The character of this government of the restoration is significantly indicated by the progress of the aristocracy in soundness of sentiment.

Gaius Carbo, once the ally of the Gracchi, had for long been a convert,( 1) and had but recently shown his zeal and his usefulness as defender of Opimius.

But he remained the renegade; when the same accusation was raised against him by the democrats as against Opimius, the government were not unwilling to let him fall, and Carbo, seeing himself lost between the two parties, died by his own hand.

Thus the men of the reaction showed themselves in personal questions pure aristocrats.

But the reaction did not immediately attack the distributions of grain, the taxation of the province of Asia, or the Gracchan arrangement as to the jurymen and courts; on the contrary, it not only spared the mercantile class and the proletariate of the capital, but continued to render homage, as it had already done in the introduction of the Livian laws, to these powers and especially to the proletariate far more decidedly than had been done by the Gracchi.