A HISTORY OF ROME
DURING THE LATER REPUBLIC AND
EARLY PRINCIPATE
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CHAPTER II
A cause never lacks a champion, nor a great cause one whom it may render
great. Failure is in itself no sign of lack of spirit and ability, and
when a vast reform is the product of a mean personality, the individual
becomes glorified by identification with his work. From this point of
view it mattered little who undertook the task of the economic
regeneration of the Roman world. Any senator of respectable antecedents
and moderate ability, who had a stable following amongst the ruling
classes, might have succeeded where Tiberius Gracchus failed; it was a
task in which authority was of more importance than ability, and the
sense that the more numerous or powerful elements of society were united
in the demand for reform, of more value than individual genius or
honesty of purpose. This was the very circumstance that foreshadowed
failure, for the men of wide connections and established fame had shrunk
from an enterprise with which they sympathised in various degrees. In
the proximate history of the Republic there had been three men who
showed an unwavering belief in the Italian farmer and the blessings of
agriculture. These were M. Porcius Cato, P. Cornelius Scipio and Ti.
Sempronius Gracchus. But the influence of Cato's house had become
extinct with its first founder. The elder son, an amiable man and an
accomplished jurist, had not out-lived his father; the second still
survived, but seems to have inherited little of the fighting qualities
of the terrible censor. The traditions of a Roman house needed to be
sustained by the efforts of its existing representative, and the
"newness" of the Porcii might have necessitated generations of vigorous
leaders to make them a power in the land. Scipionic traditions were now
represented by Aemilianus, and the glow of the luminary was reflected in
paler lights, who received their lustre from moving in that charmed
orbit. One of these, the indefatigable henchman Laelius, had risen to
the rank of consul, and stimulated by the vigorous theorisings of his
hellenised environment, he contemplated for a moment the formation of a
plan which should deal with some of the worst evils of the agrarian
question. But he looked at the problem only to start back in affright.
The strength and truculency of the vested interests with which he would
have to deal were too much for a man whose nerve was weakened by
philosophy and experience, and Laelius by his retreat justified, if he
did not gain, the soubriquet which proclaimed his "sapience".[299] But
why was Scipio himself idle? The answer is to be found both in his
temperament and in his circumstances. With all his dash and energy, he
was something of a healthy hedonist. As the chase had delighted him in
his youth, so did war in his manhood. While hating its cruelties, he
gloried in its excitement, and the discipline of the camp was more to
his mind than the turbulence of an assembly. His mind, too, belonged to
that class which finds it almost impossible to emancipate itself from
traditional politics. His vast knowledge of the history of other
civilisations may have taught him, as it taught Polybius, that Rome was
successful because she was unique.[300] Here there was to be no break
with the past, no legislator posing as a demi-god, no obedience to the
cries of the masses who, if they once got loose, might turn and rend the
enlightened few, and reproduce on Italian soil the shocking scenes of
Greek socialistic enterprise. As things were, to be a reformer was to be
a partisan, and Scipio loved the prospect of his probable supporters as
little as that of his probable opponents. The fact of the Empire, too,
must have weighed heavily with a man who was no blind imperialist. Even
though economic reform might create an added efficiency in the army,
Scipio must have known, as Polybius certainly knew, that soldiers are
but pawns in the great game, and that the controlling forces were the
wisdom of the conservative senator, the ambition of the wealthy noble,
and the capital of the enterprising knight. The wisdom of disturbing
their influence, and awakening their resentment, could scarcely appeal
to a mind so perfectly balanced and practical as Scipio's.
Circumstances, too, must have had their share in determining his
quiescence. The Scipios had been a power in Rome in spite of the
nobility. They were used because they were needed, not because they were
loved, and the necessary man was never in much favour with the senate.
Although there was no tie of blood between Aemilianus and the elder
Scipio, they were much alike both in fortune and in temperament. They
had both been called upon to save military situations that were thought
desperate; their reputation had been made by successful war; and though
neither was a mere soldier, they lacked the taste and the patience for
the complicated political game, which alone made a man a power amidst
the noble circles and their immediate dependants at Rome.
But the last generation had seen in Tiberius Gracchus a man whose
political influence had been vast, a noble with but scant respect for
the indefeasible rights of the nobility and as stern as Cato in his
animadversions on the vices of his order, a man whose greatest successes
abroad had been those of diplomacy rather than of war, one who had
established firm connections and a living memory of himself both in West
and East, whose name was known and loved in Spain, Sardinia, Asia and
Egypt. It would have been too much to hope that this honest old
aristocrat would attempt to grapple with the evils which had first
become manifest during his own long lifetime; but it was not unnatural
that people should look to a son of his for succour, especially as this
son represented the blood of the Scipios as well as of the Gracchi. The
marriage of the elderly Gracchus with the young Cornelia had marked the
closing of the feud, personal rather than political, which had long
separated him from the elder Scipio: and a further link between the two
families was subsequently forged by the marriage of Sempronia, a
daughter of Cornelia, to Scipio Aemilianus. The young Tiberius Gracchus
may have been born during one of his father's frequent absences on the
service of the State.[301] Certainly the elder Gracchus could have seen
little of his son during the years of his infancy. But the closing years
of the old man's life seem to have been spent uninterruptedly in Italy,
and Tiberius must have been profoundly influenced by the genial and
stately presence that Rome loved and feared. But he was little more than
a boy when his father died, and the early influences that moulded his
future career seem to have been due mainly to his mother. Cornelia would
have been the typical Roman matron, had she lived a hundred years
earlier; she would then have trained sons for the battlefield, not for
the Forum. As it was, the softening influences of Greek culture had
tempered without impairing her strength of character, had substituted
rational for purely supernatural sanctions, and a wide political outlook
for a rude sense of civic duty. Herself the product of an education such
as ancient civilisations rarely bestowed upon their women, she wrote and
spoke with a purity and grace which led to the belief that her sons had
learnt from her lips and from her pen their first lessons in that
eloquence which swayed the masses and altered the fortunes of Rome.[302]
But her gifts had not impaired her tenderness. Her sons were her
"Jewels," and the successive loss of nine of the children which she had
borne to Gracchus must have made the three that remained doubly dear.
The two boys had a narrow escape from becoming Eastern princes: for the
hand of the widow Cornelia was sought in marriage by the King of
Egypt.[303] Such an alliance with the representative of the two houses
of the Gracchi and the Scipios might easily seem desirable to a
protected king, although the attractions of Cornelia may also have
influenced his choice. She, however, had no aspirations to share the
throne of the Lagidae, and the hellenism of Tiberius and of his younger
brother Caius, though deep and far-reaching, was of a kind less violent
than would have been gained by transportation to Alexandria. They were
trained in rhetoric by Diophanes an exile from Mitylene, and in
philosophy by Blossius of Cumae, a stoic of the school of Antipater of
Tarsus.[304] Many held the belief that Tiberius was spurred to his
political enterprise by the direct exhortation of these teachers; but,
even if their influence was not of this definite kind, there can be
little doubt that the teaching of the two Greeks exercised a powerful
influence on the political cast of his mind. Ideals of Greek liberty,
speeches of Greek statesmen who had come forward as champions of the
oppressed, stories of social ruin averted by the voice and hand of the
heaven-sent legislator, pictures of self-sacrifice and of resigned
submission to a standard of duty--these were lessons that may have been
taught both by rhetorician and philosopher. Nor was the teaching of
history different. In the literary environment in which the Gracchi
moved, ready answers were being given to the most vital questions of
politics and social science. Every one must have felt that the
approaching struggle had a dual aspect, that it was political as well as
social. For social conservatism was entrenched behind a political
rampart: and if reform, neglected by the senate, was to come from the
people, the question had first to be asked, Had the people a legal right
to initiate reform? The historians of that and of the preceding
generation would have answered this question unhesitatingly in the
affirmative. The de facto sovereignty of the senate had not even
received a sanction in contemporary literature, while to that of the
immediate past it was equally unknown. The Roman annalists from the time
of the Second Punic War had revealed the sovereignty of the people as
the basis of the Roman constitution,[305] and the history of the long
struggle of the Plebs for freedom made the protection of the commons the
sole justification of the tribunate. From the lips of Polybius himself
Tiberius may have heard the impression which the Roman polity made on
the mind of the educated Greek: and the fact that this was a Greek
picture did not lessen its validity; for the Greek was moulding the
orthodox history of Rome, and the victims of his genius were the best
Roman intellects of the day. He might have learnt how in this mixed
constitution the people still retained their inalienable rights, how
they elected, ratified, and above all how they punished.[306] He might
have gathered that the identification of the tribunate with the
interests of the nobility was a perversion of its true and vital
function: that the tribune exists but to assist the commons and can be
subject to no authority but the people's will, whether expressed
directly by them or indirectly through his colleagues.[307] The history
of the Punic wars did indeed reveal, in the fate of a Varro or a
Minucius, how popular insubordination might be punished, when its end
was wrong. Polybius's own voice was raised in prophetic warning against
a possible demagogy of the future.[308] But that history showed the
healthy discipline of a healthy people--a people that had vanquished
genius through subordination, a peasant class whose loyalty and tenacity
were as great as those of its leaders, and without whom those leaders
would have been helpless. Where was such a class to be found now? Change
the subject or turn the page, and the Greek statesman and historian
could point to the dreadful reverse of this picture.[309] He could show
a Greek nation, gifted with political genius but doomed to political
decay--a nation whose sons accumulated money, lived in luxury with
little forethought for the future, and refused to beget children for the
State: a nation with a wealthy and cultured upper class, but one that
was literally perishing for the lack of men.[310] Was this the fate in
store for Rome? A temperament that was merely vigorous and keen might
not have been affected by such reflections. One that was merely
contemplative might have regarded them only as a subject for curious
study. But Tiberius's mind ran to neither of these two extremes. He was
a thoughtful and sensitive man of action. Sweet in temper, staid in
deportment, gentle in language, he attracted from his dependants a
loyalty that knew no limits, and from his friends a devotion that did
not even shrink from death on his behalf. Even in his pure and polished
oratory passion revealed itself chiefly in appeals to pity, not in the
harsher forms of invective or of scorn. His mode of life was simple and
restrained, but apparently with none of the pedantic austerity of the
stoic. In an age that was becoming dissolute and frivolous he was moral
and somewhat serious.[311] But his career is not that of the man who
burdens society with the impression that he has a solemn mission to
perform. Such men are rarely taken as seriously as they take themselves;
they do not win aged men of experience to support their cause; the
demeanour that wearies their friends is even likely to be found irksome
by the mob.
Roman society must have seen much promise in his youth, for honours came
early. A seat at the augural board was regarded as a tribute to his
merit rather than his birth;[312] and indeed the Roman aristocrats, who
dispensed such favours, were too clever to be the slaves of a name, when
political manipulation was in question and talent might be diverted to
the true cause. His marriage was a more important determinant in his
career. The bride who was offered him was the daughter of Appius
Claudius Pulcher, a man of consular and censorian rank and now Princeps
of the senate,[313] a clever representative of that brilliant and
eccentric house, that had always kept liberalism alive in Rome. Appius
had already displayed some of the restless individuality of his
ancestors. When the senate had refused him a triumph after a war with
the Salassi, he had celebrated the pageant at his own expense, while his
daughter, a vestal, walked beside the car to keep at bay the importunate
tribune who attempted to drag him off.[314] A similar unconventionality
was manifested in the present betrothal. The story runs that Appius
broached the question to Tiberius at an augural banquet. The proposition
was readily accepted, and Appius in his joy shouted out the news to his
wife as he entered his own front door. The lady was more surprised than
annoyed. "What need for all this haste," she said, "unless indeed you
have found Tiberius Gracchus for our girl?" [315] Appius, hasty as he
was, was probably in this case not the victim of a sudden inspiration.
The restless old man doubtless pined for reform; but he was weighed down
by years, honours and familiarity with the senate. He could not be the
protagonist in the coming struggle; but in Tiberius he saw the man of
the future.
The chances of the time favoured a military even more than a political
career; the chief spheres of influence were the province and the camp,
and it was in these that the earliest distinctions of Tiberius were won.
When a lad of fifteen he had followed his brother-in-law Scipio to
Africa, and had been the first to mount the walls of Carthage in the
vain assault on the fortress of Megara.[316] He had won the approval of
the commander by his discipline and courage, and left general regret
amongst the army when he quitted the camp before the close of the
campaign. But an experience as potent for the future as his first taste
of war, must have been those hours of leisure spent in Scipio's
tent.[317] If contact with the great commander aroused emulation, the
talk on political questions of Scipio and his circle must have inspired
profound reflection. Here he could find aspirations enough; all that was
lacking was a leader to translate them into deeds. The quaestorship, the
first round of the higher official ladder, found him attached to the
consul Mancinus and destined for the ever-turbulent province of Spain.
It was a fortunate chance, for here was the scene of his father's
military and diplomatic triumphs. But the sequel was unexpected. He had
gone to fulfil the duties of a subordinate; he suddenly found himself
performing those of a commander-in-chief or of an accredited
representative of the Roman people. The Numantines would treat only with
a Gracchus, and the treaty that saved Roman lives but not Roman honour
was felt to be really his work. In a moment he was involved in a
political question that agitated the whole of Rome. The Numantine treaty
was the topic of the day. Was it to be accepted or, if repudiated,
should the authors of the disaster, the causes of the breach of faith,
be surrendered in time-honoured fashion to the enemy as an expiation for
the violated pledge? On the first point there was little hesitation; the
senate decided for the nullity of the treaty, and it was likely that
this view would be accepted by the people, if the measures against the
ratifying officials were not made too stringent. For on this point there
was a difference of opinion. The poorer classes, whose sons and brothers
had been saved from death or captivity by the treaty, blamed Mancinus as
the cause of the disaster, but were grateful to Tiberius as the author
of the agreement. Others who had less to lose and could therefore afford
to stand on principle, would have enforced the fullest rigour of the
ancient rules and have delivered up the quaestor and tribunes with the
defaulting general.[318] It was thought that the influence of Scipio,
always great with the agricultural voters, might have availed to save
even Mancinus, nay that, if he would, he might have got the peace
confirmed.[319] But his efforts were believed to have been employed in
favour of Tiberius. The matter ended in an illogical compromise. The
treaty was repudiated, but it was decreed that the general alone should
be surrendered.[320] A breach in an ancient rule of religious law had
been made in favour of Tiberius.
But, in spite of this mark of popular favour, the experience had been
disheartening and its effect was disturbing. Although it is impossible
to subscribe to the opinion of later writers, who, looking at the matter
from a conservative and therefore unfavourable aspect, saw in this early
check the key to Tiberius's future action,[321] yet anger and fear leave
their trace even on the best regulated minds. The senate had torn up his
treaty and placed him for the moment in personal peril. It was to the
people that he owed his salvation. If circumstances were to develop an
opposition party in Rome, he was being pushed more and more into its
ranks. And a coolness seems to have sprung up at this time between him
and the man who had been his great exemplar. Tiberius took no counsel
of Scipio before embarking on his great enterprise; support and advice
were sought elsewhere. He may have already tested Scipio's lack of
sympathy with an active propaganda; shame might have kept back the hint
of a plan that might seem to imply a claim to leadership. But it is
possible that there was some feeling of resentment against the warrior
now before Numantia, who had done nothing to save the last Numantine
treaty and the honour of the name of Gracchus.
His reticence could scarcely have been due to ignorance of his own
designs; for his brother Caius left it on record that it was while
journeying northward from Rome on his way to Numantia that Tiberius's
eyes were first fully opened to the magnitude of the malady that cried
aloud for cure.[322] It was in Etruria, the paradise of the capitalist,
that he saw everywhere the imported slave and the barbarian who had
replaced the freeman. It was this sight that first suggested something
like a definite scheme. A further stimulus was soon to be found in
scraps of anonymous writing which appeared on porches, walls and
monuments, praying for his succour and entreating that the public land
should be recovered for the poor.[323] The voiceless Roman people was
seeking its only mode of utterance, a tribune who should be what the
tribune had been of old, the servant of the many not the creature of the
few. To Gracchus's mother his plans could hardly have been veiled. She
is even said to have stimulated a vague craving for action by the
playful remark that she was still known as the mother-in-law of Scipio,
not as the mother of the Gracchi.[324]
But there was need of serious counsel. Gracchus did not mean to be a
mere demagogue, coming before the people with a half-formed plan and
stirring up an agitation which could end merely in some idle resolution.
There were few to whom he could look for advice, but those few were of
the best. Three venerable men, whose deeds and standing were even
greater than their names, were ready with their support. There was the
chief pontiff, P. Licinius Crassus Mucianus, the man who was said to
combine in a supreme degree the four great blessings of wealth, birth,
eloquence and legal lore;[325] there was the brother of Crassus, P.
Mucius Scaevola,[326] the greatest lawyer of his age and already
destined to the consulship for the following year; lastly there was
Tiberius's father-in-law, the restless Appius, now eagerly awaiting the
fulfilment of a cherished scheme by the man of his own choice.[327]
Thus fortified, Tiberius Gracchus entered on his tribunate, and
formulated the measure which was to leave large portions of the public
domain open for distribution to the poor. In the popular gatherings with
which he opened his campaign, he dwelt on the nature of the evils which
he proposed to remedy. It was the interest of Italy, not merely of the
Roman proletariate, that was at stake.[328] He pointed out how the
Italian peasantry had dwindled in numbers, and how that portion of it
which still survived had been reduced to a poverty that was irremediable
by their own efforts. He showed that the slave gangs which worked the
vast estates were a menace, not a help, to Rome. They could not be
enlisted for service in the legions; their disaffection to their masters
was notorious; their danger was being proved even now by the horrible
condition of Sicily, the fate of its slave-owning landlords, the long,
difficult and eventful war which had not even yet been brought to a
close.[329] Sometimes the language of passion replaced that of reason in
his harangues to the crowds that pressed round the Rostra. "The beasts
that prowl about Italy have holes and lurking-places where they may make
their beds. You who fight and die for Italy enjoy but the blessings of
air and light. These alone are your heritage. Homeless, unsettled, you
wander to and fro with your wives and children. Our generals are in the
habit of inspiring their soldiers to the combat by exhorting them to
repel the enemy in defence of their tombs and ancestral shrines. The
appeal is idle and false. You cannot point to a paternal altar, you have
no ancestral tomb. No! you fight and die to give wealth and luxury to
others. You are called the masters of the world; yet there is no clod of
earth that you can call your own." [330]
The proposal, which was ushered in by these stirring appeals, seemed at
first sight to be of a moderate and somewhat conservative character. It
professed to be the renewal of an older law, which had limited the
amount of domain land which an individual might possess to five hundred
jugera;[331] it professed, that is, to reinforce an injunction which
had been persistently disobeyed, for this enactment restricting
possession had never been repealed. The extent to which a proposal of
this kind is a re-enactment, in the spirit as well as in the letter,
depends entirely on the length of time which has elapsed since the
original proposal has begun to be violated. A political society, which
recognises custom as one of the bases of law, must recognise desuetude
as equally valid. A law, which has not been enforced for centuries,
would, by the common consent of the courts of such nations as favour
progressive legislation, be regarded as no law at all. Again, the age of
an ordinance determines its suitability to present conditions. It may be
justifiable to revive an enactment that is centuries old; but the
revival should not necessarily dignify itself with that name. It must be
regarded as a new departure, unless the circumstances of the old and the
new enactment can be proved to be approximately the same. Our attempts
to judge the Gracchan law by these considerations are baffled by our
ignorance of the real date of the previous enactment, the stringency of
whose measures he wished to renew. If it was the Licinian law of the
middle of the fourth century,[332] this law must have been renewed, or
must still have continued to be observed, at a period not very long
anterior to the Gracchan proposal; for Cato could point his argument
against the declaration of war with Rhodes by an appeal to a provision
attributed to this measure[333]--an appeal which would have been
pointless, had the provision fallen into that oblivion which persistent
neglect of an enactment must bring to all but the professed students of
law. We can at least assert that the charge against Gracchus of reviving
an enactment so hoary with age as to be absurdly obsolete, is not one of
the charges to be found even in those literary records which were most
unfriendly to his legislation.[334]
The general principle of the measure was, therefore, the limitation to
five hundred jugera of the amount of public land that could be
"possessed" by an individual. The very definition of the tenure
immediately exempted large portions of the State's domain from the
operation of this rule.[335] The Campanian land was leased by the State
to individuals, not merely possessed by them as the result of an
occupation permitted by the government; it, therefore, fell outside the
scope of the measure;[336] but, as it was technically public land and
its ownership was vested in the State, it would have been hazardous to
presume its exemption; it seems, therefore, to have been specifically
excluded from the operation of the bill, and a similar exception was
probably made in favour of many other tracts of territory held under a
similar tenure.[337] Either Gracchus declined to touch any interest that
could properly describe itself as "vested," even though it took merely
the form of a leasehold, or he valued the secure and abundant revenue
which flowed into the coffers of the State from these domains. There
were other lands strictly "public" where the claim of the holders was
still stronger, and where dispossession without the fullest compensation
must have been regarded as mere robbery. We know from later legislation
that respect was had to such lands as the Trientabula, estates which had
been granted by the Roman government at a quit rent to its creditors, as
security for that portion of a national debt which had never been
repaid. It is less certain what happened in the case of lands of which
the usufruct alone had been granted to communities of Roman citizens or
Latin colonists. Ownership in this case still remained vested in the
Roman people, and if the right of usufruct had been granted by law, it
could be removed by law. In the case of Latin communities, however, it
was probably guaranteed by treaty, which no mere law could touch: and so
similar were the conditions of Roman and Latin communities in this
particular, that it is probable that the land whose use was conferred on
whole communities by these ancient grants, was wholly spared by the
Gracchan legislation. In the case of those commons which were possessed
by groups of villagers for the purposes of pasturage (ager
compascuus),[338] it is not likely that the group was regarded as the
unit: and therefore, even in the case of such an aggregate possessing
over five hundred jugera, their occupation was probably left
undisturbed.
All other possessors must vacate the land which exceeded the prescribed
limit. Such an ordinance would have been harsh, had no compensation been
allowed, and Gracchus proposed certain amends for the loss sustained. In
the first place, the five hundred jugera retained by each possessor
were to be increased by half as much again for each son that he might
possess: although it seems that the amount retained was not to exceed
one thousand jugera.[339] Secondly, the land so secured to existing
possessors was not to be held on a merely precarious tenure, and was not
to be burdened by the payment of dues to the State; even if ownership
was not vested in its holders, they were guaranteed gratuitous
undisturbed possession in perpetuity.[340] Thirdly, the bill as
originally drafted even suggested some monetary compensation for the
land surrendered.[341] This compensation was probably based on a
valuation of stock, buildings, and recent permanent improvements, which
were to be found on the territory now reverting to the State. It must
have applied for the most part only to arable land, and practically
amounted to a purchase by the State of items to which it could lay no
legal claim; for it was the soil alone, not the buildings on the soil,
over which its lordship could properly be asserted.
The object of reclaiming the public land was its future distribution
amongst needy citizens. This distribution might have taken either of two
forms. Fresh colonies might have been planted, or the acquired land
might merely be assigned to settlers who were to belong to the existing
political organisations. It was the latter method of simple assignation
that Gracchus chose. There was felt to be no particular need for new
political creations; for the pacification of Italy seemed to be
accomplished, and the new farming class would perform their duty to the
State equally well as members of the territory of Rome or of that of the
existing municipia and coloniae of Roman citizens. There is some
evidence that the new proprietors were not all to be attached to the
city of Rome itself, but that many, perhaps most, were to be attributed
to the existing colonies and municipia, in the neighbourhood of which
their allotments lay.[342] The size of the new allotments which Gracchus
projected is not known; it probably varied with the needs and status of
the occupier, perhaps with the quality of the land, and there is some
indication that the maximum was fixed at thirty jugera.[343] This is
an amount that compares favourably with the two, three, seven or ten
jugera of similar assignments in earlier times, and is at once a proof
of the decrease in the value of land--a decrease which had contributed
to the formation of the large estates--and of the large amount of
territory which was expected to be reclaimed by the provisions of the
new measure. The allotments thus assigned were not, however, to be the
freehold property of their recipients. They were, indeed, heritable and
to be held on a perfectly secure tenure by the assignees and their
descendants; but a revenue was to be paid to the State for their use:
and they were to be inalienable--the latter provision being a desperate
expedient to check the land-hunger of the capitalist, and to save the
new settlers from obedience to the economic tendencies of the
times.[344]
It is doubtful whether the social object of Gracchus could have been
fully accomplished, had he confined his attention wholly to the existing
citizens of Rome. The area of economic distress was wider than the
citizen body, and it was the salvation of Italy as a whole that Gracchus
had at heart.[345] There is much reason for supposing that some of the
Italian allies were to be recipients of the benefits of the
measure.[346] In earlier assignations the Latins had not been excluded,
and it is probable that at least these, whether members of old
communities or of colonies, were intended to have some share in the
distribution. There could be no legal hindrance to such participation.
With respect to rights in land, the Latins were already on a level with
Roman citizens, and their exclusion from the new allotments would have
been due to a mere political prejudice which is not characteristic
either of Gracchus or his plans.
The ineffectiveness of laws at Rome was due chiefly to the apathy of the
executive authority. Gracchus saw clearly that his measure would, like
other social efforts of the past, become a mere pious resolution, if its
execution were entrusted to the ordinary officials of the State.[347]
But a special commission, which should effectually carry out the work
which he contemplated, must be of a very unusual kind. The magnitude of
the task, and the impossibility of assigning any precise limit of time
to its completion, made it essential that the Triumvirate which he
established should bear the appearance of a regular but extraordinary
magistracy of the State. The three commissioners created by the bill
were to be elected annually by the Comitia of the Tribes.[348]
Re-election of the same individuals was possible, and the new magistracy
was to come to an end only with the completion of its work. Its
occupants, perhaps, possessed the Imperium from the date of the first
institution of the office; they certainly exercised it from the moment
when, as we shall see, their functions of assignment were supplemented
by the addition of judicial powers. Gracchus was doubtless led to this
new creation purely by the needs of his measure; but he showed to later
politicians the possibility of creating a new and powerful magistracy
under the guise of an agrarian law.
Such was the measure that seemed to its proposer a reasonable and
equitable means of remedying a grave injustice and restoring rather than
giving rights to the poor. He might, if he would, have insisted on
simple restitution. Had he pressed the letter of the law, not an atom of
the public domain need have been left to its present occupiers. The
possessor had no rights against the State; he held on sufferance, and
technically he might be supposed to be always waiting for his summons to
ejectment. To give such people something over and above the limit that
the laws had so long prescribed, to give them further a security of
tenure for the land retained which amounted almost to complete
ownership--were not these unexpected concessions that should be received
with gratitude? And even up to the eve of the polling the murmurs of the
opposition were sometimes met by appeals to its nobler sentiments. The
rich, said Gracchus, if they had the interests of Italy, its future
hopes and its unborn generations at heart, should make this land a free
gift to the State; they were vexing themselves about small issues and
refusing to face the greater problems of the day.[349]
But personal interests can never seem small, and the average man is more
concerned with the present than with the future. The opposition was
growing in volume day by day, and the murmurs were rising into shrieks.
The class immediately threatened must have been numerically small; but
they made up in combination and influence what they lacked in numbers.
It was always easy to startle the solid commercial world of Rome by the
cry of "confiscation". A movement in this direction might have no
limits; the socialistic device of a "re-division of land," which had so
often thrown the Greek commonwealths into a ferment, was being imported
into Roman politics. All the forces of respectability should be allied
against this sinister innovation. It is probable that many who
propagated these views honestly believed that they exactly fitted the
facts of the case. The possessors did indeed know that they were not
owners. They were reminded of the fact whenever they purchased the right
of occupation from a previous possessor, for such a title could not pass
by mancipation; or whenever they sued for the recovery of an estate from
which they had been ejected, for they could not make the plea before the
praetor that the land was theirs "according to the right of the
Quirites," but could rely only on the equitable assistance of the
magistrate tendered through the use of the possessory interdicts; or,
more frequently still, whenever they paid their dues to the Publicanus,
that disinterested middle-man, who had no object in compromising with
the possessors, and could seldom have allowed an acre of land to escape
his watchful eye. But, in spite of these reminders, there was an
impression that the tenure was perfectly secure, and that the State
would never again re-assert its lordship in the extreme form of
dispensing entirely with its clients. Gracchus might talk of
compensation, but was there any guarantee that it would be adequate,
and, even supposing material compensation to be possible, what solace
was that to outraged feelings? Ancestral homes, and even ancestral
tombs, were not grouped on one part of a domain, so that they could be
saved by an owner when he retained his five hundred jugera; they were
scattered all over the broad acres. Estates that technically belonged to
a single man, and were therefore subject to the operation of the law,
had practically ceased to confer any benefit on the owner, and were
pledged to other purposes. They had been divided as the peculia of his
sons, they had been promised as the dowry of his daughters. Again those
former laws may have rightly forbidden the occupation of more than a
certain proportion of land; but much of the soil now in possession had
not been occupied by its present inhabitant; he had bought the right to
be there in hard cash from the former tenant. And think of the invested
capital! Dowries had been swallowed up in the soil, and the Gracchan law
was confiscating personal as well as real property, taking the wife's
fortune as well as the husband's. Nay, if the history of the public land
were traced, could it not be shown that such value as it now possessed
had been given it by its occupiers or their ancestors? The land was not
assigned in early times, simply because it was not worth assignation. It
was land that had been reclaimed for use, and of this use the authors of
its value were now to be deprived.[350]
Such was the plaint of the land-holders, one not devoid of equity and,
therefore, awakening a response in the minds of timid and sober business
men, who were as yet unaffected by the danger. But some of these found
their own personal interests at stake. So good had the tenure seemed,
that it had been accepted as security for debt,[351] and the Gracchan
attack united for once the usually hostile ranks of mortgagers and
mortgagees. The alarm spread from Rome to the outlying municipalities.
[352] Even in the city itself a very imperfect view of the scope of the
bill was probably taken by the proletariate. We may imagine the
distorted form in which it reached the ears of the occupants of the
country towns. "Was it true that the land which had been given them in
usufruct was to be taken away?" was the type of question asked in the
municipia and in the colonies, whether Roman or Latin. The needier
members of these towns received the news with very different feelings.
They had every chance of sharing in the local division of the spoils,
and their voices swelled the chorus of approval with which the poorer
classes everywhere received the Gracchan law. Amidst this proletariate
certain catch-words--well-remembered fragments of Gracchus's speeches--
had begun to be the familiar currency of the day. "The numberless
campaigns through which this land has been won," "The iniquity of
exclusion from what is really the property of the State," "The disgrace
of employing the treacherous slave in place of the free-born citizen"--
such was the type of remark with which the Roman working-man or idler
now entertained his fellow. All Roman Italy was in a blaze, and there
must have been a sense of insecurity and anxiety even in those allied
towns whose interest in Roman domain-land was remote. Might not State
interests be as lightly violated as individual interests by a sovereign
people: and was not the example of Rome almost as perilous as her action?
The opponents of Gracchus had no illusions as to the numerical strength
which he could summon to his aid. If the battle were fought to a finish
in the Comitia, there could be no doubt as to his triumphant victory.
Open opposition could serve no purpose except to show what a remnant it
was that was opposing the people's wishes. But there was a means of at
least delaying the danger, of staving off the attack as long as Gracchus
remained tribune, perhaps of giving the people an opportunity of
recovering completely from their delirium. When the college of tribunes
moved as a united body, its force was irresistible; but now, as often
before, there was some division in its ranks. It was not likely that ten
men, drawn from the order of the nobility, should view with equal favour
such a radical proposal as that of Tiberius Gracchus. But the popular
feeling was so strong that for a time even the unsympathetic members of
the board hesitated to protest, and no colleague of Tiberius is known to
have opposed the movement in its initial stages. Even the man who was
subsequently won over to the capitalist interest hesitated long before
taking the formidable step: It was believed, however, that the hesitancy
of Marcus Octavius was due more to his personal regard for Tiberius than
to respect for the people's wishes.[353] The tribune who was to scotch
the obnoxious measure was an excellent instrument for a dignified
opposition. He was grave and discreet, a personal friend and intimate of
Tiberius.[354] It is true that he was a large holder on the public
domain, and that he would suffer by the operation of the new agrarian
law. But it was fitting that the landlord class should be represented by
a landlord, and, if there had been the least suspicion of sordid
motives, it would have been removed by Octavius's refusal to accept
private compensation for himself from the slender means of Tiberius
Gracchus.[355] The offer itself reads like an insult, but it was
probably made in a moment of passionate and unreflecting fervour.
Neither the profferer nor the refuser could have regarded it in the
light of a bribe. Even when the veto had been pronounced, the daily
contest between the two tribunes in the Forum never became a scene of
unseemly recrimination. The war of words revolved round the question of
principle. Both disputants were at white heat; yet not a word was said
by either which conveyed a reflection on character or motive.[356]
These debates followed the first abortive meeting of the Assembly. As
the decisive moment approached, streams of country folk had poured into
Rome to register their votes in favour of the measure.[357] The Contio
had given way to the Comitia, the people had been ready to divide, and
Gracchus had ordered his scribe to read aloud the words of the bill.
Octavius had bidden the scribe to be silent;[358] the vast meeting had
melted away, and all the labours of the reformer seemed to have been in
vain. To accept a temporary defeat under such circumstances was in
accordance with the constitutional spirit of the times. The veto was a
mode of encouraging reflection; it might yield to a prolonged campaign,
but it was regarded as a barrier against a hasty popular impulse which,
if unchecked, might prove ruinous to some portion of the community.
Gracchus, however, knew perfectly well that it was now being used in the
interest of a small minority, and he held the rights which it protected
to be non-existent; he believed the question of agrarian reform to be
bound up with his own personality, and its postponement to be equivalent
to its extinction; he had no intention of allowing his own political
life to be a failure, and, instead of discarding his weapons of attack,
he made them more formidable than before. Perhaps in obedience to
popular outcries, he redrafted his bill in a form which rendered it more
drastic and less equitable.[359] It is possible that some of the
douceurs given to the possessors by his original proposal were not
really in accordance with his own judgment. They were meant to disarm
opposition. Now that opposition had not been disarmed, they could be
removed without danger. The stricter measure had the same chance of
success or failure as the less severe. We do not know the nature of the
changes which were now introduced; but it is possible that the pecuniary
compensation offered for improvements on the land to be resumed was
either abolished or rendered less adequate than before.
But even the form of the law was unimportant in comparison with the
question of the method by which the new opposition was to be met. The
veto, if persisted in by Octavius, would suspend the agrarian measure
during the whole of Tiberius's year of office. It could only be
countered by a device which would make government so impossible that the
opposition would be forced to come to terms. The means were to be found
in the prohibitive power of the tribunes, that right, which flowed from
their major potestas, of forbidding under threat of penalties the
action of all other magistrates. It was now rarely used except at the
bidding of the senate and for certain specified purposes. It had become,
in fact, little more than the means of enforcing obedience to a
temporary suspension of business life decreed by the government. But
recent events suggested a train of associations that brought back to
mind the great political struggles of the past, and recalled the mode in
which Licinius and Sextius had for five years sustained their anarchical
edict for the purpose of the emancipation of the Plebs. The difference
between the conditions of life in primitive Rome and in the cosmopolitan
capital of to-day did not appeal to Tiberius. The Justitium was as
legitimate a method of political warfare as the Intercessio. He issued
an edict which forbade all the other magistracies to perform their
official functions until the voting on the agrarian law should be
carried through; he placed his own seals on the doors of the temple of
Saturn to prevent the quaestors from making payments to the treasury or
withdrawing money from it; he forbade the praetors to sit in the courts
of justice and announced that he would exact a fine from those who
disobeyed. The magistrates obeyed the edict, and most of the active life
of the State was in suspense.[360] The fact of their obedience showed
the overwhelming power which Tiberius now had behind him; for an
ill-supported tribune, who adopted such an obsolete method of warfare,
would have been unable to enforce his decrees and would merely have
appeared ridiculous. The opponents of the law were now genuinely
alarmed. Those who would be the chief sufferers put on garments of
mourning, and paced the silent Forum with gloom and despair written on
their faces, as though they were the innocent victims of a great wrong.
But, while they took this overt means of stirring the commiseration of
the crowd, it was whispered that the last treacherous device for
averting the danger was being tried. The cause would perish with the
demagogue, and Tiberius might be secretly removed. Confidence in this
view was strengthened when it was known that the tribune carried a
dagger concealed about his person.[361]
An attempt was now made to discover whether the pressure had been
sufficient and whether the veto would be repeated. Gracchus again
summoned the assembly, the reading of the bill was again commenced and
again stopped at the instance of Octavius.[362] This second
disappointment nearly led to open riot. The vast crowd did not
immediately disperse; it felt its great physical strength and the utter
weakness of the regular organs of government. There were ominous signs
of an appeal to force, when two men of consular rank, Manlius and
Fulvius,[363] intervened as peacemakers. They threw themselves at the
feet of Tiberius, they clasped his hands, they besought him with tears
to pause before he committed himself to an act of violence. Tiberius was
not insensible to the appeal. The immediate future was dark enough, and
the entreaties of these revered men had saved an awkward situation. He
asked them what they held that he should do. They answered that they
were not equal to advise on a matter of such vast import; but that there
was the senate. Why not submit the whole matter to the judgment of the
great council of the State? Tiberius's own attitude to this proposal may
have been influenced by the fact that it was addressed to his colleagues
as well as to himself,[364] and that they apparently thought it a
reasonable means of relieving the present situation. It is difficult to
believe that the man who had never taken the senate into his confidence
over so vital a matter as the agrarian law, could have had much hope of
its sympathy now. But his conviction of the inherent reasonableness of
his proposal,[365] of his own power of stating the case convincingly,
and his knowledge that the senate usually did yield at a crisis, that
its government was only possible because it consistently kept its finger
on the pulse of popular opinion, may have directed his acceptance of its
advice. Immediate resort was had to the Curia. The business of the house
must have been immediately suspended to listen to a statement of the
merits of the agrarian measure, and to a description of the political
situation which it had created. When the debate began, it was obvious
that there was nothing but humiliation in store for the leaders of the
popular movement. The capitalist class was represented by an
overwhelming majority; carping protests and riddling criticism were
heard on every side, and Tiberius probably had never been told so many
home truths in his life. It was useless to prolong the discussion, and
Tiberius was glad to get into the open air of the Forum again. He had
formed his resolution, and now made a proposal which, if carried
through, might remove the deadlock by means that might be construed as
legitimate. The new device was nothing less than the removal of his
colleague Octavius from office. He announced that at the next meeting of
the Assembly two questions would be put before the Plebs, the acceptance
of the law and the continuance by Octavius of his tenure of the
tribunate.[366] The latter question was to be raised on the general
issue whether a tribune who acted contrary to the interests of the
people was to continue in office. At the appointed time[367] Octavius's
constancy was again tested, and he again stood firm. Tiberius broke out
into one of his emotional outbursts, seizing his colleague's hands,
entreating him to do this great favour to the people, reminding him that
their claims were just, were nothing in proportion to their toils and
dangers. When this appeal had been rejected, Tiberius summed up the
impossibility of the situation in terms which contained a condemnation
of the whole growth and structure of the Roman constitution. It was not
in human power, he said, to prevent open war between magistrates of
equal authority who were at variance on the gravest matters of
state;[368] the only way which he saw of securing peace was the
deposition of one of them from office. He did not care in the present
instance which it was. The people would be the arbiter. Let his own
deposition be proposed by Octavius; he would walk quietly away into a
private station, if this were the will of the citizens. The man who
spoke thus had more completely emancipated himself from Roman formulae
than any Roman of the past. To Octavius it must have seemed a mere
outburst of Greek demagogism. The offer too was an eminently safe one to
make under the circumstances. On no grounds could it be accepted. At
this point the proceedings were adjourned to allow Octavius time for
deliberation.
On the following day Gracchus announced that the question of deposition
would be taken first, and a fresh and equally vain appeal was made to
the feelings of the unshaken Octavius.[369] The question was then put,
not as a vague and general resolution, but as a determinate motion that
Octavius be deprived of the tribunate. The thirty-five tribes voted, and
when the votes of seventeen had been handed up and proclaimed,[370] and
the voice of but one was Lacking to make Octavius a private citizen,
Tiberius as the presiding tribune stopped for a moment the machinery of
the election. He again showed himself as a revolutionist unfortunate in
the possession of a political and personal conscience. The people were
witnessing a more passionate scene than ever, one that may appear as the
last effort of reconciliation between the two social forces that were to
meet in terrible conflict. Gracchus's arms were round his opponent's
neck; broken appeals fell from his lips--the old one that he should not
break the heart of the people: the new one that he should not cause his
own degradation, and leave a bitter memory in the mind of the author of
his fall. Observers saw that Octavius's heart was touched; his eyes were
filled with tears, and for some time he kept a troubled silence. But he
soon remembered his duty and his pledge. Tiberius might do with him what
he would. Gracchus called the gods to witness that he would willingly
have saved his colleague from dishonour, and ordered the resumption of
the announcement of the votes. The bill became law and Octavius was
stripped of his office. It was probably because he declined to recognise
the legality of the act that he still lingered on the Rostra. One of the
tribunician viatores, a freedman of Gracchus, was commanded to fetch
him down. When he reached the ground, a rush was made at him by the mob;
but his supporters rallied round him, and Tiberius himself rushed from
the Rostra to prevent the act of violence. Soon he was lost in the crowd
and hurried unobserved from the tumult.[371] His place in the
tribunician college was filled up by the immediate election of one
Quintus Mummius.[372]
The members of the assembly that deposed Octavius may have been the
spectators and authors of a new precedent in Roman history, one that was
often followed in the closing years of the Republic, but one that may
have received no direct sanction from the records of the past. The
abrogation of the imperium of a proconsul had indeed been known,[373]
but the deposition of a city magistrate during his year of office seems
to have been a hitherto untried experiment. We cannot on this ground
alone pronounce it to have been illegal; for an act never attempted
before may have perfect legal validity, as the first occasion on which a
legitimate deduction has been made from admitted principles of the
constitution. It had always been allowed that under certain
circumstances (chiefly the neglect of the proper formalities of
election) a magistrate might be invited to abdicate his office; but the
fact of this invitation is itself an evidence for the absence of any
legal power of suspension. Tradition, however, often supplemented the
defects of historical evidence, and one, perhaps the older, tale of the
removal of the first consul Collatinus stated that it was effected by a
popular measure introduced by his colleague.[374] This story was a
fragment of that tradition of popular sovereignty which animated the
historical literature of the age of the Gracchi: and one deduction from
that theory may well have seemed to be that the sovereign people could
change its ministers as it pleased. It was a deduction, however, that
was not drawn even in the best period of democratic Athens; it ran
wholly counter to the Roman conception of the magistracy as an authority
co-ordinate with the people and one that, if not divinely appointed,
received at least something of a sacred character from the fact of
investiture with office. Even the prosecution of a magistrate for the
gravest crime, although technically permissible during his year of
office, had as a rule been relegated to the time when he again became a
private citizen; the tribunician college, in particular, had generally
thrown its protecting shield around its offending members, and had thus
sustained its own dignity and that of the people. But, even if it be
supposed that the sovereign could, at any moment and without any of the
due formalities, proclaim itself a competent court of justice, and even
though removal from office might be improperly represented as a
punishment, there was the question of the offence to be considered. No
crime known to the law had been charged against Octavius. In the
exercise of his admitted right, or, as he might have expressed it, of
his sacred duty, he had offended against the will of a majority. The
analogy of the criminal law was from this point of view hopeless, and
was therefore not pressed on this occasion. From another point of view
it was not quite so remote. The tumultuous popular assemblages that had,
on the bidding of a prosecuting tribune, often condemned commanders for
vague offences hardly formulated in any particular law, scarcely
differed, except in the fact that no previous magisterial inquiry had
been conducted, from the meeting that deposed Octavius. The gulf that
lies between proceedings in a parliament and proceedings in a court of
law, was far less in Rome than it would have been in those Hellenic
communities that possessed a developed system of criminal judicature.
If criminal analogies failed, a purely political ground of defence must
be adduced. This could hardly be based on considerations of abstract
justice, although, as we shall see, an attempt was made by Tiberius
Gracchus to give it even this foundation. Could it be based on
convenience? Obviously, as Gracchus saw, his act was the only effective
means of removing a deadlock created by a constitution which knew only
magistrates and people and had effectively crippled both. So far, it
might be defended on grounds of temporary necessity. But an act of this
kind could not die. To what consequences might not its repetition lead?
Imagine a less serious question, a less representative assembly. Think
of the possibility of a few hundred desperate members of the
proletariate gathering on the Capitoline hill and deposing a tribune who
represented the interests of the vast outlying population of Rome. This
is a consequence which, it is true, was not realised in the future. But
that was only because the tribunate was more than Gracchus conceived it,
and was too strong in tradition and associations of sanctity to be
broken even by his attack. The scruples which troubled him most arose
from the suspicion that the sacred office itself might have been held to
suffer by the deposition of Octavius, and it was to a repudiation of
this view that he subsequently devoted the larger part of his systematic
defence of his action.
At the same meeting at which Octavius was deposed, the agrarian bill was
for the first time read without interruption to the people and
immediately became law. Shortly after, the election of the commissioners
was proceeded with and resulted in the appointment of Tiberius Gracchus
himself, of his father-in-law Appius Claudius and of Gracchus's younger
brother Caius.[375] It was perhaps natural that the people should pin
their faith on the family of their champion; but it could hardly have
increased the confidence of the community as a whole in the wisdom with
which this delicate task would be executed, to find that it was
entrusted to a family party, one of which was a mere boy; and the
mistrust must have been increased when, somewhat later in the course of
the year, the thorny questions which immediately encompassed the task of
distribution led to the introduction by Tiberius of another law, which
gave judicial power to the triumvirs, for the purpose of determining
what was public land and what was private.[376] The fortunes of the
richer classes seemed now to be entrusted to one man, who combined in
his own person the tribunician power and the imperium, whose
jurisdiction must have seriously infringed that of the regular courts,
and who was assisted in issuing his probably inappellable decrees by a
father-in-law and a younger brother. But, although effective protest was
impossible, the senate showed its resentment by acts that might appear
petty and spiteful, did we not remember that they were the only means
open to this body of passing a vote of censure on the recent
proceedings. The senate controlled every item of the expenditure; and
when the commissioners appealed to it for their expenses, it refused a
tent and fixed the limit of supplies at a denarius and a half a day. The
instigator of this decree was the ex-consul Scipio Nasica, a heavy loser
by the agrarian law, a man of strong and passionate temper who was every
day becoming a more infuriated opponent of Tiberius Gracchus.[377]
Meanwhile the latter had celebrated a peaceful triumph which far
eclipsed the military pageants of the imperators of the past. The
country people, before they returned to their farms, had escorted him to
his house; they had hailed him as a greater than Romulus, as the
founder, not of a city nor of a nation, but of all the peoples of
Italy.[378] It is true that his escort was only the poor, rude mob.
Stately nobles and clanking soldiers were not to be seen in the
procession. But they were better away. This was the true apotheosis of a
real demagogism. And the suspicion of the masses was as readily fired as
their enthusiasm. A friend of Tiberius died suddenly and ugly marks were
seen upon the body. There was a cry of poison; the bier was caught up on
the shoulders of the crowd and borne to the place of burning. A vast
throng stood by to see the corpse consumed, and the ineffectiveness of
the flames was held a thorough confirmation of the truth of their
suspicions.[379] It remained to see how far this protective energy would
serve to save their favourite when the day of reckoning came.
Tiberius could hardly have shared in the general elation. To make
promises was one thing, to fulfil them another. Everything depended on
the effectiveness of the execution of the agrarian scheme; and, although
the mechanism for distribution was excellent, some of the material
necessary for its successful fulfilment was sadly lacking. There were
candidates enough for land, and there was sufficient land for the
candidates. But whence were the means for starting these penniless
people on their new road to virtue and prosperity to be derived? To give
an ardent settler thirty jugera of soil and to withhold from him the
means of sowing his first crop or of making his first effort to turn
pasture into arable land, was both useless and cruel; and we may imagine
that the evicted possessors had not left their relinquished estates in a
very enviable condition. The doors of the Aerarium were closed, for its
key was in the hands of the senate; and Gracchus had to cast an anxious
eye around for means for satisfying the needs of his clients.
The opportunity was presented when the Roman people came into the
unexpected inheritance of Attalus the Third, king of Pergamon. The
testament was brought to Rome by Eudemus the Pergamene, whose first
business was with the senate. But, when Eudemus arrived in the city, he
saw a state of things which must have made him doubt whether the senate
was any longer the true director of the State. It sat passive and
sullen, while an energetic prostates of the Greek type was doing what
he liked with the land of Italy. No sane ambassador could have refused
to neglect Gracchus, and it is practically certain that Eudemus
approached him. This fact we may believe, even if we do not accept the
version that the envoy had taken the precaution of bringing in his
luggage a purple robe and a diadem, as symbols that might be necessary
for a fitting recognition of Tiberius's future position.[380] It is also
possible that suspicion of the rule of senators and capitalists may also
have prompted the Greek to attempt to discover whether a more tolerable
settlement might not be gained for his country through the leader of the
popular party.[381] We cannot say whether Gracchus ever contemplated a
policy with respect to the province as a whole. His mind was probably
full of his immediate needs. He saw in the treasures of Attalus more
than an equivalent for the revenues enclosed in the locked Aerarium, and
he announced his intention of promulgating a plebiscite that the money
left by the king should be assigned to the settlers provided for by his
agrarian law.[382] It is possible that he contemplated the application
of the future revenues of the kingdom of Pergamon to this or some
similar purpose; and it was perhaps partly for this reason, partly in
answer to the objection that the treasure could not be appropriated
without a senatorial decree, that he announced the novel doctrine that
it was no business of the senate to decide the fate of the cities which
had belonged to the Attalid monarchy, and that he himself would prepare
for the people a measure dealing with this question.[383]
This was the fiercest challenge that he had yet flung to the senate.
There might be a difference of opinion as to the right of a magistrate
to put a question to the people without the guidance of a senatorial
decree; the assignment of land was unquestionably a popular right in so
far as it required ratification by the commons; even the deposition of
Octavius was a matter for the people and would avenge itself. But there
were two senatorial rights--the one usurped, the other created--whose
validity had never been questioned. These were the control of finance
and the direction of provincial administration. Were the possibility
once admitted that these might be dealt with in the Comitia, the
magistrates would cease to be ministers of the senate; for it was
chiefly through a system of judicious prize-giving that the senate
attached to itself the loyalty of the official class. There was perhaps
less fear of what Gracchus himself might do than of the spectre which he
was raising for the future. For in Roman history the events of the past
made those of the future; there were few isolated phenomena in its
development.
From this time the attacks of individual senators on Gracchus became
more vehement and direct. They proceeded from men of the highest rank. A
certain Pompeius, in whom we may probably see an ex-consul and a future
censor, was not ashamed of raising the spectre of a coming monarchy by
reference to the story of the sceptre and the purple robe, and is said
to have vowed to impeach Gracchus as soon as his year of magistracy had
expired;[384] the ex-consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus, of Macedonian
fame, reproached Tiberius with his rabble escort. He compared the
demeanour of the father and the son. In the censorship of the former the
citizens used to quench their lights at night, as they saw him pass up
the street to his house, that they might impress the censorial mind with
the ideas of early hours and orderly conduct; now the son of this man
might be seen returning home amidst the blaze of torches, held in the
stout arms of a defiant body-guard drawn from the neediest classes.[385]
These arrows may have Missed the mark; the one that hit was winged by an
aged senator, Titus Annius Luscus, who had held the consulship twenty
years before. His wit is said to have been better established than his
character. He excelled in that form of ready altercation, of impaling
his opponent on the horns of a dilemma by means of some innocent
question, which, both in the courts and the senate, was often more
effective than the power of continuous oratory. He now challenged
Tiberius to a wager (sponsio), such as in the public life of Rome was
often employed to settle a disputed point of honour or of fact, to
determine the question whether he had dishonoured a colleague, who was
holy in virtue of his office and had been made sacrosanct by the laws.
The proposal was received by the senators with loud cries of
acclamation. A glance at Tiberius would probably have shown that Annius
had found the weak spot, not merely in his defensive armour, but in his
very soul. The deposition of Octavius was proving a very nemesis; it was
a democratic act that was in the highest degree undemocratic, an
assertion and yet a gross violation of popular liberty.[386] The
superstitious masses were in the habit of washing their hands and
purifying their bodies before they entered into the presence of a
tribune.[387] Might there not be a thrill of awe and repentance when the
idea was brought home to them that this holy temple had been violated:
and must not this be followed by a sense of repugnance to the man who
had prompted them to the unhallowed deed? Tiberius sprang to his feet,
quitted the senate-house and summoned the people. The majesty of the
tribunate in his person had been outraged by Annius. He must answer for
his words. The aged senator appeared before the crowd; he knew his
disadvantage if the ordinary weapons of comitial strife were employed.
In power of words and in repute with the masses he stood far behind
Tiberius. But his presence of mind did not desert him. Might he ask a
few questions before the regular proceedings began? The request was
allowed and there was a dead silence. "Now suppose," said Annius, "you,
Tiberius, were to wish to cover me with shame and abuse, and suppose I
were to call on one of your colleagues for help, and he were to come up
here to offer me his assistance, and suppose further that this were to
excite your displeasure, would you deprive that colleague of yours of
his office?" To answer that question in the affirmative was to admit
that the tribunician power was dead; to answer it in the negative was to
invite the retort that the auxilium was only one form of the
intercessio. The quick-witted southern crowd must have seen the
difficulty at once, and Tiberius himself, usually so ready and bold in
speech, could not face the dilemma. He remained silent and dismissed the
assembly.[388]
But matters could not remain as they were. This new aspect of Octavius's
deposition was the talk of the town, and there were many troubled
consciences amongst the members of his own following. Something must be
done to quiet them; he must raise the question himself. The situation
had indeed changed rapidly. Tiberius Gracchus was on his defence. Never
did his power of special pleading appear to greater advantage than in
the speech which followed. He had the gift which makes the mighty
Radical, of diving down and seizing some fundamental truth of political
science, and then employing it with merciless logic for the illustration
or refutation of the practice of the present. The central idea here was
one gathered from the political science of the Greeks. The good of the
community is the only test of the rightness of an institution. It is
justified if it secures that end, unjustified if it does not: or, to use
the language of religion, holy in the one case, devoid of sanctity in
the other. And an institution is not a mere abstraction; we must judge
it by its use. We must, therefore, say that when it obeys the common
interest, it is right: when it ceases to obey it, it is wrong. But the
right must be preserved and the wrong plucked out. So Gracchus
maintained that the tribune was holy and sacrosanct because he had been
sanctified to the people's service and was the people's head. If then he
change his character and do the people wrong, cutting down its strength
and silencing its voice as expressed through the suffrage, he has
deprived himself of his office, for he has ceased to conform to the
terms on which he received it. Should we leave a tribune alone who was
pulling down the Capitolium or burning the docks? And yet a tribune who
did these things would remain a tribune, though a bad one. It is only
when a tribune is destroying the power of the people that he is no
longer a tribune at all. The laws give the tribune the power to arrest
the consul. It is a power given against a man elected by the people; for
consul and tribune are equally mandataries of the people. Shall not then
the people have the right of depriving the tribune of his authority,
when he uses this authority in a way prejudicial to the interests of the
giver? What does the history of the past teach us? Can anything have
been more powerful or more sacred than the ancient monarchy of Rome? The
Imperium of the king was unlimited, the highest priestly offices were
his. Yet the city expelled Tarquin for his crimes. The tyranny of a
single man was alone sufficient to bring to an end a government which
had its roots in the most distant past, which had presided over the very
birth of the city. And, if sanctity alone is to be the ground of
immunity, what are we to think of the punishment of a vestal virgin? Is
there anything in Rome more holy and awe-inspiring than the maidens who
tend and guard the eternal flame? Yet their sin is visited by the most
horrible of deaths. They hold their sacrosanct character through the
gods; they lose it, therefore, when they sin against the gods. Should
the same not be true of the tribune? It is on account of the people that
he is sacred; he cannot retain this divine character when he wrongs the
people; he is a man engaged in destroying the very power which is the
source of his strength. If the tribunate can justly be gained by a
favourable vote of the majority of the tribes, can it not with greater
justice be taken away by an adverse vote of all of them? Again, what
should be the limits of our action in dealing with sacred things? Does
sanctity mean immobility? By no means. What are more holy and inviolable
than things dedicated to the gods? Yet this character does not prevent
the people from handling, moving, transferring them as it pleases. In
the case of the tribunate, it is the office, not the man, that is
inviolable; it may be treated as an object of dedication and transferred
to another. The practice of our own State proves that the office is not
inviolable in the sense of being inalienable, for its holders have often
forsworn it and asked to be divested of it.[389]
The strongest part of this utterance was that which dealt with the
sacred character of office; it was a mere emanation from the performance
of certain functions; the protection, not the reality, of the thing.
Gracchus might have added that even a treaty might under certain
circumstances be legitimately broken. The weakest, from a Roman
standpoint or indeed from that of any stable political society, was the
identification of the permanent and temporary character of an
institution, the assumption that a meeting of the people was the people,
that a tribune was the tribune. How far the speech was convincing we do
not know; it certainly did not relieve Tiberius of his embarrassments,
which were now thickening around him.
Tiberius's success had been mainly due to the country voters. It is true
that he had a large following in the city; but this was numerically
inferior to a mass of urban folk, whose attitude was either indifferent
or hostile. They were indifferent in so far as they did not want
agrarian assignments, and hostile in so far as they were clients of the
noble houses which opposed Tiberius's policy. This urban party was now
in the ascendant, for the country voters had scattered to their
homes.[390] The situation demanded that he should work steadily for two
objects, re-election to the tribunate and the support of the city
voters. If, in addition to this support, he could hold out hopes that
would attract the great capitalists to his side, his position would be
impregnable. Hence in his speeches he began to throw out hints of a new
and wide programme of legislation.[391] There was first the military
grievance. Recent regulations, by the large decrease which they made in
the property qualifications required for service,[392] had increased the
liability to the conscription of the manufacturing and trading classes
of Rome. Gracchus proposed that the period of service should be
shortened--his suggestion probably being, not that the years of
liability to service (the seventeenth to the forty-sixth) should be
lessened, but that within these years a limited number of campaigns
should be agreed on, which should form the maximum amount of active
service for every citizen.[393] Two other proposals dealt with the
question of criminal jurisdiction. The first allowed an appeal to the
people from the decision of judices. The form in which this proposal
is stated by our authority, would lead us to suppose that the courts to
be rendered appellable were those constituted under standing laws. The
chief of these quaestiones or judicia publica was the court which
tried cases for extortion, established in the first instance by a Lex
Calpurnia, and possibly reconstituted before this epoch by a Junian
law.[394] A permanent court for the trial of murder may also have
existed at this time.[395] The judges of these standing commissions were
drawn from the senatorial order; and Gracchus, therefore, by suggesting
an appeal from their judgment to the people, was attacking a senatorial
monopoly of the most important jurisdiction, and perhaps reflecting on
the conduct of senatorial judices, as displayed especially in relation
to the grievances of distressed provincials. But it is probable that he
also meant to strike a blow at a more extraordinary prerogative claimed
by the senate, and to deny the right of that body to establish special
commissions which could decide without appeal on the life and fortunes
of Roman citizens.[396] So far his proposals, whether based on a
conviction of their general utility or not, were a bid for the support
of the average citizen. But when he declared that the qualification for
the criminal judges of the time could not be allowed to stand, and that
these judges should be taken either from a joint panel of senators and
knights, or from the senate increased by the addition of a number of
members of the equestrian order equal to its present strength, he was
holding out a bait to the wealthy middle class, who were perhaps already
beginning to feel senatorial jurisdiction in provincial matters irksome
and disadvantageous to their interests. We are told by one authority
that Gracchus's eyes even ranged beyond the citizen body and that he
contemplated the possibility of the gift of citizenship to the whole of
Italy.[397] This was not in itself a measure likely to aid in his
salvation by the people; if it was not a disinterested effort of
far-sighted genius, it may have been due to the gathering storm which
his experience showed him the agrarian commission would soon be forced
to meet.[398] Certainly, if all these schemes are rightly attributed to
Tiberius Gracchus, it was he more than any man who projected the great
programme of reform that the future had in store.
Unfortunately for Gracchus the time was short for nursing a new
constituency or spreading a new ideal. The time for the tribunician
elections was approaching, an active canvass was being carried on by the
candidates, and the aggrieved landowners were throwing the whole weight
of their influence into the opposite scale.[399] Wild rumours of his
plans were being circulated. The family clique that filled the agrarian
commission was to snatch at other offices; Gracchus's brother, a youth
still unqualified even for the quaestorship,[400] was to be thrust into
the tribunate, and his father-in-law Appius was destined for the
consulate.[401] Rome was to be ruled by a dynasty, and the tyranny of
the commission was to extend to every department of the State. Gracchus
felt that the city-combination against him was too strong, and sent an
earnest summons to his supporters in the country. But practical needs
were stronger than gratitude; the farmers were busy with their harvest;
and it was plain that on this occasion the man of the street was to have
the decisive voice. The result showed that even he was not unmoved by
Gracchus's services, and by his last appeal that a life risked on behalf
of the people should be protected by a renewed investiture with the
tribunate.[402]
The day of the election arrived and the votes were taken. When they came
to be read out, it was found that the two first tribes had given their
voice for Gracchus. Then there was a sudden uproar. The votes were going
against the landlords; a legal protest must be made. Men rose in the
assembly, and shouted out that immediate re-election to the tribunate
was forbidden by the law. They were probably both right and wrong in
their protest, as men so often were who ventured to make a definite
assertion about the fluid public law of Rome. There was apparently no
enactment forbidding the iteration of this office, and appointment to
the tribunate must have been governed by custom. But recent custom seems
to have been emphatically opposed to immediate re-election, and the
appeal was justified on grounds of public practice.[403] It would
probably have been disregarded, had the Gracchan supporters been in an
overwhelming majority, or Gracchus's colleagues unanimous in their
support. But the people were divided, and the president was not
enthusiastic enough in the cause to risk his future impeachment.
Rubrius, to whom the lot had assigned the conduct of the proceedings on
that day, hesitated as to the course which he ought to follow. A bolder
spirit Mummius, the man who had been made by the deposition of Octavius,
asked that the conduct of the assembly should be handed over to him.
Rubrius, glad to escape the difficulty, willingly yielded his place; but
now the other members of the college interposed. The forms of the
Comitia were being violated; a president could not be chosen without the
use of the lot. The resignation of Rubrius must be followed by another
appeal to sortition. The point of order raised, as usual, a heated
discussion; the tribunes gathered on the Rostra to argue the matter out.
Nothing could be gained by keeping the people as the spectators of such
a scene, and Gracchus succeeded in getting the proceedings adjourned to
the following day.[404]
The situation was becoming more desperate; for each delay was a triumph
for the opposition, and could only strengthen the belief in the
illegality of Gracchus's claim. He now resorted to the last device of
the Roman; he ceased to be a protector and became a suppliant. Although
still a magistrate, he assumed the garb of mourning, and with humbled
and tearful mien begged the help of individuals in the market
place.[405]
He led his son by the hand; his children and their mother were to be
wards of the people, for he had despaired of his own life. Many were
touched; to some the tribunate of Gracchus seemed like a rift in a dark
cloud of oppression which would close around them at his fall, and their
hearts sank at the thought of a renewed triumph of the nobility. Others
were moved chiefly by the fears and sufferings of Gracchus. Cries of
sympathy and defiance were raised in answer to his tears, and a large
crowd escorted him to his house at nightfall and bade him be confident
of their support on the following day. During his appeals he had hinted
at the fear of a nocturnal attack by his foes: and this led many to form
an encampment round his house and to remain as its vigilant defenders
throughout the night.[406]
Before day-break he was up and engaged in hasty colloquy with his
friends. The fear of force was certainly present; and definite plans may
have been now made for its repulsion. Some even believed that a signal
for battle was agreed on by Gracchus, if matters should come to that
extreme.[407] With a true Roman's scruples he took the omens before he
left his house. They presaged ill. The keeper of the sacred chickens,
which Gracchus's Imperium now permitted him to consult, could get
nothing from the birds, even though he shook the cage. Only one of the
fowls advanced, and even that would not touch the food. And the unsought
omens were as evil as those invited. Snakes were found to have hatched a
brood in his helmet, his foot stumbled on the threshold with such
violence that blood flowed from his sandal; he had hardly advanced on
his way when crows were seen struggling on his left, and the true object
of the sign was pointed when a stone, dislodged by one of them from a
roof, fell at his own feet. This concourse of ill-luck frightened his
boldest comrades; but his old teacher, Blossius of Cumae, vehemently
urged the prosecution of the task. Was a son of Gracchus, the grandson
of Africanus, chief minister of the Roman people,[408] to be deterred by
a crow from listening to the summons of the citizens? If the disgrace of
his absence amused his enemies, they would keep their laughter to
themselves. They would use that absence seriously, to denounce him to
the people as a king who was already aping the luxury of the tyrant. As
Blossius spoke, men were seen running from the direction of the Capitol;
they came up, they bade him press on, as all was going well. And, in
fact, it seemed as if all might turn out brightly. The Capitoline
temple, and the level area before it, which was to be the scene of the
voting, were filled with his supporters. A hearty cheer greeted him as
he appeared, and a phalanx closed round him to prevent the approach of
any hostile element. Shortly after the proceedings began, the senate was
summoned by the consul to meet in the temple of Fides.[409] A few yards
of sloping ground was all that now separated the two hostile camps.[410]
The interval for reflection had strengthened the belief of some of the
tribunes that Gracchus's candidature was illegal, and they were ready to
support the renewed protests of the rich. The election, however, began;
for the faithful Mummius was now presiding, and he proceeded to call on
the tribes to vote. But the business of filing into their separate
compartments, always complicated, was now impossible. The fringe of the
crowd was in a continual uproar; from its extremities the opponents of
the measure were wedging their way in. As his supporters squared their
shoulders, the whole mass rocked and swayed. There was no hope of
eliciting a decision from this scuffling and pushing throng. Every
moment brought the assembly nearer to open riot. Suddenly a man was seen
at some distance from Tiberius gesticulating with his hand as though he
had something to impart. He was recognised as Fulvius Flaccus, a
senator, a man perhaps already known as a sympathiser with schemes of
reform. Gracchus asked the crowd immediately around him to give way a
little, and Fulvius fought his way up to the tribune. His news was that
in the sitting of the senate the rich proprietors had asked the consul
to use force, that he had declined, and that now they were preparing on
their own motion to slay Tiberius. For this purpose they had collected a
large band of armed slaves and retainers.[411] Tiberius immediately
imparted the news to his friends. Preparations for defence were hastily
made: an improvised body-guard was formed; togas were girt up, and the
staves of the lictors were broken into fragments to serve as clubs. The
Gracchans more distant from the centre of the scene were meanwhile
marvelling at the strange preparations of which they caught but
glimpses, and could be seen asking eager questions as to their meaning.
To reach these distant supporters by his voice was impossible; Tiberius
could but touch his forehead with his hand to indicate that his life was
in danger. Immediately a shout went up from the opposite side "Tiberius
is asking for the diadem," and eager messengers sped with the news to
the senate.[412] There was probably a knowledge that physical support
for their cause would be found in that quarter, and the exodus of these
excited capitalists was apparently assisted by an onslaught from the
mob. A regular tumult was brewing, and the tribunes, instead of striving
to preserve order, or staying to interpose their sacred persons between
the enraged combatants, fled incontinently from the spot. Their fear was
natural, for by remaining they might seem to be identifying themselves
with a cause that was either lost or lawless. With the tribunes vanished
the last trace of legality. The priests closed the temple to keep its
precincts from the mob. The more timorous of the crowd fled in wild
disorder, spreading wilder rumours. Tiberius was deposing the remaining
tribunes from office; he was appointing himself to a further tribunate
without the formalities of election.[413]
Meanwhile the senate was deliberating in the temple of Fides. In the old
days their deliberations might have resulted in the appointment of a
dictator, and one of the historians who has handed down the record of
these facts marvels that this was not the case now.[414] But the
dictatorship had been weakened by submission to the appeal, and long
before it became extinct had lost its significance as a means of
repressing sedition within the city. The Roman constitution had now no
mechanism for declaring a state of siege or martial law. From one point
of view the extinction of the dictatorship was to be regretted. The
nomination of this magistrate would have involved at least a day's
delay;[415] some further time would have been necessary before he had
collected round him a sufficient force in a city which had neither
police nor soldiers. Had it been decided to appoint a dictator, the
outrages of the next hour could never have occurred. As things were, it
seemed as though the senate had to choose between impotence and murder.
There was indeed another way. Such was the respect for members of the
senatorial order, that a deputation of that body, headed by the consul,
would probably have led to the dispersal of the mob. But passions were
inflamed and it was no time for peaceful counsels. The advocate of
summary measures was the impetuous Nasica. He urged the consul to save
the city and to put down the tyrant. He demanded that the sense of the
house should be taken as to whether extreme measures were now necessary.
Even at this time a tradition may have existed that a magic formula by
which the senate advised the magistrates "to see to it that the State
took no harm," [416] could justify any act of violence in an emergency.
The sense of the house was with Nasica, but a resolution could not be
framed unless the consul put the question. The answer of Scaevola was
that of a lawyer. He would commence no act of violence, he would put to
death no citizen uncondemned. If, however, the people, through the
persuasion or compulsion of Tiberius, should come to any illegal
decision, he would see that such a resolution was not observed. Nasica
sprang to his feet. "The consul is betraying the city; those who wish
the salvation of the laws, follow me." [417] With this he drew the hem
of his toga over his head,[418] and rushed from the door in the
direction of the Capitoline temple. He was followed by a crowd of
senators, all wrapping the folds of their togas round their left arms.
Outside the door they were joined by their retainers armed with clubs
and staves.[419]
Meanwhile the proceedings in the Area Capitolii had been becoming
somewhat less turbulent. The turmoil had quieted down with the exclusion
of the more violent members of the opposition. Gracchus had called a
Contio, for the purpose, it was said, of encouraging his supporters and
asserting his own constancy and defiance of senatorial authority. The
gathering had become a mere partisan mass meeting, such as had often
been seen in the course of the current year, and the herald was crying
"Silence," [420] when suddenly the men on the outskirts of the throng
fell back to right and left. A long line of senators had been seen
hastening up the hill. A deputation from the fathers had come. That must
have been the first impression: and the crowd fell back before its
masters. But in a moment it was seen that the masters had come to
chastise, not to plead. With set faces and blazing eyes Nasica and his
following threw themselves on the yielding mass. The unarmed senators
snatched at the first weapons that lay to hand, the fragments of the
shattered furniture of the meeting, severed planks and legs of benches,
while their retinue pressed on with clubs and sticks. The whole column
made straight for Tiberius and his improvised body-guard. Resistance was
hopeless, and the tribune and his friends turned to flee. But the idea
of restoring order occupied but a small place in the minds of the
maddened senators, The accumulated bitterness of a year found its outlet
in one moment of glorious vengeance. The fathers were behaving like a
Greek street mob of the lowest type which had turned against an
oppressive oligarchy. They were clubbing the Gracchans to death.
Tiberius was in flight when some one seized his toga. He slipped it off
and fled, clad only in his tunic, when he stumbled over a prostrate body
and fell. As he rose, a rain of blows descended on his head.[421] The
man who was seen to strike the first blow is said to have been Publius
Saturius, one of his own colleagues. The glory of his death was
vehemently disputed; one Rufus, since he could not claim the first blow,
is said to have boasted of being the author of the second. Tiberius is
said to have fallen by the very doors of the Capitoline temple, not far
from the statues of the Kings.[422] The number of his adherents that
perished was over three hundred, and it was noted that not one of these
was slain by the sword.[423] Their bodies were thrown into the
Tiber--not by the mob but by the magistrates; the hand of an aedile
committed that of Tiberius to the stream.[424]
The murder of a young man, who was still under thirty at the time of his
death,[425] and the slaughter of a few hundreds of his adherents, may
not seem to be an act of very great significance in the history of a
mighty empire. Yet ancient historians regarded the event as
epoch-marking, as the turning point in the history of Rome, as the
beginning of the period of the civil wars.[426] To justify this
conclusion it is not enough to point to the fact that this was the first
blood shed in civic discord since the age of the Kings;[427] for it
might also have been the last. Though the vendetta is a natural
outgrowth of Italian soil, yet masses of men are seldom, like
individuals, animated solely by the spirit of revenge. The blood of the
innocent is a good battle-cry in politics, but it is little more; it is
far from being the mere pretext, but it is equally far from being the
true cause, of future revolution. Familiarity with the use of force in
civic strife is also a fatal cause of its perpetuation; but familiarity
implies its renewed employment: it can hardly be the result of the first
experiment in murder. The repetition of this ghastly phenomenon in Roman
politics can only be accounted for by the belief that the Gracchan
émeute was of its very nature an event that could not be isolated:
that Gracchus was a pioneer in a hostile country, and that his opponents
preserved all their inherent weakness after the first abortive
manifestation of their pretended strength. A bad government may be
securely entrenched. The senate, whether good or bad, had no defences at
all. Its weakness had in the old days been its pride. It ruled by
influencing opinion. Now that it had ceased to influence, it ruled by
initiating a riot in the streets. It had no military support except such
as was given it by friendly magistrates, and this was a dangerous weapon
which it hesitated to use. To ignore militarism was to be at the mercy
of the demagogue of the street, to admit it was found subsequently to be
equivalent to being at the mercy of the demagogue of the camp. In either
case authority must be maintained at the cost of civil war. But the
material helplessness of the senate was only one factor in the problem.
More fatal flaws were its lack of insight to discover that there were
new problems to be faced, and lack of courage in facing them. This moral
helplessness was due partly to the selfishness of individuals, but
partly also to the fixity of political tradition. In spite of the
brilliancy and culture of some of its members, the senate in its
corporate capacity showed the possession of a narrow heart and an
inexpansive intelligence. Its sympathies were limited to a class; it
learnt its new lessons slowly and did not see their bearing on the
studies of the future. Imperialism abroad and social contentment at home
might be preserved by the old methods which had worked so well in the
past. But to the mind of the masses the past did not exist, and to the
mind of the reformer it had buried its dead. The career of Tiberius
Gracchus was the first sign of a great awakening; and if we regard it as
illogical, and indeed impossible, to pause here and estimate the
character of his reforms, it is because the more finished work of his
brother was the completion of his efforts and followed them as
inexorably as the daylight follows the dawn.
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