were hangers-on of the rich in the towns and eager for distributions
of land. The poor were oppressed no doubt by the rich men both of
their own cities and of Rome. The rich chafed at the intolerable
insolence of Roman officials. It was not that Rome interfered with
the local self-government she had granted by treaty, but the Italians
laboured under grievous disabilities and oppression. So late as the
Jugurthine war, Latin officers were executed by martial law, whereas
any Roman soldier could appeal to a civil tribunal. Again, while the
armies had formerly been recruited from the Romans and the allies
equally, now the severest service and the main weight of wars fell
on the latter, who furnished, moreover, two soldiers to every Roman.
Again, without a certain amount of property, a man at Rome could not
be enrolled in the army; but the rule seems not to have applied
to Italians. Nor was the civil less harsh than the military
administration. A consul's wife wished to use the men's bath at
Teanum; and because the bathers were not cleared out quickly enough,
and the baths were not clean enough, M. Marius, the chief magistrate
of the town, was stripped and scourged in the market-place. A free
herdsman asked in joke if it was a corpse that was in a litter passing
through Venusia, and which contained a young Roman. Though not even an
official, its occupant showed that, if lazy, he was at least alive, by
having the peasant whipped to death with the litter straps. In short,
the rich Italians would feel the need of the franchise as strongly as
the old plebeians had felt it, and all the more strongly because the
Romans had not only ceased to enfranchise whole communities, but were
chary of giving the citizenship even to individuals. The poor also had
the ordinary grievances against their own rich, and were so far likely
to favour the schemes of any man who assailed the capitalist class,
Roman or Italian, as a whole; but they none the less disliked Roman
supremacy, and would be easily persuaded to attribute to that