as it was decidedly emboldened by this partial concession, displayed
all the more rudeness and violence in the capital; and in Etruria,
the true centre of all insurrections of the Italian proletariate,
civil war already broke out, the dispossessed Faesulans resumed
possession of their lost estates by force of arms, and several
of the veterans settled there by Sulla perished in the tumult.
The senate on learning what had occurred resolved to send the two consuls
thither, in order to raise troops and suppress the insurrection.(20)
It was impossible to adopt a more irrational course. The senate,
in presence of the insurrection, evinced its pusillanimity
and its fears by the re-establishment of the corn-law; in order
to be relieved from a street-riot, it furnished the notorious
head of the insurrection with an army; and, when the two consuls
were bound by the most solemn oath which could be contrived not to turn
the arms entrusted to them against each other, it must have required
the superhuman obduracy of oligarchic consciences to think of erecting
such a bulwark against the impending insurrection. Of course Lepidus
armed in Etruria not for the senate, but for the insurrection--
sarcastically declaring that the oath which he had taken bound him
only for the current year. The senate put the oracular machinery
in motion to induce him to return, and committed to him the conduct
of the impending consular elections; but Lepidus evaded compliance,
and, while messengers passed to and fro and the official year drew
to an end amidst proposals of accommodation, his force swelled to an army.
When at length, in the beginning of the following year (677),
the definite order of the senate was issued to Lepidus to return
without delay, the proconsul haughtily refused obedience,
and demanded in his turn the renewal of the former tribunician power,
the reinstatement of those who had been forcibly ejected
from their civic rights and their property, and, besides this,