Cicero's speeches give a vivid picture of a highly organized system for distributing largesse to the voters
in various forms, from free seats at the games to outright bribes. In his indictment of C. Verres, who was
on trial in 70 for extortionate practices as governor of Sicily, Cicero recounts how Verres tried to use his
illicit gains to prevent Cicero's election to the aedileship in that year. One effect of the increased
competition resulting from Sulla's measures was to make it even more difficult than before for a man of
non-senatorial background to reach the higher offices, and Cicero wanted the aedileship, an optional
office between quaestorship and praetorship, because it offered an opportunity to give games and win
popularity. Despite Verres he was successful, but in that very year the electoral situation was made still
more complex by the activity of the censors.
The year 70 was altogether momentous. For it was then, in the consulship of Cn. Pompeius Magnus and
M. Licinius Crassus, outstanding partisans of Sulla, that the dictator's restrictions on the legislative and
judicial powers of the tribunes of the plebs were removed, after nearly a decade of popular agitation.
After his election, Pompey had made a speech combining this promise with an attack on the corruption
of provincial governors and the senatorial juries who failed to punish them. A decade of expensive and
prolonged war with accompanying food shortages had made the senatorial government vulnerable to
criticism. Scandals involving marked ballots and lavish bribery had rendered the senatorial courts,
despite the conviction of Verres, indefensible. If Sulla's senators were, as he probably hoped, less liable
than their predecessors to acquit their peers, since most of them would never enjoy the same
opportunities, they were more vulnerable to bribes, since the new men among them found maintaining a
senatorial lifestyle a strain and could not borrow easily in the expectation of later provincial profits.
Though Pompey does not seem to have specified how the judiciary was to B.C. straightened out, he did
not oppose the passage of the lex Amelia which gave the equites two-thirds of the seats on the juries.
The censors of the year, friends of Pompey, ejected from the Senate sixty-four members, mostly men
who had proved themselves corrupt in the provinces or the courts. Their struggles to recover senatorial
rank by being elected to office again compounded electoral competition in the sixties, while other action
by the censors introduced a further element of uncertainty into the electoral game. The Italians, who had
gained the franchise at the end of the Social War (above, pp. 413 f.) were at last enrolled in the thirty-
five Roman tribes. Henceforth candidates for office had to consider a wider electorate, of whom at least
the more prosperous members might actually find it "worth while to come to Rome and vote. Thus when
Cicero was planning his consular campaign, he included in his schedule a visit to the governor of
Cisalpine Gaul (the Po valley) for 'the district is likely to count heavily in the voting'.
Optimates and Populares
Sulla's legislation and the struggles that led to its modification also had a profound effect on terminology
and habits of thought.
It was in this period that the ideology or, on a cynical view, the propaganda familiar to us from the
works of Cicero and Caesar became defined. The habit of mapping out the political scene in terms of a