Through the legislative acts above described we can trace the speedy restoration of the democracy and of comitial legislative power after the overthrow of C. Sempronius Gracchus. We are now approaching a second crisis in which the aristocracy had to struggle for existence. Against it was formed a combination of three powerful men, C. Marius, supported by the knights and the municipes,[2434] C. Servilius Glaucia, and L. Appuleius Saturninus. It is almost certain that this Servilius is to be identified with the author of the lex repetundarum of 111 or thereabout, probably a plebiscite, which repealed the Acilian law on the same subject.[2435] In important respects his statute was an improvement on earlier regulations of the crime. “Glaucia’s alteration in procedure was thorough and permanent. He introduced the system of the ‘second hearing’—an obligatory renewal of the trial, which rendered it possible for counsel to discuss evidence which had already been given, and for jurors to get a grasp of the mass of scattered data which had been presented to their notice[2436]—and he also made it possible to recover damages, not only from the chief malefactor, but from all who had dishonestly shared his spoils.”[2437] These principles were taken up into the Cornelian law which superseded it in 81.[2438] The circumstance that the man whom the optimates regarded as merely a vulgar demagogue was the author of so statesmanlike a measure ought to militate against their opinion, not only of him, but also of his associates. He, too, represented the knights,[2439] whereas Appuleius was a champion of the rural plebs against the senate and the populace. As tribune of the plebs in 103 the latter proposed a law for the assignment of lands in the province of Africa to the retiring veterans of Marius in lots of a hundred iugera each. When Baebius, a colleague, interceded, the people pelted him with stones and drove him from the assembly. Thus the law was violently carried, but we hear nothing more of it. Probably it was not enforced.[2440] This act marks an epoch in the history of Roman colonization; through it the government first expressed its intention to provide discharged soldiers with farms, a departure made necessary by the Marian policy of filling the army with capite censi.[2441] Either to this tribunate or more probably to his second belongs the lex de maiestate (minuta),[2442] the first of the kind in Roman history. It defined the crime and made general provisions for the prosecution of those who were accused of it.[2443] The same statute provided for the establishment of a court which seems to have been standing rather than special.[2444]