The principal performer in this theatre of political rascality was that Publius Clodius, of whose services, as already mentioned,(2) the regents availed themselves against Cato and Cicero. Left to himself, this influential, talented, energetic and-- in his trade--really exemplary partisan pursued during his tribunate, of the people (696) an ultra-democratic policy, gave the citizens corn gratis, restricted the right of the censors to stigmatize immoral burgesses, prohibited the magistrates from obstructing the course of the comitial machinery by religious formalities, set asidethe limitswhich had shortly before (690), for the purpose of checking the system of bands, been imposed on the right of association of the lower classes, and reestablished the "street-clubs" (-collegia compitalicia-) at that time abolished, which were nothing else than a formal organization--subdivided according to the streets, and with an almost military arrangement--of the whole free or slave proletariate of the capital. If in addition the further law, which Clodius had likewise already projected and purposed to introduce when praetor in 702, should give to freedmen and to slaves living in de facto possession of freedom the same political rights with the freeborn, the author of all these brave improvements of the constitution might declare his work complete, and as a second Numa of freedom and equality might invite the sweet rabble of the capital to see him celebrate high mass in honour of the arrival of the democratic millennium in the temple of Liberty which he had erected on the site of one of his burnings at the Palatine. Of course these exertions in behalf of freedom did not exclude a traffic in decrees of the burgesses; like Caesar himself, Caesar's ape kept governorships and other posts great and small on sale for the benefit of his fellow-citizens, and sold the sovereign rights of the state for the benefit of subject kings and cities. Quarrel of Pompeius with Clodius