He succeeded, and Rullus with his agrarian law was sent back into darkness.

I regard the second speech against Rullus as the _ne plus ultra_, the very _beau ideal_ of a political harangue to the people on the side of order and good government.
I cannot finish this chapter, in which I have attempted to describe the lesser operations of Cicero's Consulship, without again alluding to the picture drawn by Virgil of a great man quelling the storms of a seditious rising by the gravity of his presence and the weight of his words.[174] The poet surely had in his memory some occasion in which had taken place this great triumph of character and intellect combined.

When the knights, during Cicero's Consulship essayed to take their privileged places in the public theatre, in accordance with a law passed by Roscius Otho a few years earlier (B.C.

68), the founder of the obnoxious law himself entered the building.

The people, enraged against a man who had interfered with them and their pleasures, and who had brought them, as it were under new restraints from the aristocracy, arose in a body and began to break everything that came to hand.