a deplorable, although partial, weakness of a great man who had no greatness of character. Marius had joined himself with a sad knave, to get his sixth consulship. This was L. Apuleius Saturninus, who, undeservedly enough, is often named with the Gracchi, although there cannot be a wider interval than that between them and Saturninus. He was a man like Catiline, one indeed of whom the like is seldom seen; for though one can understand how ambition will lead people blindfold into acts of dangerous daring, yet how a man could have taken in his head to be so mad, is all but incomprehensible. It would seem that his was a revolutionary mind; that he formed no clear notion of what things would come to, being utterly regardless of institutions and government, and only thinking of violence and confusion. He had sprung from one of the richest and most eminent plebeian families; just as in the French revolution, men of the first nobility put themselves at the head of the rabble. I do not recollect whether it is of him, or of Servilius Glaucia, that Cicero says, that no one had been gifted with a more malignant wit:[85] it was by this means that they managed the people. He had started in life as an aristocrat. There were at that time eight quæstorships, which were given partly to consulars, and partly to other persons. They were places with an income attached to them, one of them being the _quæstura Ostiensis_, which had the charge of the granaries at Rome. Saturninus had, as quæstor, availed himself of the privilege of _peculatus_ taken by the men of rank; but when the tables were suddenly turned, and the oligarchs were no longer able to screen the sins of their own body, owing to an honest party having been formed from both factions under the lead of the straight-forward C. Memmius, he got liable to the punishment of being deposed, and so he threw himself into the arms of the mob: it was a conspiracy of the dregs of the upper and middle classes. He now became a tribune of the people, and behaved in the most savage manner towards the very first men, for instance, the censors and others. When, on his standing the second time for the tribuneship, another candidate, A. Nonius was set up against him, he so hounded on the rabble against that unfortunate man, that they murdered him; and thus he made himself by force a tribune again. The magistrates had no more any authority; those who had the power, did just what they liked.