The leaders of these bands kept to their colours only so far as they inexorably persecuted their personal enemies--as in the case of Clodius against Cicero and Milo against Clodius--while their partisan position served them merely as a handle in these personal feuds.
We might as well seek to set a charivari to music as to write the history of this political witches' revel; nor is it of any moment to enumerate all the deeds of murder, besiegings of houses, acts of incendiarism and other scenes of violence within a great capital, and to reckon up how often the gamut was traversed from hissing and shouting to spitting on and trampling down opponents, and thence to throwing stones and drawing swords.
Clodius The principal performer in this theatre of political rascality was that Publius Clodius, of whose services, as already mentioned,( 2) the regents availed themselves against Cato and Cicero.
Left to himself, this influential, talented, energetic and-- in his trade--really exemplary partisan pursued during his tribunate, of the people (696) an ultra-democratic policy, gave the citizens corn gratis, restricted the right of the censors to stigmatize immoral burgesses, prohibited the magistrates from obstructing the course of the comitial machinery by religious formalities, set asidethe limitswhich had shortly before (690), for the purpose of checking the system of bands, been imposed on the right of association of the lower classes, and reestablished the "street-clubs" (-collegia compitalicia-) at that time abolished, which were nothing else than a formal organization--subdivided according to the streets, and with an almost military arrangement--of the whole free or slave proletariate of the capital.

If in addition the further law, which Clodius had likewise already projected and purposed to introduce when praetor in 702, should give to freedmen and to slaves living in de facto possession of freedom the same political rights with the freeborn, the author of all these brave improvements of the constitution might declare his work complete, and as a second Numa of freedom and equality might invite the sweet rabble of the capital to see him celebrate high mass in honour of the arrival of the democratic millennium in the temple of Liberty which he had erected on the site of one of his burnings at the Palatine.
Of course these exertions in behalf of freedom did not exclude a traffic in decrees of the burgesses; like Caesar himself, Caesar's ape kept governorships and other posts great and small on sale for the benefit of his fellow-citizens, and sold the sovereign rights of the state for the benefit of subject kings and cities.
Quarrel of Pompeius with Clodius At all these things Pompeius looked on without stirring.
If he did not perceive how seriously he thus compromised himself, his opponent perceived it.

Clodius had the hardihood to engage in a dispute with the regent of Rome on a question of little moment, as to the sending back of a captive Armenian prince; and the variance soon became a formal feud, in which the utter helplessness of Pompeius was displayed.

The head of the state knew not how to meet the partisan otherwise than with his own weapons, only wielded with far less dexterity.

If he had been tricked by Clodius respecting the Armenian prince, he offended him in turn by releasing Cicero, who was preeminently obnoxious to Clodius, from the exile into which Clodius had sent him; and he attained his object so thoroughly, that he converted his opponent into an implacable foe.
If Clodius made the streets insecure with his bands, the victorious general likewise set slaves and pugilists to work; in the frays which ensued the general naturally was worsted by the demagogue and defeated in the street, and Gaius Cato was kept almost constantly under siege in his garden by Clodius and his comrades.