But I ask of you whether Lucius Lucullus, the consul, a very wise man, passed that law according to that resolution of the senate? I ask whether Marcus Lucullus and Caius Cassius passed that law, against whom, when they were the consuls elect, the senate passed the very same resolution? They did not pass it. And that which you assert to have been brought about by Habitus's money, though you do not confirm your assertion by even the very slightest circumstances of suspicion, was done in the first instance by the justice and wisdom of those consuls, in order that men might not think that what the senate had decreed for the purpose of extinguishing the flames of present unpopularity, might afterwards be referred to the people. The Roman people itself afterwards, which formerly when excited by the fictitious complaints of Lucius Quinctius, a tribune of the people, had demanded that thing and the proposal of that law, now being influenced by the tears of the son of Caius Junius, a little boy, rejected the whole law and the whole proposition with the greatest outcry and with the greatest eagerness.
From which
that was easy to be understood which has been often said,—that as the sea, which by its own
nature is tranquil, is often agitated and disturbed by the violence of the winds, so, too, the
Roman people is, when left to itself, placable, but is easily roused by the language of
seditious men, as by the most violent storm.