If that had been all, it was enough, but Livonius and his supporters had other plans that struck at the very heart of the city-state. Rome had grown fat on the spoils of empire and in the process it had become the magnet for everyone seeking a fortune and in many cases those in search of no more than the food necessary to survive. The city was crowded, with huge wealth living cheek by jowl with acute poverty. In fear of riot it had been agreed that a dole of corn, enough to sustain life, should be issued to the poorest members of the population, but that was not enough for the reformers; they now wanted to give farms to the landless peasants who filled the slums as a way of clearing them out of the city, land that would have to come from those who owned it, the wealthy elite that governed the city and had made vast fortunes from Rome’s conquests. Egging on the mob, who had most to gain from his proposed reforms, Tiberius Livonius threatened to make Rome ungovernable.

Such ideas must be fought and defeated, but politically, not by some successful soldier at the head of fighting legions, who were barred from entry to the city. It was over four hundred years since the leading families had founded the Republic, expelling the Tarquin kings, yet the memory of their despotism still lived on, making men suspicious of success, lest too much fortune tempt anyone to seek supreme power; to overthrow the Senate, suborn the Republic and reinstate a royal tyranny. Aulus Cornelius Macedonicus, attached as he was to the patrician cause, with one great campaign to his name, given another, might see personal rule as the best method of restoring order, and having done so, the best method of keeping it so by a continuation of that rule. Lucius Falerius, who knew the man in question better than anyone, had used his considerable oratory to ridicule such fears.