_De Lege Agraria contra Rullum_. In his discourse _Pro Lege Manilia_, the first of the deliberative kind addressed to the assembly of the people, Cicero had the advantage of speaking for a favourite of the multitude, and against the chiefs of the Senate; but he was placed in a very different situation when he came to oppose the Agrarian law. This had been for 300 years the darling object of the Roman tribes—the daily attraction and rallying word of the populace—the signal of discord, and most powerful engine of the seditious tribunate. The first of the series of orations against the Agrarian law, now proposed by Rullus, was delivered by Cicero in the Senate-house, shortly after his election to the consulship: The second and third were addressed to the people from the rostrum. The scope of the present Agrarian law was, to appoint Decemvirs for the purpose of selling the public domains in the provinces, and to recover from the generals the spoils acquired in foreign wars, by which a fund might be formed for the purchase of lands in Italy, particularly Campania—to be equally divided among the people. Cicero, in his first oration, of which the commencement is now wanting, quieted the alarms of the Senate, by assuring them of his resolution to oppose the law with his utmost power. When the question came before the people, he did not fear to encounter the Tribunes on their own territory, and most popular subject; he did not hesitate to make the rabble judges in their own cause, though one in which their passions, interests, and prejudices, and those of their fathers, had been engaged for so many centuries. Conscious of his superiority, he invited the Tribunes to ascend the rostrum, and argue the point with him before the assembled multitude; but the field was left clear to his argument and eloquence, and by alternately flattering the people, and ridiculing the proposer of the law, he gave such a turn to their inclinations, that they rejected the proposition as eagerly as they had before received it.