle.[757] But neither his age nor his wounds sufficed to overcome the strange prejudice of the mob. Obloquy and abuse dogged his footsteps, until at length he was forced, in the interest of his own peace or security, to beg of the senate one of those honorary embassies which covered the retirement of a senator either for private business or for leisure, and to seek a home in Sicily.[758] His last public utterance was an impassioned prayer that he might never return to his ungrateful country: and the gods granted him his request. If this story is true, it proves that public opinion was stronger even than the voice of the Comitia. Lentulus, if put on his trial, would probably have been acquitted; but the resentful minority, which was powerless in the assembly, may have been sufficiently strong to make life unbearable to its chosen victim by its demeanour at public gatherings and in the streets. But even the Comitia had limits to its endurance. During the year which followed Opimius's acquittal there appeared before them a suppliant for their favour who had about equal claims to the gratitude and the hatred of both sections of the people. They were the self-destructive or corroborative claims of the statesman who is called a convert by his friends and a renegade by his foes. No living man of the age had stood in a stronger political light than Carbo. An active assistant of Tiberius Gracchus, and so embittered an opponent of Scipio Aemilianus as to be deemed the author of his death, he had severed his connection with the party of reform, probably in consequence of the view that the extension of the franchise which had become embedded in their programme was either impracticable or undesirable. He must have proved a welcome ally to the nobility in their struggle with Caius Gracchus, and their appreciation of his value seems proved by the fact that he was elected to the consulship in the very year of the tribune's fall, when the influence of the senate, and therefore in all probability their power of controlling the elections, had been fully re-established. The debt was paid by a vigorous championship of the cause of Opimius, which was heard during the