For the present and perhaps also for the future the fall of the aristocracy was an accomplished fact.

The oligarchs resembled an army utterly broken up, whose scattered bands might serve to reinforce another body of troops, but could no longer themselves keep the field or risk a combat on their own account.

But as the old struggle came to an end, a new one was simultaneously beginning--the struggle between the two powers hitherto leagued for the overthrow of the aristocratic constitution, the civil- democratic opposition and the military power daily aspiring to greater ascendency.

The exceptional position of Pompeius even under the Gabinian, and much more under the Manilian, law was incompatible with a republican organization.

He had been as even then his opponents urged with good reason, appointed by the Gabinian law not as admiral, but as regent of the empire; not unjustly was he designated by a Greek familiar with eastern affairs "king of kings." If he should hereafter, on returning from the east once more victorious and with increased glory, with well-filled chests, and with troops ready for battle and devoted to his cause, stretch forth his hand to seize the crown--who would then arrest his arm?
Was the consular Quintus Catulus, forsooth, to summon forth the senators against the first general of his time and his experienced legions?
or was the designated aedile Gaius Caesar to call forth the civic multitude, whose eyes he had just feasted on his three hundred and twenty pairs of gladiators with their silver equipments?
Soon, exclaimed Catulus, it would be necessary once more to flee to the rocks of the Capitol, in order to save liberty.
It was not the fault of the prophet, that the storm came not, as he expected, from the east, but that on the contrary fate, fulfilling his words more literally than he himself anticipated, brought on the destroying tempest a few years later from Gaul..