Never since the commencement of the revolution had the government of the restoration been so firmly established, or so popular.

Consular laws were substituted for tribunician; restrictions on liberty replaced measures of progress.

The cancelling of the laws of Saturninus was a matter of course; the transmarine colonies of Marius disappeared down to a single petty settlement on the barbarous island of Corsica.

When the tribune of the people Sextus Titius--a caricatured Alcibiades, who was greater in dancing and ball-playing than in politics, and whose most prominent talent consisted in breaking the images of the gods in the streets at night--re-introduced and carried the Appuleian agrarian law in 655, the senate was able to annul the new law on a religious pretext without any one even attempting to defend it; the author of it was punished, as we have already mentioned, by the equites in their tribunals.

Next year (656) a law brought in by the two consuls made the usual four-and-twenty days' interval between the introduction and the passing of a project of law obligatory, and forbade the combination of several enactments different in their nature in one proposal; by which means the unreasonable extension of the initiative in legislation was at least somewhat restricted, and the government was prevented from being openly taken by surprise with new laws.