To the political and military crisis thus beginning fell to be added the economic crisis--perhaps still more terrible--which set in upon the Roman capitalists in consequence of the Social war and the Asiatic troubles. The debtors, unable even to raise the interest due and yet inexorably pressed by their creditors, had on the one hand entreated from the proper judicial authority, the urban praetor Asellio, a respite to enable them to dispose of their possessions, and on the other hand had searched out once more the old obsolete laws as to usury(21) and, according to the rule established in olden times, had sued their creditors for fourfold the amount of the interest paid to them contrary to the law. Asellio lent himself to bend the actually existing law into conformity with the letter, and put into shape in the usual way the desired actions for interest; whereupon the offended creditors assembled in the Forum under the leadership of the tribune of the people Lucius Cassius, and attacked and killed the praetor in front of the temple of Concord, just as in his priestly robes he was presenting a sacrifice--an outrage which was not even made a subject of investigation (665). On the other hand it was said in the circles of the debtors, that the suffering multitude could not be relieved otherwise than by "new account-books," that is, by legally cancelling the claims of all creditors against all debtors. Matters stood again exactly as they had stood during the strife of the orders; once more the capitalists in league with the prejudiced aristocracy made war against, and prosecuted, the oppressed multitude and the middle party which advised a modification of the rigour of the law; once more Rome stood on the verge of that abyss into which the despairing debtor drags his creditor along with him. Only, since that time the simple civil and moral organization of a great agricultural city had been succeeded by the social antagonisms of a capital of many nations, and by that demoralization in which the prince and the beggar meet; now all incongruities had come to be on a broader, more abrupt, and fearfully grander scale. When the Social war brought all the political and social elements fermenting among the citizens into collision with each other, it laid the foundation for a new resolution. An accident led to its outbreak. The Sulpician Laws Sulpicius Rufus