Young Appius Claudius accuses Servilius, and makes a mess of the attack, while the praetor mismanages the conduct of the trial, so that nothing comes of it; but finally Appius is himself accused by the Servilii _de vi_, in order to keep him from further attacks on Servilius![202] Appius the father quarrelled with Caelius and egged on others to accuse him, though he was curule aedile at the time.

"Their impudence was so boundless that they secured that an information should be laid against me for a very serious crime (under the Scantinian law).
Scarcely had Pola got the words out of his mouth, when I laid an information under the same law against the censor, Appius.

I never saw a more successful stroke!"[203] Of the games, and the panthers to be exhibited at them, about which Caelius is for ever worrying his friend in Cilicia, we shall see something in another chapter.

There is plenty of other gossip in these letters, and gossip often about unsavoury matters which need not be noticed here.

It lets in a flood of light upon the causes of the general incompetence and inefficiency; the life of the Forum was a demoralising one: Uni se atque eidem studio omnes dedere et arti uerba dare ut caute possint, pugnare dolose: blanditia certare, bonum simulare uirum se: insidias facere, ut si hostes sint omnibus omnes.[204] From what has been said in this sketch it should be clear that we have in the aristocracy of this period a complicated society, the various aspects of which can hardly be united in a single picture.