Constitutional means were exhausted.

In earlier times under such circumstances men were not indisposed to let the proposal go to sleep for the current year, and to take it up again in each succeeding one, till the earnestness of the demand and the pressure of public opinion overbore resistance.
Now things were carried with a higher hand.

Gracchus seemed to himself to have reached the point when he must either wholly renounce his reform or begin a revolution.

He chose the latter course; for he came before the burgesses with the declaration that either he or Octavius must retire from the college, and suggested to Octavius that a vote of the burgesses should be taken as to which of them they wished to dismiss.

Octavius naturally refused to consent to this strange challenge; the -intercessio- existed for the very purpose of giving scope to such differences of opinion among colleagues.