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. While accordingly the more clear-seeing of the aristocracy could not but find these partial and grudging concessions as inadequate as did the new burgesses and the excluded themselves, they further painfully felt the absence from their ranks of the numerous and excellent men whom the Varian commission of high treason had exiled, and whom it was the more difficult to recall because they had been condemned by the verdict not of the people but of the jury-courts; for, while there was little hesitation as to cancelling a decree of the people even of a judicial character by means of a second, the cancelling of a verdict of jurymen bythe people appeared to the betterportion of the aristocracy as a very dangerous precedent. Thus neither the ultras nor the moderates were content with the issue of the Italian crisis. But still deeper indignation swelled the heart of the old man, who had gone forth to the Italian war with freshened hopes and had come back from it reluctantly, with the consciousness of having rendered new services and of having received in return new and most severe mortifications, with the bitter feeling of being no longer dreaded but despised by his enemies, with that gnawing spirit of vengeance in his heart, which feeds on its own poison. It was true of him also, as of the new burgesses and the excluded; incapable and awkward as he had shown himself to be, his popular name was still a formidable weapon in the hand of a demagogue.

With these elements of political convulsion was combined the rapidly spreading decay of decorous soldierly habits and of military discipline. The seeds, which were sown by the enrolment of the proletariate in the army, developed themselves with alarming rapidity during the demoralizing insurrectionary war, which compelled Rome to admit to the service every man capable of bearing arms without distinction, and which above all carried political partizanship directly into the headquarters and into the soldiers' tent. The effects soon appeared in the slackening of all the bonds of the military hierarchy. During the siege of Pompeii the commander of the Sullan besieging corps, the consular Aulus Postumius Albinus, was put to death with stones and bludgeons by his soldiers, who believed themselves betrayed by their general to the enemy; and Sulla the commander-in-chief contented himself with exhorting the troops to efface the memory of that occurrence by their brave conduct in presence of the enemy. The authors of that deed were the marines, from of old the least respectable of the troops. A division of legionaries raised chiefly from the city populace soon followed the example thus given. Instigated by Gaius Titius, one of the heroes of the market-place, it laid hands on the consul Cato. By an accident he escaped death on this occasion; Titius was arrested, but was not punished. When Cato soon afterwards actually perished in a combat, his own officers, and particularly the younger Gaius Marius, were - whether justly or unjustly, cannot be ascertained - designated as the authors of his death.

To the political and military crisis thus beginning fell to be added the economic crisis - perhaps still more terrible - which set in upon the Roman capitalists in consequence of the Social war and the Asiatic troubles. The debtors, unable even to raise the interest due and yet inexorably pressed by their creditors, had on the one hand entreated from the proper judicial authority, the urban praetor Asellio, a respite to enable them to dispose of their possessions, and on the other hand had searched out once more the old obsolete laws as to usury[21] and, according to the rule established in olden times, had sued their creditors for fourfold the amount of the interest paid to them contrary to the law. Asellio lent himself to bend the actually existing law into conformity with the letter, and put into shape in the usual way the desired actions for interest; whereupon the offended creditors assembled in the Forum under the leadership of the tribune of the people Lucius Cassius, and attacked and killed the praetor in front of the temple of Concord, just as in his priestly robes he was presenting a sacrifice - an outrage which was not even made a subject of investigation (665). On the other hand it was said in the circles of the debtors, that the suffering multitude could not be relieved otherwise than by "new account-books", that is, by legally cancelling the claims of all creditors against all debtors.

Matters stood again exactly as they had stood during the strife of the orders; once more the capitalists in league with the prejudiced aristocracy made war against, and prosecuted, the oppressed multitude and the middle party which advised a modification of the rigour of the law; once more Rome stood on the verge of that abyss into which the despairing debtor drags his creditor along with him. Only, since that time the simple civil and moral organization of a great agricultural city had been succeeded by the social antagonisms of a capital of many nations, and by that demoralization in which the prince and the beggar meet; now all incongruities had come to be on a broader, more abrupt, and fearfully grander scale. When the Social war brought all the political and social elements fermenting among the citizens into collision with each other, it laid the foundation for a new resolution. An accident led to its outbreak.

It was the tribune of the people Publius Sulpicius Rufus who in 666 proposed to the burgesses to declare that every senator, who owed more than 2000 denarii (82 pounds), should forfeit his seat in the senate; to grant to the burgesses condemned by non-free jury courts liberty to return home; to distribute the new burgesses among all the tribes, and likewise to allow the right of voting in all tribes to the freedmen. They were proposals which from the mouth of such a man were at least somewhat surprising. Publius Sulpicius Rufus (born in 630) owed his political importance not so much to his noble birth, his important connections, and his hereditary wealth, as to his remarkable oratorical talent, in which none of his contemporaries equalled him.