For the moment the power of the optimates seemed restored. The spectre of monarchy had made the men of riches coalesce with their old rivals the men of rank; and the mob, ungrateful for an unexecuted corn-law, chafed at Italian pretensions. Metellus, the aristocrat, was recalled to Rome amid the enthusiasm of the anti-Italian mob, and P. Furius was torn to pieces for having opposed his return. [Sidenote: Marius falls into disrepute.] Marius slunk away to the East, finding that his treachery had only isolated him and brought him into contempt; and there, it is said, he tried to incite Mithridates to war. Sextus Titius indeed brought forward an agrarian law in 99 B.C. But he was opposed by his colleagues and driven into exile. Two events soon happened which showed not only the embittered feelings existing between the urban and rural population, but also the sympathy with the provincials felt by the better Romans, and, as an inference, the miserable condition of the provincials themselves. [Sidenote: The Lex Licinia Minucia.] The first was the enactment, in 95 B.C., of the Lex Licinia Minucia, which ordered Latins and Italians resident at Rome to leave the city. [Sidenote: and the prosecution of Rutilius Rufus foreshadow the Social War.] The second was the prosecution and conviction of Publius Rutilius Rufus, nominally for extortion, but really because, by his just administration of the province of Asia, he had rebuked extortion and the equestrian courts which connived at it. Though most of the senators were as guilty as the equites, the mass, like M. Scaurus, who was himself impeached for extortion, would ill brook being forced to appear before their courts, and be eager to take hold of their maladministration of justice as a pretext for abrogating the Servilian law.