He even made an attempt to seize Rhegium, which was frustrated, however, by the Sicilian governor Gaius Norbanus.

Notwithstanding isolated mischances the Romans were constantly drawing nearer to the attainment of their end; the fall of Nola, the submission of Samnium, the possibility of rendering considerable forces available for Asia appeared no longer distant, when the turn taken by affairs in the capital unexpectedly gave fresh life to the well-nigh extinguished insurrection.
Ferment in Rome The Bestowal of the Franchise and Its Limitations Secondary Effect of the Political Prosecutions Marius Rome was in a fearful ferment.

The attack of Drusus upon the equestrian courts and his sudden downfall brought about by the equestrian party, followed by the two-edged Varian warfare of prosecutions, had sown the bitterest discord between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie as well as between the moderates and the ultras.
Events had completely justified the party of concession; what it had proposed voluntarily to bestow, men had been more than half compelled to concede; but the mode in which the concession was made bore, just like the earlier refusal, the stamp of obstinate and shortsighted envy.

Instead of granting equality of rights to all Italian communities, they had only expressed the inferiority in another form.
They had received a great number of Italian communities into Roman citizenship, but had attached to what they thus conferred an offensive stigma, by placing the new burgesses alongside of the old on nearly the same footing as the freedmen occupied alongside of the freeborn.
They had irritated rather than pacified the communities between the Po and the Alps by the concession of Latin rights.

Lastly, they had withheld the franchise from a considerable, and that not the worst, portion of the Italians--the whole of the insurgent communities which had again submitted; and not only so, but, instead of legally re-establishing the former treaties annulled by the insurrection, they had at most renewed them as a matter of favour and subject to revocation at pleasure.( 20) The disability as regarded the right of voting gave the deeper offence, that it was--as the comitia were then constituted--politically absurd, and the hypocritical care of the government for the unstained purity of the electors appeared to every unprejudiced person ridiculous; but all these restrictions were dangerous, inasmuch as they invited every demagogue to carry his ulterior objects by taking up the more or less just demands of the new burgesses and of the Italians excluded from the franchise.