What Demosthenes said of his Athenians was justly applied to the Romans of this period--the people were very zealous for action, so long as they stood round the platform and listened to proposals of reforms; but when they went home, no one thought further of what he had heard in the market-place.

However those democratic agitators might stir the fire, it was to no purpose, for the inflammable material was wanting.

The government knew this, and allowed no sort of concession to be wrung from it on important questions of principle; at the utmost it consented (about 682) to grant amnesty to a portion of those who had become exiles with Lepidus.
Any concessions that did take place, came not so much from the pressure of the democracy as from the attempts at mediation of the moderate aristocracy.

But of the two laws which the single still surviving leader of this section Gaius Cotta carried in his consulate of 679, that which concerned the tribunals was again set aside in the very next year; and the second, which abolished the Sullan enactment that those who had held the tribunate should be disqualified for undertaking other magistracies, but allowed the other limitations to continue, merely--like every half-measure--excited the displeasure of both parties.
The party of conservatives friendly to reform which lost its most notable head by the early death of Cotta occurring soon after (about 681) dwindled away more and more--crushed between the extremes, which were becoming daily more marked.

But of these the party of the government, wretched and remiss as it was, necessarily retained the advantage in presence of the equally wretched and equally remiss opposition.
Quarrel between the Government and Their General Pompeius But this state of matters so favourable to the government was altered, when the differences became more distinctly developed which subsisted between it and those of its partisans, whose hopes aspired to higher objects than the seat of honour in the senate and the aristocratic villa.