This “long-service army” brought Rome face to face with another difficulty, and led indirectly to another great peril. When the soldiers returned home after many years of service in distant regions, what was to be done with them? Many, perhaps most of them, had no homes to go to. The veterans might naturally demand some permanent settlement, but the Senate showed no sign of appreciating the problem, and in this matter the general was helpless without the Senate. So it happened that many of them lapsed into the crowded city, to pick up a living we know not how, with the help of the distribution of cheap corn. Among them were beyond doubt numbers of non-citizens, who could not legally vote in elections or legislation, and were inadequately protected in regard to person and property, in spite of all the long service they had gone through. These men began to offer themselves as voters, and to exercise the rights of citizenship illegally; yet the confusion of the registers was such that they could not be detected. At last the adulteration of the Roman citizen body became so obvious that the consuls of 95 B.C. passed a law with the object of making it clear who was a citizen and who was not, and of eliminating those who were not really privileged. But it was now too late to take such a step. News of it spread over all Italy, and it was construed as a deliberate attempt to exclude Italians from the citizenship. Five years later another vain attempt was made by a noble tribune to do as Gracchus had wished to do, to extend the citizenship and to enlarge the Senate: but he was assassinated before his laws were passed, and then at last there followed the inevitable outbreak, perhaps long meditated. The social war, as it is called, in reality a civil war, was a crisis in the history of European development. When it was over, the ancient city-state of the Greeks and Italians had vanished in Italy, and in its place arose a new form of polity, for which there was then no name.