This project offered inconveniences, but also great advantages. Rullus, certainly, was to blame for not designating all the places where he wished to establish colonies; for making two exemptions, one favourable, the other unfavourable to Pompey; for assigning to the decemvirs powers too extensive, tending to arbitrary acts and speculations: nevertheless, his project had an important political aim. The public domain, encroached upon by usurpations or by the colonies of Sylla, had almost disappeared. The law was to re-constitute it by the sale of conquered territories. On the other side, the lands confiscated in great number by Sylla, and given or sold at a paltry price to his partisans, had suffered a general depreciation, for the ownership was liable to be contested, and they no longer found purchasers. The Republic, while desirous of relieving the poorer class, had thus an interest in raising the price of these lands and in securing the holders. The project of Rullus was, in fact, a veritable law of indemnity. There are injustices which, sanctioned by time, ought also to be sanctioned by law, in order to extinguish the causes of dissension, by restoring their security to existing things, and its value to property.
If the great orator had known how to raise himself above the questions of person and of party, he would, like Cæsar, have supported the proposal of the tribune, amending only what was too absolute or too vague in it; but, overreached by the faction of the great, and desiring to please the knights, whose interests the law injured, he attacked it with his usual eloquence, exaggerating its defects. It would only benefit, he said, a small number of persons. Whilst appearing to favour Pompey, it deprived him, on account of his absence, of the chance of being chosen decemvir. It allowed some individuals to dispose of kingdoms like Egypt, and of the immense territories of Asia. Capua would become the capital of Italy, and Rome, surrounded by a girdle of military colonies devoted to ten new tyrants, would lose its independence. To purchase the lands, instead of apportioning the _ager publicus_, was monstrous, and he could not admit that they would engage the people to abandon the capital to go and languish in the fields. Then, exposing the double personal interest of the author of the law, he reminded them that the father-in-law of Rullus was enriched with the spoils of proscripts, and that Rullus himself had reserved the right of being nominated decemvir.