The scope of his proposal[670] was more moderate than that which had

been put forward by Flaccus. He suggested the grant of the full rights

of citizenship to the Latins, and of Latin rights to the other Italian

allies.[671] Italy was thus, from the point of view of private law, to

be Romanised almost up to the Alps;[672] while the cities already in

enjoyment of some or all of the private privileges of the Roman, were to

see the one anomaly removed, which created an invidious distinction

between them and the burgess towns, hampered their commerce, and

imperilled their landed possessions. The proposal had the further

advantage that it took account of the possible unwillingness of many of

the federate cities to accept the Roman franchise; such a refusal was

not likely to be made to the offer of Latin rights: for the Latin

community was itself a federate city with its own laws, magistrates and

courts, and the sense of autonomy would be satisfied while many of the

positive benefits of Roman citizenship would be gained. Grades of

privilege would still exist in Italy, and a healthy discontent might in

time be fostered, which would lead all Italian communities to seek

absorption into the great city. Past methods of incorporation might be

held to furnish a precedent; the scheme proposed by Gracchus was hardly

more revolutionary than that which had, in the third and at the

beginning of the second centuries, resulted in the conferment of full

citizenship on the municipalities of half-burgesses. It differed from it

only in extending the principle to federate towns; but the rights of the

members of the Latin cities bore a close resemblance to those of the old

_municipes_, and they might easily be regarded as already enjoying the

partial citizenship of Rome. The conferment of this partial citizenship

on the other Italians, while in no way destroying local institutions or

impairing local privileges, would lead to the possibility of a common

law for the whole of Italy, would enable every Italian to share in the

benefits of Roman business life, and appear in the court of the urban

praetor to defend such rights as he had acquired, by the use of the

forms of Roman law. The tentativeness of the character of Gracchus's

proposal, while recommending it as in harmony with the cautious spirit

of Roman development which had worked the great changes of the past, may

also have been dictated by the feeling that the more moderate scheme

stood a better chance of acceptance by the mob of Rome. All he asked was

that the grievances which had led to the revolt of Fregellae, and the

dangers revealed by that revolt, should be removed. The numbers of the

added citizens would not be overwhelming; for the majority of Italians

all that was asked was the possession of certain private rights, which

had been so ungrudgingly granted to communities in the past. Throughout

the campaign he probably laid more stress on the duty of protecting the

individual than on the right of the individual to power. And the fact

that the protection was demanded, not against the Roman State, but

against an oppressive nobility that disgraced it by a misuse of its

powers, gave a democratic colouring to the demand, and suggested a

community of suffering, and therefore of sympathy, between the donors

and recipients of the gift. Even before his franchise law was before the

world, he seems to have been engaged in educating his auditors up to

this view of the case; for it was probably in the speeches with which he

introduced his law for the better protection of the life of the Roman

citizen, that he illustrated the cruel caprice of the nobility by grisly

stories of the sufferings of the Italians. He had told of the youthful

legate who had had a cow-herd of Venusia scourged to death, as an answer

to the rustic's jesting query whether the bearers of the litter were

carrying a corpse: and of the consul who had scourged the quaestor of

Teanum Sidicinum, the man of noblest lineage in his state, because the

men's baths, in which the consul's wife had elected to bathe, were not

adequately prepared for her reception.[673] Since the objections of the

populace to the extension of the franchise were the result of prejudice

rather than of reason, they might be weakened if the sense of jealousy

and distrust could be diverted from the people's possible rivals to the

common oppressors of Rome and Italy.

The appeal to sentiment might have been successful, had not the most

sordid passions of the mob been immediately inflamed by the oratory of

the opponents of the measure. The most formidable of these opponents was

drawn from the ranks of Gracchus's own supporters; for the franchise

question had again proved a rock which could make shipwreck of the unity

of the democratic party. His _protégé_, the consul Fannius, was not

ashamed to appeal to the most selfish instincts of the populace. "Do you

suppose," he said, "that, when you have given citizenship to the Latins,

there will be any room left for you at public gatherings, or that you

will find a place at the games or festivals? Will they not swamp

everything with their numbers?" [674]

Fannius, as a moderate, was an excellent exponent of senatorial views,

and it was believed that many noble hands had collaborated in the

crushing speech which inflicted one of its death-blows on the Gracchan

proposal.[675]

The opportunity for active opposition had at last arrived, and the

senate was emboldened to repeat the measure which four years earlier had

swept the aliens out of Rome. Perhaps in consequence of powers given by

the law of Pennus, the consul Fannius was empowered to issue an edict

that no Italian, who did not possess a vote in the Roman assemblies,

should be permitted within five miles of Rome at the time when the

proposal about the franchise was to be submitted to the Comitia.[676]

Caius answered this announcement with a fiery edict of his own, in which

he inveighed against the consul and promised his tribunician help to any

of the allies who chose to remain in the city.[677] The power which he

threatened to exercise was probably legal, since there is no reason to

suppose that the tribunician _auxilium_ could be interposed solely for

the assistance of members of the citizen body;[678] but he must have

known that the execution of this promise was impracticable, since the

injured party could be aided only by the personal interposition of the

tribune, and it was clear that a single magistrate, burdened with many

cares, and living a life of the most varied and strenuous activity,

could not be present in every quarter of Rome and in a considerable

portion of the surrounding territory. Even the cooperation of his ardent

colleague Flaccus could not have availed for the protection of many of

his Italian friends, and the course of events so soon taught him the

futility of this means of struggling for Italian rights that when,

somewhat later in the year, one of his Italian friends was seized by a

creature of Fannius before his eyes, he passed by without an attempt at

aid. His enemies, he knew, were at the time eager for a struggle in

which, when they had isolated him from his Italian supporters, physical

violence would decide the day: and he remarked that he did not wish to

give them the pretext for the hand-to-hand combat which they

desired.[679] One motive, indeed, of the invidious edict issued by the

consul seems to have been to leave Gracchus to face the new position

which his latest proposal had created, without any external help; but as

external help, if successfully asserted, could only have taken the form

of physical violence, there was reasonable ground for holding that the

decree excluding the Italians was the only means of preventing a serious

riot or even a civil war. The senate could scarcely have feared the

moral influence of the Italians on the voting populace of Rome, and they

knew that, in the present state of public sentiment, the constitutional

means of resistance which had failed against Tiberius Gracchus might be

successfully employed against his brother. The whole history of the

first tribunate of Caius Gracchus proves the frank recognition of the

fact that the tribunician veto could no longer be employed against a

measure which enlisted anything like the united support of the people;

but, like all other devices for suspending legislation, its employment

was still possible for opponents, and welcome even to lukewarm

supporters, when the body politic was divided on an important measure

and even the allies of its advocate felt their gratitude and their

loyalty submitted to an unwelcome strain. Resistance by means of the

intercession did not now require the stolid courage of an Octavius, and

when Livius Drusus threatened the veto,[680] there was no question of

his deposition. Some nerve might have been required, had he made this

announcement in the midst of an excited crowd of Italian postulants for

the franchise; but from this experience he was saved by the

precautionary measure taken by the senate. It is probable that Drusus's

announcement caused an entire suspension of the legal machinery

connected with the franchise bill, and that its author never ventured to

bring it to the vote.

It is possible that to this stage of Gracchus's career belongs a

proposal which he promulgated for a change in the order of voting at the

Comitia Centuriata. The alteration in the structure of this assembly,

which had taken place about the middle of the third century, had indeed

done much to equalise the voting power of the upper and lower classes;

but the first class and the knights of the eighteen centuries were still

called on to give their suffrage first, and the other classes doubtless

voted in the order determined by the property qualification at which

they were rated. As the votes of each century were separately taken and

proclaimed, the absolute majority required for the decisions of the

assembly might be attained without the inferior orders being called on

to express their judgment, and it was notorious that the opinion of

later voters was profoundly influenced by the results already announced.

Gracchus proposed that the votes of all the classes should be taken in

an order determined solely by the lot.[681] His interest in the Comitia

Centuriata was probably due to the fact that it controlled the consular

elections, and a democratic consulship, which he had vainly tried to

secure by his support of Fannius, might be rendered more attainable by

the adoption of the change which he advocated. The great danger of the

coming year was the election of a consul strongly identified with the

senatorial interest--of a man like Popillius who would be keen to seize

some moment of reaction and attempt to ruin the leaders of the reform

movement, even if he could not undo their work. It is practically

certain that this proposal of Gracchus never passed into law, it is

questionable whether it was ever brought before the Comitia. The

reformer was immediately plunged into a struggle to maintain some of his

existing enactments, and to keep the favour of the populace in the face

of insidious attempts which were being made to undermine their

confidence in himself.

The senate had struck out a new line of opposition, and they had found a

willing, because a convinced, instrument for their schemes. It is

inconceivable that a council, which reckoned within itself

representatives of all the noblest houses at Rome, should not have

possessed a considerable number of members who were influenced by the

political views of a Cato or a Scipio, or by the lessons of that

humanism which had carried the Gracchi beyond the bounds of Roman

caution, but which might suffuse a more conservative mind with just

sufficient enlightenment to see that much was wrong, and that moderate

remedies were not altogether beyond the limits of practicability. But

this section of senatorial opinion could find no voice and take no

independent action. It was crushed by the reactionary spirit of the

majority of the peers, and frightened at the results to which its

theories seem to lead, when their cautious qualifications, never likely

to find acceptance with the masses, were swept away by more

thorough-going advocates. But the voice, which the senate kept stifled

during the security of its rule, might prove valuable in a crisis. The

moderate might be put forward to outbid the extremist; for his

moderation would certainly lead him to respect the prejudices of the

mob, while any excesses, which he was encouraged or instructed to

commit, need not touch the points essential to political salvation, and

might be corrected, or left to a natural dissolution, when the crisis

had been passed and the demagogue overthrown. The instrument chosen by

the senate was Marcus Livius Drusus,[682] the tribune who had threatened

to interpose his veto on the franchise bill. There is no reason why the

historian should not treat the political attitude of this rival of

Gracchus as seriously as it seems to have been treated by Drusus's

illustrious son, who reproduced, and perhaps borrowed from his father's

career, the combination of a democratic propaganda, which threw specious

unessentials to the people, with the design of maintaining and

strengthening the rule of the nobility. The younger Drusus was, it is

true, a convert to the Italian claims which his father had resisted; but

even this advocacy shows development rather than change, for the party

represented by the elder Drusus was by no means blind to the necessity

for a better security of Italian rights. The difference between the

father and the son was that the one was an instrument and the other an

agent. But a man who is being consciously employed as an instrument, may

not only be thoroughly honest, but may reap a harvest of moral and

mental satisfaction at the opportunities of self-fulfilment which chance

has thrown in his way. The position may argue a certain lack of the

sense of humour, but is not necessarily accompanied by any conscious

sacrifice of dignity. Certainly the public of Rome was not in the secret

of the comedy that was being played. It saw only a man of high birth and

aristocratic culture, gifted with all the authority which great wealth

and a command of dignified oratory can give,[683] approaching them with

bounties greater in appearance than those which Gracchus had recently

been willing to impart, attaching no conditions to the gift and, though

speaking in the name of the senate, conveying no hint of the deprivation

of any of the privileges that had so recently been won. And the new

largess was for the Roman people alone; it was not depreciated by the

knowledge that the blessings, which it conferred or to which it was

added, would be shared by rivals from every part of Italy.

An aspirant for favour, who wished to enter on a race with the recent

type of popular leader, must inevitably think of provision for the poor;

but a mere copy or extension of the Gracchan proposals was impossible.

No measure that had been fiercely opposed by the senate could be

defended with decency by the representative, and, as Drusus came in

after time to be styled, the "advocate" of that body.[684] Such a scheme

as an extension of the system of corn distribution would besides have

shocked the political sense both of the patron and his clients, and

would not have served the political purposes of the latter, since such a

concession could not easily have been rescinded. The system of agrarian

assignation, in the form in which it had been carried through by the

hands of the Gracchi, had at the moment a complete machinery for its

execution, and there was no plausible ground for extending this measure

of benevolence. The older system of colonisation was the device which

naturally occurred to Drusus and his advisers, and the choice was the

more attractive in that it might be employed in a manner which would

accentuate certain elements in the Gracchan scheme of settlement that

had not commended themselves to public favour. The masses of Rome

desired the monopoly of every prize which the favourite of the moment

had to bestow; but Gracchus's colonies were meant for the middle class,

not for the very poor, and the preliminary to membership of the

settlements was an uncomfortable scrutiny into means, habits and

character.[685] The masses desired comfort. Capua may have pleased them,

but they had little liking for a journey across the sea to the site of

desolated Carthage. The very modesty of Gracchus's scheme, as shown in

the number of the settlements projected and of the colonists who were to

find a home in each, proved that it was not intended as a benefit to the

proletariate as a whole. Drusus came forward with a proposal for twelve

colonies, all of which were probably to be settled on Italian and

Sicilian soil;[686] each of these foundations was to provide for three

thousand settlers, and emigrants were not excluded on the ground of

poverty. An oblique reflection on the disinterestedness of Gracchus's

efforts was further given in the clause which created the commissioners

for the foundation of these new colonies, Drusus's name did not appear

in the list. He asked nothing for himself, nor would he touch the large

sums of money which must flow through the hands of the commissioners for

the execution of so vast a scheme.[687] The suspicion of self-seeking or

corruption was easily aroused at Rome, as it must have been in any state

where such large powers were possessed by the executive, and where no

control of the details of execution or expenditure had ever been

exercised by the people; and Gracchus's all-embracing energy had

betrayed him into a position, which had been accepted in a moment of

enthusiasm, but which, disallowed as it was by current sentiment and

perhaps by the law, might easily be shaken by the first suggestion of

mistrust. The scheme of Drusus, although it proved a phantom and perhaps

already possessed this elusive character when the senate pledged its

credit to the propounder of the measure, was of value as initiating a

new departure in the history of Roman colonisation. Even Gracchus had

not proposed to provide in this manner for the dregs of the city, and

the first suggestion for forming new foundations simply for the object

of depleting the plethora of Rome--the purpose real or professed of many

later advocates of colonisation--was due to the senate as an accident in

a political game, to Drusus perhaps as the result of mature reflection.

Since his proposal, which was really one for agrarian assignation on an

enormous scale, was meant to compete with Gracchus's plan for the

founding of colonies, it was felt to be impossible to burden the new

settlers with the payment of dues for the enjoyment of their land.

Gracchus's colonists were to have full ownership of the soil allotted to

them, and Drusus's could not be placed in an inferior position. But the

existence of thirty-six thousand settlers with free allotments would

immediately suggest a grievance to those citizens who, under the

Gracchan scheme of land-assignment, had received their lots subject to

the condition of the payment of annual dues to the State. If the new

allotments were to be declared free, the burden must be removed from

those which had already been distributed.[688] Drusus and the senate

thus had a logical ground for the step which seems to have been taken,

of relieving all the land which had been distributed since the tribunate

of the elder Gracchus from the payment of _vectigal_. It was a popular

move, but it is strange that the senate, which was for the most part

playing with promises, should have made up its mind to a definite step,

the taking of which must have seriously injured the revenues of the

State. But perhaps they regarded even this concession as not beyond

recall, and they may have been already revolving in their minds those

tortuous schemes of land-legislation, which in the near future were to

go far to undo the work of the reformers.

The senate also permitted Drusus to propose a law for the protection of

the Latins, which should prove that the worst abuses on which Gracchus

dwelt might be removed without the gift of the franchise. The enactment

provided that no Latin should be scourged by a Roman magistrate, even on

military service.[689] Such summary punishment must always have been

illegal when inflicted on a Latin who was not serving as a soldier under

Roman command and was within the bounds of the jurisdiction of his own

state; the only conceivable case in which he could have been legally

exposed to punishment at the hands of Roman officials in times of peace,

was that of his committing a crime when resident or domiciled in Rome.

In such circumstances the penalty may have been summarily inflicted, for

the Latins as a whole did not possess the right of appeal to the Roman

Comitia.[690] The extension of the magisterial right of coercion over

the inhabitants of Latin towns, and its application in a form from which

the Roman citizen could appeal, were mere abuses of custom, which

violated the treaties of the Latin states and were not first forbidden

by the Livian law. But the declaration that the Latin might not be

scourged by a Roman commander even on military service, was a novelty,

and must have seemed a somewhat startling concession at a time when the

Roman citizen was himself subject to the fullest rigour of martial law.

It was, however, one that would appeal readily to the legal mind of

Rome, for it was a different matter for a Roman to be subject to the

martial law of his own state, and for the member of a federate community

to be subjected to the code of this foreign power. It was intended that

henceforth the Latin should suffer at least the degrading punishment of

scourging only after the jurisdiction and on the bidding of his own

native commander; but it cannot be determined whether he was completely

exempted from the military jurisdiction of the Roman commander-in-chief

--an exemption which might under many circumstances have proved fatal to

military discipline and efficiency. There is every reason to suppose

that this law of Drusus was passed, and some reason to believe that it

continued valid until the close of the Social War destroyed the

distinctions between the rights of the Latin and the Roman. Its enactment

was one of the cleverest strokes of policy effected by Drusus and the

senate; for it must have satisfied many of the Latins, who were eager

for protection but not for incorporation, while it illustrated the

weakness, and as it may have seemed to many, the dishonesty, of

Gracchus's seeming contention that abuses could only be remedied by the

conferment of full political rights. The whole enterprise of Drusus

fully attained the immediate effect desired by the senate. The people

were too habituated to the rule of the nobility to remember grievances

when approached as friends; the advances of the senate were received in

good faith, and Drusus might congratulate himself that a representative

of the Moderates had fulfilled the appropriate task of a mediator

between opposing factions.[691]

We might have expected that Gracchus, in the face of such formidable

competition, would have stood his ground in Rome and would have

exhausted every effort of his resistless oratory in exhibiting the

dishonesty of his opponents and in seeking to reclaim the allegiance of

the people. But perhaps he held that the effective accomplishment of

another great design would be a better object-lesson of his power as a

benefactor and a surer proof of the reality of his intentions, as

contrasted with the shadowy promises of Drusus. He availed himself of

his position of triumvir for the foundation of the colony of Junonia--an

office which the senate gladly allowed him to accept--and set sail for

Africa to superintend in person the initial steps in the creation of his

great transmarine settlement.[692] His original plan was soon modified

by the opposition which it encountered; the promised number of

allotments was raised to six thousand, and Italians were now invited to

share in the foundation.[693] Both of these steps were doubtless the

result of the senate's dalliance with colonial schemes and with the

Latins, but the latter may also be interpreted as a desperate effort to

get the colony under weigh at any cost. Fulvius Flaccus, who was also

one of the colonial commissioners, either stayed at Rome during the

entire period of his colleague's absence or paid but the briefest visit

to Africa; for he is mentioned as the representative of the party's

interests in Rome during Gracchus's residence in the province. The

choice of the delegate was a bad one. Not only was Flaccus hated by the

senate, but he was suspected by the people. These in electing him to the

tribunate had forgiven his Italian leanings when the Italian cause was

held to be extinct; but now the odium of the franchise movement clung to

him afresh, and suspicion was rife that the secret dealings with the

allies, which were believed to have led to the outbreak of Fregellae,

had never been interrupted or had lately been renewed. The difficulties

of his position were aggravated by faults of manner. He possessed

immense courage and was an excellent fighter; but, like many men of

combative disposition, he was tactless and turbulent. His reckless

utterances increased the distrust with which he was regarded, and

Gracchus's popularity necessarily waned with that of his

lieutenant.[694]

Meanwhile the effort was being made to reawaken Carthage and to defy the

curse in which Scipio had declared that the soil of the fallen city

should be trodden only by the feet of beasts. No scruple could be

aroused by the division of the surrounding lands; the site where

Carthage had stood was alone under the ban,[695] and had Gracchus been

content with mere agrarian assignment or had he established Junonia at

some neighbouring spot, his opponents would have been disarmed of the

potent weapon which superstition invariably supplied at Rome. As it was,

alarming rumours soon began to spread of dreadful signs which had

accompanied the inauguration of the colony.[696] When the colonists

according to ancient custom were marching to their destined home in

military order with standards flying, the ensign which headed the column

was caught by a furious wind, torn from the grip of its resisting

bearer, and shattered on the ground. When the altars had been raised and

the victims laid upon them, a sudden storm-blast caught the offerings

and hurled them beyond the boundaries of the projected city which had

recently been cut by the share. The boundary-stones themselves were

visited by wolves, who seized them in their teeth and carried them off

in headlong flight. The reality of the last alarming phenomenon, perhaps

of all these omens, was vehemently denied by Gracchus and by

Flaccus;[697] but, even if the reports now flying abroad in Rome had any

basis in fact, the circumstances of the foundation did not deter the

leader nor frighten away his colonists. Gracchus proceeded with his work

in an orderly and methodical manner, and when he deemed his personal

supervision no longer essential, returned to Rome after an absence of

seventy days. He was recalled by the news of the unequal contest that

was being waged between the passionate Fulvius and the adroit Drusus.

Clearly the circumstances required a cooler head than that possessed by

Flaccus; and there was the threat of a still further danger which

rendered Gracchus's presence a necessity. The consulship for the

following year was likely to be gained by one of the most stalwart

champions of ultra-aristocratic views. Lucius Opimius had been defeated

when seeking that office in the preceding year, chiefly through the

support which Gracchus's advocacy had secured to Fannius. Now there was

every chance of his success;[698] for Opimius's chief claim to

distinction was the prompt action which he had shown in the conquest of

Fregellae, and the large numbers of the populace who detested the

Italian cause were likely to aid his senatorial partisans in elevating

him to the consulship. The consular elections might exercise a

reactionary influence on the tribunician; and, if Gracchus's candidature

was a failure, he might be at the mercy of a resolute opponent, who

would regard his destruction as the justifiable act of a saviour

of society.

When Caius returned, the people as a whole seemed more apathetic than

hostile. They listened with a cold ear both to appeals and promises, and

this coldness was due to satiety rather than suspicion. They had been

promised so much within the last few months that demagogism seemed to be

a normal feature of existence, and no keen emotion was stirred by any

new appeal to their vanity or to their interests. Such apathy, although

it may favour the military pretender, is more to be dreaded than actual

discontent by the man who rules merely by the force of character and

eloquence. Criticism may be met and faced, and, the keener it is, the

more it shows the interest of the critics in their leader. Pericles was

hated one moment, deified the next; but no man could profess to be

indifferent to his personality and designs. Gracchus took the lesson to

heart, and concentrated his attention on the one class of his former

supporters, whose daily life recalled a signal benefit which he had

conferred, a class which might be moved by gratitude for the past and

hope for the future. One of his first acts after his return was to

change his residence from the Palatine to a site lying below the

Forum.[699] Here he had the very poor as his neighbours, the true urban

proletariate which never dreamed of availing itself of agrarian

assignments or colonial schemes, but set a very real value on the

corn-distributions, and may have believed that their continuance would

be threatened by Gracchus's fall from power. It is probable, however,

that, even without this motive, the characteristic hatred which is felt

by the partially destitute for the middle class, may have deepened the

affection with which Gracchus was regarded by the poorer of his

followers, when they saw him abandoned by the more outwardly respectable

of his supporters. The present position of Gracchus showed clearly that

the powerful coalition on which he had built up his influence had

crumbled away. From a leader of the State he had become but the leader

of a faction, and of one which had hitherto proved itself powerless to

resist unaided a sudden attack by the government.

From this democratic stronghold he promulgated other laws, the tenor of

which is unknown, while he showed his sympathy with the lower orders in

a practical way which roused the resentment of his fellow-magistrates.

[700] A gladiatorial show was to be given in the Forum on a certain day,

and most of the magistrates had erected stands, probably in the form of

a rude wooden amphitheatre, which they intended to let on hire.[701]

Gracchus chose to consider this proceeding as an infringement of the

people's rights. It was perhaps not only the admission by payment, but

the opinion that the enclosure unduly narrowed the area of observation

and cut off all view of the performance from the surrounding crowd,[702]

that aroused Gracchus's protest, and he bade the magistrates pull down

the erection that the poorer classes might have a free view of the

spectacle. His request was disregarded, and Gracchus prepared a surprise

for the obstinate organisers. On the very night before the show he

sallied out with the workmen that his official duties still placed at his

disposal; the tiers of seats were utterly demolished, and when day dawned

the people beheld a vacant site on which they might pack themselves as

they pleased. To the lower orders it seemed the act of a courageous

champion, to the officials the wild proceeding of a headstrong

demagogue. It could not have improved Gracchus's chances with the

moneyed classes of any grade; he had merged their chances of enjoyment

with that of the crowd and violated their sense of the prerogatives

of wealth.

But, although Gracchus may have been acting violently, he was not acting

blindly. He must have known that his cause was almost lost, but he must

also have been aware that the one chance of success lay in creating a

solidarity of feeling in the poorer classes, which could only be

attained by action of a pronounced and vigorous type. To what extent he

was successful in reviving a following which furnished numerical support

superior, or even equivalent to, the classes alienated by his conduct or

won over by the intrigues of his opponents, is a fact on which we have

no certain information. Only one mention has been preserved of his

candidature for a third tribunate: and this narrative, while asserting

the near approach which Gracchus made to victory, confesses the

uncertainty of the accounts which had been handed down of the election.

The story ran that he really gained a majority of the votes, but that

the tribune who presided, with the connivance of some of his colleagues,

basely falsified the returns.[703] It is a story that cannot be tested

on account of our ignorance of the precautions taken, and therefore of

the possibilities of fraud which might be exhibited, in the elections of

this period. At a later period actual records of the voting were kept,

in case a decision should be doubted;[704] and had an appeal to a

scrutiny been possible at this time, Gracchus was not the man to let the

dubious result remain unchallenged. But the story, even if we regard it

as expressing a mere suspicion, suggests the profound disappointment of

a considerable class, which had given its favourite its united support

and received the news of his defeat with surprise and resentment. It

breathes the poor man's suspicion of the chicanery of the rich, and may

be an index that Gracchus retained the confidence of his humbler

supporters until the end.

The defeat, although a terrible blow, did not crush the spirit of

Gracchus; it only rendered it more bitter and defiant. It was now that

he exulted openly in the destructive character of his work, and he is

said to have answered the taunts of his enemies by telling them that

their laughter had a painful ring, and that they did not yet know the

great cloud of darkness which his political activity had wrapped around

their lives.[705] The dreaded danger of Opimius's election was soon

realised, and members of the newly appointed tribunician college were

willing to put themselves at the orders of the senate. The surest proof

that Gracchus had fallen would be the immediate repeal of one of his

laws, and the enactment which was most assailable was that which, though

passed under another's name, embodied his project for the refoundation

of Carthage. This Rubrian law might be attacked on the ground that it

contravened the rules of religious right, the violation of which might

render any public act invalid;[706] and the stories which had been

circulated of the evil omens that had attended the establishment of

Junonia, were likely to cause the scruples of the senate to be supported

by the superstition of the people. Gracchus still held an official

position as a commissioner for colonies, if not for land-distribution

and the making of roads, but none of these positions gave him the

authority to approach the people or the power to offer effective legal

resistance to the threatened measure; any further opposition might

easily take the form of a breach of the peace by a private individual

and give his enemies the opportunity for which they were watching; and

it was therefore with good reason that Gracchus at first determined to

adopt a passive attitude in the face of the proposal of the tribune

Minucius Rufus for the repeal of the Rubrian law.[707] Even Cornelia

seems to have counselled prudence, and it was perhaps this crisis in her

son's career which drew from her the passionate letter, in which the

mother triumphs over the patriot and she sees the ruin of the Republic

and the madness of her house in the loss which would darken her

declining years.[708] This protest is more than consistent with the

story that she sent country folk[709] to swell the following and protect

the person of her son, when she saw that he would not yield without

another effort to maintain his cause. The change of attitude is said to

have been forced on Gracchus by the exhortations of his friends and

especially of the impetuous Fulvius. The organisation of a band such as

Gracchus now gathered round him, although not in itself illegal, was a

provocation to riot; and a disastrous incident soon occurred which gave

his opponents the handle for which they had long been groping. At the

dawn of the day, on which the meeting was to be held for the discussion,

and perhaps for the voting, on the repeal of the threatened law,

Gracchus and his followers ascended to the Capitol, where the opposite

party was also gathering in strength. It seems that the consul Opimius

himself, although he could not preside at the final meeting of the

assembly, which was purely plebeian, was about to hold a Contio[710] or

to speak at one summoned by the tribunes. Gracchus himself did not

immediately enter the area in which the meeting was to be held, but

paced the portico of the temple buried in his thoughts.[711] What

immediately followed is differently told; but the leading facts are the

same in every version.[712] A certain Antullus or Antullius, spoken of

by some as a mere unit amongst the people, described by others as an

attendant or herald of Opimius, spoke some words--the Gracchans said, of

insolence: their opponents declared, of patriotic protest--to Gracchus

or to Fulvius, at the same time stretching out his arm to the speaker

whom he addressed. The gesture was misinterpreted, and the unhappy man

fell pierced with iron pens, the only weapons possessed by the unarmed

crowd. There could be no question that the first act of violence had

come from Gracchus's supporters, and the end for which Opimius had

waited had been gained. Even the eagerness with which the leader had

disclaimed the hasty action of his followers might be interpreted as a

renewed infringement of law. He had hurried from the Capitol to the

Forum to explain to all who would listen the unpremeditated nature of

the deed and his own innocence of the murder; but this very action was a

grave breach of public law, implying as it did an insult to the majesty

of the tribune in summoning away a section of the people whom he was

prepared to address.[713]

The meeting on the Capitol was soon dissolved by a shower of rain,[714]

and the tribunes adjourned the business to another day; while Gracchus

and Fulvius Flaccus, whose half-formed plans had now been shattered,

hastened to their respective homes. The weakness of their position had

been that they refused to regard themselves in their true light as the

leaders of a revolution against the government. Whatever their own

intentions may have been, it is improbable that their supporters

followed them to the Capitol simply with the design of giving peaceful

votes against the measure proposed: and, had Antullius not fallen, the

meeting on the Capitol might have been broken up by a rush of Gracchans,

as that which Tiberius once harangued had been invaded by a band of

senators. Success and even salvation could now be attained solely by the

use of force; and the question of personal safety must have appealed to

the rank and file as well as to the leaders, for who could forget the

judicial massacre which had succeeded the downfall of Tiberius? But the

security of their own lives was probably not the only motive which led

numbers of their adherents to follow the two leaders to their

homes.[715] Loyalty, and the keen activity of party spirit, which

stimulates faction into war, must also have led them to make a last

attempt to defend their patrons and their cause. The whole city was in a

state of restless anticipation of the coming day; few could sleep, and

from midnight the Forum began to be filled with a crowd excited but

depressed by the sense of some great impending evil.[716]

At daybreak the consul Opimius sent a small force of armed men to the

Capitol, evidently for the purpose of preventing the point of vantage

being seized by the hostile democrats, and then he issued notices for a

meeting of the senate. For the present he remained in the temple of

Castor and Pollux to watch events. When the fathers had obeyed his

summons, he crossed the Forum and met them in the Curia. Shortly after

their deliberations had begun, a scene, believed to have been carefully

prepared, began to be enacted in the Forum.[717] A band of mourners was

seen slowly making its way through the crowded market-place; conspicuous

on its bier was the body of Antullius, stripped so that the wound which

was the price of his loyalty might be seen by all. The bearers took the

route that led them past the senate-house, sobbing as they went and

wailing out the mourning cry. The consul was duly startled, and curious

senators hastened to the door. The bier was then laid on the ground, and

the horrified aristocrats expressed their detestation of the dreadful

crime of which it was a witness. Their indignation may have imposed on

some members of the crowd; others were inclined to mock this outburst of

oligarchic pathos, and to wonder that the men who had slain Tiberius

Gracchus and hurled his body into the Tiber, could find their hearts

thus suddenly dissolved at the death of an unfortunate but

undistinguished servant. The motive of the threnody was somewhat too

obvious, and many minds passed from the memory of Tiberius's death to

the thought of the doom which this little drama was meant to presage for

his brother.

The senators returned to the Curia, and the final resolution was taken.

Opimius was willing to venture on the step which Scaevola had declined,

and a new principle of constitutional law was tentatively admitted. A

state of siege was declared in the terms that "the consul should see

that the State took no harm," [718] and active measures were taken to

prepare the force which this decree foreshadowed. Opimius bade the

senators see to their arms, and enjoined each of the members of the

equestrian centuries to bring with him two slaves in full equipment at

the dawn of the next day.[719] But an attempt was made to avert the

immediate use of force by issuing a summons to Gracchus and Flaccus to

attend at the senate and defend their conduct there.[720] The summons

was perfectly legal, since the consul had the right to demand the

presence of any citizen or even any inferior magistrate; but the two

leaders may well be excused for their act of contumacy in disobeying the

command. They knew that they would merely be putting themselves as

prisoners into the hands of a hostile force; nor, in the light of past

events, was it probable that their surrender and punishment would save

their followers from destruction. Preparations for defence, or a

counter-demonstration which would prove the size and determination of

their following, might lead the senate to think of negotiation. Its

members had an inducement to take this view. Their legal position, with

respect to the step which they were now contemplating, was unsound; and

although they might claim that they had the government in the shape of

its chief executive officer on their side, and that their late policy

had attracted the support of the majority of the citizens, yet there was

no uncontested precedent for the legitimacy of waging war against a

faction at Rome; they had no mandate to perform this mission, and its

execution, which had lately been rendered illegal by statute law, might

subsequently be repudiated even by many of those whom they now regarded

as their supporters. Yet we cannot wonder at the uncompromising attitude

of the senate. They held themselves to be the legitimate government of

the State; they had learnt the lesson that a government must rest either

on its merits or on force; they were unwilling to repeat the scandalous

scene which, on the occasion of Tiberius Gracchus's death, had proved

their weakness, and were perhaps unable to resort to such unpremeditated

measures in the face of the larger following of Caius; they could enlist

on their side some members of the upper middle class who would share in

the guilt, if guilt there was: and lastly they had at their mercy two

men, of whom one had twice shaken the commonwealth and the other had

gloried in the prospect of its self-mutilation in the future.

The wisdom and justice of resistance appealed immediately to the mind of

Flaccus, whose combative instincts found their natural satisfaction in

the prospect of an interchange of blows. The finer and more complex

spirit of Gracchus issued in a more uncertain mood. The bane of the

thinker and the patriot was upon him. Was a man who had led the State to

fight against it, and the rule of reason to be exchanged for the base

arbitrament of the sword? None knew the emotions with which he turned

from the Forum to gaze long and steadfastly at the statue of his father

and to move away with a groan;[721] but the sight of his sorrow roused a

sympathy which the call to arms might not have stirred. Many of the

bystanders were stung from their attitude of indifference to curse

themselves for their base abandonment of the man who had sacrificed so

much, to follow him to his house, and to keep a vigil before his doors.

The night was passed in gloomy wakefulness, the spirits of the watchers

were filled with apprehension of the common sacrifice which the coming

day might demand, and the silence was only broken when the voluntary

guard was at intervals relieved by those who had already slumbered.

Meanwhile the neighbours of Flaccus were being startled by the sounds of

boisterous revelry that issued from his halls. The host was displaying

an almost boyish exuberance of spirits, while his congenial comrades

yelled and clapped as the wine and the jest went round. At daybreak

Fulvius was dragged from his heavy slumbers, and he and his companions

armed themselves with the spoils of his consulship, the Gallic weapons

that hung as trophies upon his walls.[722] They then set out with

clamorous threats to take possession of the Aventine. The home that

Icilius had won for the Plebs was to be the scene of another struggle

for freedom. It was in later times pretended that Fulvius had taken the

step, from which even Catilina shrank, of calling the slaves to arms on

a promise of freedom.[723] We have no means of disproving the

allegation, which seems to have occurred with suspicious frequency in

the records left by aristocratic writers of the popular movements which

they had assisted to crush. But it is easy to see that the devotion of

slaves to their own masters during such struggles, and the finding of

their bodies amidst the slain, would be proof enough to a government,

anxious to emphasise its merits as a saviour of society, that general

appeals had been made to the servile class. Such a deduction might

certainly have been drawn from a view of the forces mustered under

Opimius; for in these the slaves may have exceeded the citizens in

number.[724]

Gracchus's mind was still divided between resistance and resignation. He

consented to accompany his reckless friend to the Aventine, as the only

place of refuge; but he declined to don his armour, merely fastening

under his toga a tiny dagger,[725] as a means of defence in the last

resort, or perhaps of salvation, did all other measures fail. The

presage of his coming doom was shared by his wife Licinia who clung to

him at the door, and when he gently disengaged himself from her arms,

made one more effort to grasp his robe and sank senseless on the

threshold. When Gracchus reached the Aventine with his friends, he found

that Flaccus and his party had seized the temple of Diana and had made

hasty preparations for fortifying it against attack. But Gracchus,

impressed with the helplessness or the horror of the situation,

persuaded him to make an effort at accommodation, and the younger son of

Flaccus, a boy of singular beauty, was despatched to the Curia on the

mission of peace.[726] With modest mien and tears streaming from his

eyes he gave his message to the consul. Many--perhaps most--of those who

listened were not averse to accept a compromise which would relieve the

intolerable strain and avert a civil strife. But Opimius was inflexible;

the senate, he said, could not be approached by deputy; the principals

must descend from the Aventine, lay down their arms, deliver themselves

up to justice as citizens subject to the laws, and then they might

appeal to the senate's grace; he ended by forbidding the youth to

return, if he could not bring with him an acceptance of these final

terms. The more pacific members of the senate could offer no effective

objection, for it was clear that the consul was acting within his legal

rights. The coercion of a disobedient citizen was a matter for the

executive power and, though Opimius had spoken in the name of the

senate, the authority and the responsibility were his. Retirement would

have been their only mode of protest; but this would have been a

violation of the discipline which bound the Council to its head, and

would have betrayed a suspicious indifference to the cause which was

regarded as that of the constitution. It is said that, on the return of

the messenger, Gracchus expressed willingness to accept the consul's

terms and was prepared to enter the senate and there plead his own cause

and that of his followers.[727] But none of his comrades would agree,

and Flaccus again despatched his son with proposals similar to those

which had been rejected. Opimius carried out his injunction by detaining

the boy and, thirsting for battle to effect the end which delay would

have assured, advanced his armed forces against the position held by

Flaccus. He was not wholly dependent on the improvised levies of the

previous day. There were in Rome at that moment some bands of Cretan

archers,[728] which had either just returned from service with the

legions or were destined to take part in some immediate campaign. It was

to their efforts that the success of the attack was mainly due. The

barricade at the temple might have resisted the onslaught of the

heavily-armed soldier; but its defenders were pierced by the arrows, the

precinct was strewn with wounded men, and the ranks were in utter

disorder when the final assault was made. There were names of

distinction which lent a dignity to the massacre that followed. Men like

Publius Lentulus, the venerable chief of the senate, gave a perpetual

colour of respectability to the action of Opimius by appearing in their

panoplies amongst the forces that he led.[729]

When the rout was complete and the whole crowd in full flight, Flaccus

sought escape in a workshop owned by a man of his acquaintance; but the

course of his flight had been observed, the narrow court which led to

the house was soon crowded by pursuers, who, maddened by their ignorance

of the actual tenement that concealed the person of Flaccus, vowed that

they would burn the whole alley to the ground if his hiding-place were

not revealed.[730] The trembling artisan who had befriended him did not

dare to betray his suppliant, but relieved his scruples by whispering

the secret to another. The hiding place was immediately revealed, and

the great ex-consul who had laid the foundations of Rome's dominion in

farther Gaul, a man strenuous and enlightened, ardent and faithful but

perhaps not overwise, was hacked to pieces by his own citizens in an

obscure corner of the slums of Rome. His elder son fell fighting by his

side. To the younger, the fair ambassador of that day, now a prisoner of

the consul, the favour was granted of choosing his own mode of death.

Early Rome had repudiated the principle of visiting the sins of the

fathers upon the children;[731] but the cold-blooded horrors of the

Oriental and Hellenic world were now becoming accepted maxims of state

to a government trembling for its safety and implacable in its revenge.

Meanwhile Gracchus had been saved from both the stain of civil war and

the humiliation of capture by his foes. No man had seen him strike a

blow throughout the contest. In sheer disgust at the appalling scene he

had withdrawn to the shrine of Diana, and was there prepared to compass

his own death.[732] His hand was stayed by two faithful friends,

Pomponius and Laetorius,[733] who urged him to escape. Gracchus obeyed,

but it was believed by some that, before he left the temple, he

stretched forth his hand to the goddess and prayed that the Roman people

might never be quit of slavery as a reward for their ingratitude and

treachery.[734] This outburst of anger, a very natural consequence of

his own humiliating plight, is said to have been kindled by the

knowledge that the larger portion of the mob had already listened to a

promise of amnesty and had joined the forces of Opimius. Unlike most

imprecations, that of Gracchus was destined to be fulfilled.

The flight of Gracchus led him down the slope of the Aventine to the

gate called Trigemina which stood near the Tiber's bank. In hastening

down the hill he had sprained his ankle, and time for his escape was

only gained by the devotion of Pomponius,[735] who turned, and

single-handed kept the pursuing enemy at bay until trampling on his

prostrate body they rushed in the direction of the wooden bridge which

spanned the river. Here Laetorius imitated the heroism of his comrade.

Standing with drawn sword at the head of the bridge, he thrust back all

who tried to pass until Gracchus had gained the other bank. Then he too

fell, pierced with wounds. The fugitive had now but a single slave to

bear him company in his flight; it led them through frequented streets,

where the passers-by stopped on their way, cheered them on as though

they were witnessing a contest of speed, but gave no sign of help and

turned deaf ears to Gracchus's pleading for a horse; for the pursuers

were close behind, and the dulled and panic-stricken mob had no thought

but for themselves. The grove of Furrina[736] received them just before

they were overtaken by the pursuing band; and in the sacred precinct the

last act was accomplished. It was known only that master and slave had

been found lying side by side. Some believed that the faithful servant

had slain Gracchus and then pierced his own breast; others held that

they were both living when the enemy came upon them, but that the slave

clung with such frantic devotion to his master that Gracchus's body

could not be reached until the living shield had been pierced and torn

away.[737] The activity of the pursuers had been stimulated by greed,

for Opimius had put a price upon the heads of both the leaders of the

faction on the Aventine. The bearers of these trophies of victory were

to receive their weight in gold. The humble citizens who produced the

head of Flaccus are said to have been defrauded of their reward; but the

action of the man who wrested the head of Gracchus from the first

possessor of the prize and bore it on a javelin's point to Opimius, long

furnished a text to the moralist who discoursed on the madness of greed

and the thirst of gold. Its unnatural weight is said to have revealed

the fact that the brain had been extracted and the cavity filled with

molten lead.[738] The bodies of the slain were for the most part thrown

into the Tiber, but one account records that that of Gracchus was handed

over to his mother for burial.[739] The number of the victims of the

siege, the pursuit and the subsequent judicial investigation is said to

have been three thousand.[740] The resistance to authority, which was

all that could be alleged against the followers of Gracchus, was

treated, not as a riot, but as a rebellion. The Tullianum saw its daily

dole of victims, who were strangled by the executioner; the goods of the

condemned were confiscated by the State and sold at public auction. All

public signs of mourning were forbidden to their wives;[741] and the

opinion of Scaevola, the greatest legal expert of the day, was that some

property of his niece Licinia, which had been wrecked in the general

tumult, could be recovered only from the goods of her husband, to whom

the sedition was due.[742] The attitude of the government was, in fact,

based on the view that the members of the defeated party, whether slain

or executed, had been declared enemies of the State. Their action had

put them outside the pale of law, and the decree of the senate, which

had assisted Opimius in the extreme course that he had taken, was an

index that the danger, which it vaguely specified, aimed at the actual

existence of the commonwealth and undermined the very foundations of

society. Such was the theory of martial law which Opimius's bold action

gave to his successors. Its weakness lay in the circumstance that it was

unknown to the statutes and to the courts; its plausibility was due

partly to the fact that, since the desuetude of the dictatorship, no

power actually existed in Rome which could legally employ force to crush

even the most dangerous popular rising, and partly to the peculiarities

of the movement which witnessed the first exercise of this authority.

The killing of Caius Gracchus and his followers, however useless and

mischievous the act may have been, had about it an air of spurious

legality, with which no ingenuity could invest the murder of Tiberius

and his adherents. The fallen chiefs were in enjoyment of no magisterial

authority that could justify either their initial action or their

subsequent disobedience; they had fortified a position in the town, and

had certainly taken up arms, presumably for the purpose of inflicting

grievous harm on loyal fellow-citizens. As their opponents were

certainly the government, what could they be but declared foes who had

been caught red-handed in an act of treason so open and so violent that

the old identity of "traitors" and "enemies" was alone applicable to

their case? Thus legal theory itself proclaimed the existence of civil

war, and handed on to future generations of party leaders an instrument

of massacre and extirpation which reached its culminating point in the

proscription list of Sulla.

Opimius, after he had ceased to preside at his death-dealing commission,

expressed the view that he had removed the rabies of discord from the

State by the foundation of a temple to Harmony. The bitter line which

some unseen hand scribbled on the door,[743] expressed the doubt, which

must soon have crept over many minds, whether the doctor had not been

madder than the patient, and the view, which was soon destined to be

widely held, that the authors of the discord which had been professedly

healed, the teachers who were educating Rome up to a higher ideal of

civil strife, were the very men who were now in power.[744] We shall see

in the sequel with what speed Time wrought his political revenge. In the

hearts of men the Gracchi were even more speedily avenged. The Roman

people often alternated between bursts of passionate sentiment and

abject states of cowardly contentment; but through all these phases of

feeling the memory of the two reformers grew and flourished. To accept

the Gracchi was an article of faith impressed on the proudest noble and

the most bigoted optimate by the clamorous crowd which he addressed. The

man who aped them might be pronounced an impostor or a traitor; the men

he aped belonged almost to the distant world of the half-divine. Their

statues were raised in public places, the sites on which they had met

their death were accounted holy ground and were strewn with humble

offerings of the season's fruits. Many even offered to their images a

daily sacrifice and sank on their knees before them as before those of

the gods.[745] The quiet respect or ecstatic reverence with which the

names and memories of the Gracchi were treated, was partly due to a

vague sense in the mind of the common man that they were the authors of

the happier aspects of the system under which he lived, of the brighter

gleams which occasionally pierced the clouds of oppression and

discomfort; it was also due to the conviction in the mind of the

statesman, often resisted but always recurring, that their work was

unalterable. To undo it was to plunge into the dark ages, to attempt to

modify it was immediately to see the necessity of its renewal. At every

turn in the paths of political life the statesman was confronted by two

figures, whom fear or admiration raised to gigantic proportions. The

orthodox historian would angrily declare that they were but the figures

of two young men, whose intemperate action had thrown Rome into

convulsion and who had met their fate, not undeserved however

lamentable, the one in a street riot, the other while heading an armed

sedition. But the criticism contained the elements of its own

refutation. The youth, the brotherhood, the martyrdom of the men were

the very elements that gave a softening radiance to the hard contour of

their lives. The Gracchi were a stern and ever-present reality; they

were also a bright and gracious memory. In either character they must

have lived; but the combination of both presentments has secured them an

immortality which age, wisdom, experience and success have often

struggled vainly to secure. That strange feeling which a great and

beautiful life has often inspired, that it belongs to eternity rather

than to the immediate past, and that it has few points of contact with

the prosaic round of present existence, had almost banished from

Cornelia's mind the selfish instincts of her loss, and had perhaps even

dulled the tender memories which cluster round the frailer rather than

the stronger elements in the characters of those we love. Those who

visited her in her villa at Misenum, where she kept her intellectual

court, surrounded by all that was best in letters, and exchanging

greetings or gifts with the potentates of the earth, were amazed at the

composure with which she spoke of the lives and actions of her

sons.[746] The memory drew no tear, her voice conveyed no intonation of

sorrow or regret. She spoke of them as though they were historical

figures of the past, men too distant and too great to arouse the weak

emotion which darkens contemplation. Some thought that her mind had been

shaken by age, or that her sensibility had been dulled by misfortune.

"In this they proved their own utter lack of sensibility" says the

loving biographer of the Gracchi: They did not know, he adds, the signs

of that nobility of soul, which is sometimes given by birth and is

always perfected by culture, or the reasonable spirit of endurance which

mental and moral excellence supply. The calmness of Cornelia proved, as

well, that she was at one with her children after their death, and their

identity with a mind so pure is as great a tribute to their motives as

the admiration or fear of the Romans is to their intellect and their

deeds, Cornelia deserved a memorial in Rome for her own intrinsic worth;

but the demeanour of her latter days justifies the legend engraved on

the statue which was to be seen in the portico of Metellus: "To

Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi".[747]

We are now in a position to form some estimate of the political changes

which had swept over Rome during the past twelve years. The

revolutionary legislation of this period was, strictly speaking, not

itself the change, but merely the formula which marked an established

growth; nor can any profit be derived from drawing a marked contrast

between the aims and methods of the two men who were responsible for the

most decisive of these reforms. A superficial view of the facts might

lead us to suppose that Tiberius Gracchus had bent his energies solely

to social amelioration, and that it was reserved for his brother Caius

to effect vast changes in the working, though not in the structure, of

the constitution. But even a chronological survey of the actions of

these two statesmen reveals the vast union of interests that suddenly

thrust themselves forward, with a vehemence which demanded either such a

resistance as no political society is homogeneous enough to maintain, or

such concessions as may be graciously made by a government which after

the grant may still retain most of the forms and much of the substance

of its former power. So closely interwoven were social and political

questions, so necessary was it for the attempted satisfaction of one

class immediately to create the demand for the recognition or

compensation of another, that Tiberius Gracchus had no sooner formulated

his agrarian proposals than he was beset with thoughts of legislating

for the army, transferring some of the judicial power to the equestrian

order, and granting the franchise to the allies. Even the belief that

these projects were merely a device for securing his own ascendency,

does not prove that their announcement was due to a brilliant discovery

of their originator, or that he created wants which he thereupon

proposed to satisfy. The desperate statesman seizes on the grievance

which is nearest to hand; it is true that he may increase a want by

giving the first loud and clear expression to the low and confused

murmurings of discontent; but a grievance that lives and gives violent

tokens of its presence, as did that of the Italian allies in the

Fregellan revolt, must be real, not fictitious: and when it finds a

remedy, as the needs of the poor and the political claims of the knights

did under the régime of Caius Gracchus, the presumption is that the

disease has been of long standing, and that what it has for a long time

lacked was not recognition, but the opportunity and the intelligence

necessary to secure redress. Caius Gracchus was as little of a political

explorer as his brother; it did not require the intuition of genius to

see facts which formed the normal environment of every prominent

politician of the age. His claim to greatness rests, partly on the

mental and moral strength which he shared with Tiberius and which gave

him the power to counteract the force of inertia and transmute vague

thought, first into glowing words and then into vigorous action; partly

on the extraordinary ingenuity with which he balanced the interests and

claims of classes so as to form a coalition which was for the time

resistless: and partly on the finality with which he removed the

jealousies of the hour from the idle arena of daily political strife,

and gave them their place in the permanent machinery of the

constitution, there to remain as the necessary condition of the

precarious peace or the internecine war which the jarring elements of a

balance of power bring in turn to its possessors.

Since the reality of the problems with which the Gracchi dealt is

undeniable, and since few would be inclined to admit that the most

effective treatment of a problem, whether social or political, is to

refuse it a solution, any reasonable criticism of their reforms must be

based solely on a consideration of their aims and methods. The land

question, which was taken up by both these legislators, attracts our

first attention. The aim of the resumption and redistribution of the

public domain had been the revival of the class of peasant holders, whom

legend declared, perhaps with a certain element of truth, to have formed

the flower of the civic population during the years when Rome was

struggling for a place amongst the surrounding peoples and in the

subsequent period of her expansion over Italy. Such an aim may be looked

at from two points of view. It may be regarded as an end in itself,

without any reference to its political results, or it may be looked on

as an effort to increase the power and security of the State without any

peculiar consideration of the comfort and well-being of its individual

members. The Gracchan scheme, regarded from the first point of view,

can, with respect to its end as distinguished from its methods, be

criticised unfavourably only by those who hold that an urban life does

under all circumstances convey moral, mental and physical benefits which

are denied by the conditions of residence in country districts. It is

true that the objector may in turn point out that the question of the

standard of comfort to be attained in either sphere is here of supreme

importance; but such an issue brings us at once within the region of

means and not of ends, and an ideal of human life cannot be judged

solely with reference to the practicability of its realisation. It is

the second point of view from which the aim of this land legislation may

be contemplated, which first gives the critic the opportunity of denying

the validity of the end as well as the efficiency of the means. If the

new agriculturist was meant to be an element of strength to the Roman

State, to save it from the selfishness of a narrow oligarchy, the

instability of a city mob and the corruption of both, to defend the

conquests which the city had won or to push her empire further, it was

necessary to prove that he could be of utility both as a voting unit and

as a soldier in the legions. His capacity for performing the first

function efficiently was, at the very least, extremely questionable. The

reality of the farmer's vote obviously depended on the closeness of his

residence to the capital, since there is not the least trace, at this or

at any future time during the history of the Republic, of the formation

of any design for modifying the rigidly primary character of the popular

assemblies of Rome. The rights of the voter at a distance had always

been considered so purely potential, that the inland and northern

settlements which Rome established in Italy had generally been endowed

with Latin rights, while the colonies of Roman citizens clustered more

closely round their mother; and men had always been found ready to

sacrifice the active rights of Roman citizenship, on account of the

worthlessness of their possession in a remote colony. It was even

difficult to reconcile the passive rights of Roman citizenship with

residence at a distance from the capital; for all the higher

jurisdiction was centred in Rome and could not easily be sought by the

inhabitants of distant settlements.[748] But, even if we exclude the

question of relative distance from the centre of affairs, it was still

not probable that the dweller in the country would be a good citizen

according to the Hellenic comprehension of that phrase. When Aristotle

approves of a country democracy, simply because it is not strictly a

democracy at all,[749] he is thinking, not merely of the farmer's lack

of interest in city politics, but of the incompatibility of the

perpetual demands which rural pursuits make on time and energy with

attendance on public business at the centre of affairs. The son of the

soil soon learns that he owes undivided allegiance to his mother: and he

will seldom be stirred by a political emotion strong enough to overcome

the practical appeals which are made by seed-time and harvest. But the

opportunities for discarding civic obligations were far greater in Rome

than in the Greek communities. The Roman assemblies had no stated days

of meeting, laws might be promulgated and passed at any period of the

year, their tenor was explained at public gatherings which were often

announced on the very morning of the day for which they were summoned,

and could be attended only by those whom chance or leisure or the

habitual pursuit of political excitement had brought to the Capitol or

the Forum. There was not at this period a fixed date even for the

elections of the higher magistrates. An attempt was perhaps made to

arrange them for the summer, when the roads were passable, the labours

of spring were over, and the toils of harvest time had not yet

commenced.[750] But the creation of the magistrates with Imperium

depended to a large extent on the convenience of the consuls, one of

whom had sometimes to be summoned back from a campaign to preside at the

Comitia which were to elect his successors; while even the date of the

tribunician elections might have been conditioned by political

considerations. The closing events of the life of Tiberius Gracchus

prove how difficult it was to secure the attendance of the country voter

even when an election of known political import was in prospect; while

Caius realised that the best security for the popular leader, whether as

a legislator or a candidate, was to attach the urban resident to himself

by the ties of gratitude and interest. We can scarcely admit, in the

face of facts like these, that the agriculturist created by the Gracchan

reforms was likely to render any signal political assistance to his

city. It is true that the existence of a practically disfranchised

proletariate may have a modifying influence on politics. It could not in

Rome serve the purpose, which it sometimes fulfils in the modern world,

of moulding the opinion of the voter; but even in Rome it suggested a

reserve that might be brought up on emergencies. A state, however, does

not live on emergencies but on the constant and watchful activity of its

members. Such activity could be displayed at Rome only by the leisured

senator or the leaders of the city mob. The forces that had worked for

oligarchy in the past might under changed conditions produce a narrow

type of urban democracy; but they presented no hope of the realisation

of a true popular government.

It might be hoped, however, that the newly created farmer might add to

the military, if not the political, strength of the State. The hope, so

far as it rested on the agriculturist himself, was rendered something of

an anachronism by the present conditions of service. Even in the old

days a campaign prolonged beyond the ordinary duration of six months had

often effected the ruin of the peasant proprietor; and now that the

cautious policy of the protectorate had been so largely abandoned and

Rome's military efforts, no longer limited to wars of defence or

aggression, were directed to securing her ascendency in distant

dependencies by means of permanent garrisons, service in the legions was

a still more fatal impediment to industrial development. Rome had not

yet learnt the lesson that an empire cannot be garrisoned by an army of

conscripts; but she was becoming conscious of the inadequacy of her own

military system, and this consciousness led her to take the easy but

fatal step of throwing far the larger burden of foreign service on the

Latins and Italian allies. Any increase in the number and efficiency of

her own military forces would thus remove a dangerous grievance, while

it added to the strength which, in the last resort, could alone secure

the permanence of her supremacy even in Italy. Such an increase was

finally effected in the only possible manner--by the adoption of a

system of voluntary enlistment and by carrying still further the

increasing disregard for those antiquated conditions of wealth and

status, which were a part of the theory that service was a burden and

wholly inconsistent with the new requirement that it should become a

profession. Although it must be confessed that little assistance in this

direction was directly tendered by the Gracchan legislation, yet it

should be remembered that, even if we exclude from consideration the

small efforts made by Caius to render military service a more attractive

calling, the increase of the farmer class might of itself have done much

to solve the problem. Although the single occupant of a farm was clearly

incapable of taking his part in expeditions beyond the seas without

serious injury to his own interests, yet the sons of such a man might

have performed a considerable term of military service without

disastrous consequences to the estate, and where the inheritance had

remained undivided and several brothers held the land in common, the

duties of the soldier and the farmer might have been alternated without

leaving the homestead divested of its head. The recognition of the

military life as a profession must have profited still more by the

policy which encouraged the growth of the country population; for the

energy of the surplus members of the household, whose services were not

needed or could not be adequately rewarded on the farm, would find a

more salutary outlet in the stirring life of the camp than in the

enervating influences of the city. The country-side might still continue

to supply a better physique and a finer morale than were likely to be

discovered in the poorer quarters of Rome.

The objects aimed at in the Gracchan scheme of land-reform, although in

some respects difficult of realisation, have aroused less hostile

criticism than the methods which were adopted for their fulfilment. It

may be held that the scheme of practical confiscation, which, advocated

by Tiberius Gracchus, plunged him at once into a fierce political

struggle and encountered resistance which could only be overcome by

unconstitutional means, might have been avoided had the reformer seen

that an economic remedy must be ultimate to be successful, and that an

economic tendency can only be resisted by destroying the conditions

which give it the false appearance of a law. The two conditions which

were at the time fatal to the efforts of the moderate holder of land,

are generally held to have been the cheapness and, under the inhumane

circumstances of its employment, even efficiency of slave labour, and

the competition of cheap corn from the provinces. The remedial measures

which might immediately present themselves to the mind of a modern

economist, who was unfettered by a belief in free trade or in the

legitimacy of securing the cheapest labour available, are the

prohibition of, or restrictions on, the importation of slaves, and the

imposition of a duty on foreign corn. The first device might in its

extreme form have been impracticable, for it would have been difficult

to ensure such a supervision of the slave market as to discriminate

between the sale of slaves for agricultural or pastoral work and their

acquirement for domestic purposes. A tax on servile labour employed on

land, or the moderate regulation which Caesar subsequently enforced that

a certain proportion of the herdsmen employed on the pasture lands

should be of free birth,[751] would have been more practicable measures,

and perhaps, if presented as an alternative to confiscation, might not

have encountered an unconquerable resistance from the capitalists,

although their very moderation might have won them but a lukewarm

support from the people, and ensured the failure that attends on

half-measures which do not carry their meaning on their face and lack

the boldness which excites enthusiasm. But the real objection which the

Gracchi and their circle would have had to legislation of this type,

whether it had been suggested to them in its extreme shape or in some

modified form, would have been that it could not have secured the object

at which they aimed. Such measures would merely have revived the free

labourer, while their dream was to re-establish the peasant proprietor,

or at least the occupant who held his land on a perfectly secure tenure

from the State. And even the revival of the free labourer would only

have been exhibited on the most modest scale; for such legislation would

have done nothing to reclaim arable land which had degenerated into

pasturage, and to reawaken life in the great deserted tracts, whose

solitude was only broken by the rare presence of the herdsman's cabin.

To raise a cry for the restoration of free labour on this exiguous scale

might have exposed a legislator to the disappointment, if not derision,

of his friends and invited the criticism, effective because popular, of

all his secret foes. The masters of the world were not likely to give

enthusiastic support to a leader who exhibited as their goal the lonely,

barren and often dangerous life of sheep-driver to some greedy

capitalist, and who offered them the companionship, and not the service,

of the slaves that their victorious arms had won.

The alternative of protective legislation for the defence of Italian

grain may be even more summarily dismissed. It was, in the first place,

impossible from the point of view of political expediency. The Gracchi,

or any other reforming legislators, had to depend for their main support

on the voting population of the city of Rome: and such a constituency

would never have dreamed for a moment of sanctioning a measure which

would have made the price of corn dearer in the Roman market, even if

the objections of the capitalists who placed the foreign grain on that

market could have been successfully overcome. So far from dreaming of

the practicability of such a scheme, Caius Gracchus had been forced to

allow the sale of corn at Rome at a cost below the current market-price.

But, even had protection been possible, it must have come as the last,

not as the first, of the constructive measures necessary for the

settlement of the agrarian question. It might have done something to

keep the small farms standing, but these farms had to be created before

their maintenance was secured; and if adopted, apart from some scheme

aiming at a redivision of the land, such a protective measure would

merely have benefited such existing owners of the large estates as still

continued to devote a portion of their domains to agriculture. The fact,

however, which may be regarded as certain, that foreign corn could

undersell that of Italy in the Roman market, and probably in that of all

the great towns within easy access of the sea, may seem a fatal flaw in

the agrarian projects of the Gracchi. What reason was there for

supposing that the tendencies which in the past had favoured the growth

of large holdings and replaced agriculture by pasturage, should remain

inoperative in the future? Tiberius Gracchus's own regulation about the

inalienability of the lands which he assigned, seemed to reveal the

suspicion that the tendencies towards accumulation had not yet been

exhausted, and that the occupants of the newly created farms might not

find the pursuit of agriculture so profitable as to cling to them in

scorn of the enticements of the encroaching capitalist. Doubtless the

prohibition to sell revealed a weakness in the agricultural system of

the times; but the regulation was probably framed, not in despair of the

small holder securing a maintenance, but as a protection against the

money-lender, that curse of the peasant-proprietor, who might now be

less willing to approach the peasant, when the security which he

obtained could under no circumstances lead to his acquiring eventual

ownership. With respect to the future, there was reasonable hope that

the farmer, if kept in tolerable security from the strategic advances of

his wealthier neighbours, would be able to hold his own. In a modern

state, possessing a teeming population and a complex industrial

organisation, where the profits of a widely spread commercial life have

raised the standard of comfort and created a host of varied needs, the

view may reasonably be taken that, before agriculture can declare itself

successful, it must be able to point to some central market where it

will receive an adequate reward for the labour it entails. But this view

was by no means so prevalent in the simpler societies of antiquity. The

difficulties of communication, which, with reference to transport, must

have made Rome seem nearer to Africa than to Umbria, and must have

produced a similar tendency to reliance on foreign imports in many of

the great coast towns, would alone have been sufficient to weaken the

reliance of the farmer on the consumption of his products by the larger

cities. The belief that the homestead might be almost self-sufficient

probably lingered on in remote country districts even in the days of the

Gracchi; or, if absolute self-existence was unattainable, the

necessities of life, which the home could not produce, might be procured

without effort by periodical visits to the market or fair, which formed

the industrial centre of a group of hamlets. The seemingly ample size of

the Gracchan allotments, some of which were three times as great as the

larger of the colonial assignments of earlier days,[752] pointed to the

possibility of the support of a large family, if the simpler needs of

life were alone considered. The farmer's soul need not be vexed by

competition if he was content to live and not to trade, and it might

have been hoped that the devotion to the soil, which ownership inspires,

might have worked its magic even on the lands left barren through

neglect. There might even be a hope for the cultivator who aimed at the

markets of the larger towns; for, if corn returned no profit, yet oil

and wine were not yet undersold, and were both of them commodities which

would bring better returns than grain to the minute and scrupulous care

in which the smaller cultivator excels the owner of a great domain. The

failure of corn-growing as a productive industry, perhaps the

legislation of the Gracchi itself, must have given a great impetus to

the cultivation of the vine and the olive, the value attached to which

during the closing years of the Republic is, as we have seen, attested

by the fact that the extension of these products was prohibited in the

Transalpine regions in order to protect the interests of the

Roman producer.

An agricultural revival was, therefore, possible; but its success

demanded a spirit that would enter readily into the work, and submit

without a murmur to the conditions of life which the stern task

enjoined. It was here that the agrarian legislation of the Gracchi found

its obstacle. So far as it did fail--so far, that is, as it was not

sufficient to prevent the renewed accumulation of the people in the

towns and the continued depopulation of the country districts--it failed

because it offended against social ideals rather than against economic

tendencies. Many of the settlers whom it planted on the allotments, must

already have been demoralised by the feverish atmosphere of Rome; while

others of a saner and more vigorous type may have soon looked back on

the capital, not as the lounging-place of the idler, but as the exchange

of the world, or have turned their thoughts to the provinces as the

sphere where energy was best rewarded and capital gave its speediest

returns. Of the other social measures of this period, colonisation, in

so far as it had a purely agricultural object, is subject to the

criteria that have been applied to the agrarian movements of the time;

although it is possible that the formation of new or the remodelling of

old political societies, which must have followed the scheme of Drusus,

had this been ever realised, would have infused a more vigorous life in

agricultural settlements of this type than was likely to be awakened in

those which formed a mere outlying part of Rome or some existing

municipality. We have seen how the colonial plan of Drusus differed in

its intention from that of Caius Gracchus; but the latter statesman had,

in the settlement which he projected at Junonia, planned a foundation

which would proximately have lived on the wealth of its territory rather

than on its trade, and must always have been, like Carthage of old, as

much an agricultural as a commercial state. To an agrarian project such

as this no economic objection could have been offered and, had the

scheme of transmarine colonisation been fully carried out, the provinces

themselves might have been made to benefit the farming class of Italy,

whose economic foes they had become. The distance also of such

settlements from Rome would have blunted the craving for the life of the

capital, which beset the minds and paralysed the energies of the

occupants of Italian land.

But, on the whole, the Gracchan scheme of colonisation was, as we have

seen, commercial rather than agricultural, and was probably intended to

benefit a class that was not adapted to rural occupations, either by

association or training. By this enterprise Caius Gracchus showed that

he saw with perfect clearness the true reason, and the final evidence,

of the stagnation of the middle class. A nation which has abandoned

agriculture and allows itself to be fed by foreign hands, even by those

of its own subjects, is exposed to military dangers which are obvious,

and to political perils somewhat more obscure but bearing their evil

fruit from time to time; but such treason to the soil is no sign of

national decay, if the legions of workers have merely transferred their

allegiance from the country to the town, from agriculture to manufacture

and commerce. In Italy this comforting explanation was impossible.

Except perhaps in Latium and Campania, there were few industrial

centres; many of those that existed were in the hands of Greeks, many

more had sunk under the stress of war and had never been revived. The

great syndicates in which Roman capital was invested, employed slaves

and freedmen as their agents; the operations of these great houses were

directed mainly to the provinces, and the Italian seaports were employed

merely as channels for a business which was speculative and financial

and, so far as Italy was concerned, only to a very slight, if to any,

degree productive. To re-establish the producer or the trader of

moderate means, was to revive a stable element in the population, whose

existence might soften the rugged asperity with which capital confronted

power on the one hand and poverty on the other. But to revive it at Rome

would have demanded artificial measures, which, attacking as they must

have done the monopolies possessed by the Equites, would have defeated

the legislator's immediate object and probably proved impracticable,

while such a revival would also have accentuated the centralisation,

which might be useful to the politician but was deplored by the social

reformer. The debilitated class might, however, recover its elasticity

if placed in congenial surroundings and invited to the sites which had

once attracted the enterprise of the Greek trader; and Caius Gracchus's

settlements in the south of Italy were means to this end. We have no

warrant for pronouncing the experiment an utter failure. Some of these

colonies lived on, although in what guise is unknown. But even a

moderate amount of success would have demanded a continuity in the

scheme, which was rudely interrupted by the fall of its promoter, and it

is not to be imagined that the larger capitalists, whose power the

reformer had himself increased, looked with a friendly eye upon these

smaller rivals. The scheme of social reform projected by Gracchus found

its completion in his law for the sale of corn. When he had made

provision for the born agriculturist and the born tradesman, there still

remained a residuum of poorer citizens whose inclination and habits

prompted them to neither calling. It was for these men that the monthly

grant of cheapened grain was intended. Their bread was won by labour,

but by a labour so fitful and precarious that it was known to be often

insufficient to secure the minimum means of subsistence, unless some

help was furnished by the State. The healthier form of state-aid--the

employment of labour--was certainly practised by Caius Gracchus, and

perhaps the extensive public works which he initiated and supervised,

were intended to benefit the artisan who laboured in their construction

as well as the trader who would profit by their completion.

Whatever may be our judgment on the merits and results of this social

programme, the importance of the political character which it was to

assume, from the close of the career of Caius Gracchus to the downfall

of the Republic, can hardly be exaggerated. The items of reform as

embodied in his legislation became the constant factors in every

democratic programme which was to be issued in the future. In these we

see the demand for land, for colonial assignations, for transmarine

settlements, for a renewal or extension of the corn law, perpetually

recurring. It is true that this recurrence may be in part due to the

very potency of the personality of the first reformer and to the magic

of the memory which he left behind him. Party-cries tend to become

shibboleths and it is difficult to unravel the web that has been spun by

the hand of a master. Even the hated cry for the Italian franchise,

which had proved the undoing of Caius Gracchus, became acceptable to

party leaders and to an ever-growing section of their followers, largely

because it had become entwined with his programme of reform. But the

vigorous life of his great manifesto cannot be explained wholly on this

ground. It is a greater exaltation of its author to believe that its

life was due to its intrinsic utility, and that Gracchus indicated real

needs which, because they remained unsatisfied until the birth of the

Principate, were ever the occasion for the renewal of proposals so

closely modelled on his own.

When we turn from the social to the political changes of this period, we

are on far less debatable ground. Although there may be some doubt as to

the intention with which each reform was brought into existence by Caius

Gracchus, its character as illustrated by its place in the economy of

the commonwealth is so clearly stamped upon it and so potently

manifested in the immediately following years, that a comprehensive

discussion of the nature of his single measures would be merely an

unprofitable effort to recall the past or anticipate the future. But the

collective effect of his separate efforts has been subjected to very

different interpretations, and the question has been further complicated

by hazardous, and sometimes overconfident, attempts to determine how far

the legislator's intentions were fulfilled in the actual result of his

reforms. Because it can be shown that the changes introduced by

Gracchus, or, to be more strictly accurate, the symptoms which elicited

these changes, ultimately led to monarchical rule, Gracchus has been at

times regarded as the conscious author and possessor of a personal

supremacy which he deliberately intended should replace the intricate

and somewhat cumbrous mechanism which controlled the constitutional

government of Rome; because he sowed the seeds of a discord so terrible

as to be unendurable even in a state which had never known the absence

of faction and conflict, and had preserved its liberties through

carefully regulated strife, his work has been held to be that of some

avenging angel who came, not to renew, but to destroy. There is truth in

both these pictures; but the Gracchus whom they portray as the force

that annihilated centuries of crafty workmanship, as the first precursor

of the coming monarchy, is the Gracchus who rightly lives in the

historic imagination which, unfettered by conditions of space or time,

prefers the contemplation of the eternity of the work to that of the

environment of the worker; it is a presentment which would be applicable

to any man as able and as resolute as Gracchus, who attempted to meet

the evils created by a weak and irresponsible administration, partly by

the restoration of old forms, partly by the recognition of new and

pressing claims. There is a point at which reform, except it go so far

as to blot out a constitution and substitute another in its place, must

act as a weakening and dissolving force. That point is reached when an

existing government is effectually hampered from exercising the

prerogatives of sovereignty and no other power is sufficiently

strengthened to act as its unquestioned substitute. The dissolution will

be easier if reform bears the not uncommon aspect of conservatism, and a

nominal sovereign, whose strength, never very great, has been sapped by

disuse and the habit of mechanical obedience, is placed in competition

with a somewhat effete usurper. It is not, however, fair to regard

Gracchus as a radical reactionary who was the first to drag a prisoned

and incapable sovereign into the light of day. Had he done this, he

would have been the author of a revolution and the creator of a new

constitution. But this he never attempted to be, and such a view of his

work rests on the mistaken impression that, at the time of his reforms,

the senate was recognised as the true government of Rome. Such a

pretension had never been published nor accepted. We are not concerned

with its reality as a fact; but no sound analysis, whether undertaken by

lawyer or historian, would have admitted its theoretical truth. The

literary atmosphere teemed with theories of popular sovereignty of a

limited kind, and Gracchus, while recognising this sovereignty, did

little to remove its limitations. It is true that, like his brother, he

legislated without seeking the customary sanction of the senate; but

initial reforms could never have been carried through, had the

legislator waited for this sanction; and the future freedom of the

Comitia from senatorial control was at best guaranteed by the force of

the example of the Gracchi, not by any new legal ordinances which they

ordained. Earlier precedents of the same type had not been lacking, and

it was only the comprehensiveness of the Gracchan legislation which

seemed to give a new impetus to the view that in all fundamental

matters, which called for regulation by Act of Parliament, the people

was the single and uncontrolled sovereign. Thus was developed the idea

of the possibility of a new period of growth, which should refashion the

details of the structure of the State into greater correspondence with

the changed conditions of the times. As the earlier process of change

had raised the senate to power, the latter might be interpreted as

containing a promise that a new master was to be given to the Roman

world. But it is highly improbable that to Gracchus or to any of his

contemporaries was the true nature of the prophecy revealed. For the

moment a balance of power was established, and the moneyed class stood

midway between the opposing factions of senate and people. Its new

powers were intended to constrain the senate into efficiency rather than

to reduce it to impotence, and to create these powers Gracchus had

endowed the equestrian order with that right of audit which, in the

earlier theory of the constitution, had been held to be one of the

securest guarantees of the power of the people. Gracchus predicted the

strife that was likely to follow this friction between the government

and the courts; but this prediction, while it perhaps reveals the hope

that in the issues of the future the mercantile class would generally be

found on the side of the people, betrays still more clearly the belief

that the people, and their patron of the moment, were utterly incapable

of standing alone, and that no true democratic government was possible

for Rome. In spite of his Hellenism Gracchus betrayed two

characteristics of the true Roman. He believed in the advisability of

creating a political impasse, from which some mode of escape would

ultimately be devised by the wearied and lacerated combatants; and he

held firmly to the view that the people, considered strictly in itself,

had no organic existence; that it never was, and never could be, a power

in its own right. He made no effort to give the Roman Comitia an

organisation which would have placed it on something like the

independent level of a Greek Ecclesia. Such an omission was perhaps the

result of neglect rather than of deliberation; but this very neglect

proves that Gracchus had in no way emancipated himself from the typical

Roman idea that the people could find expression only through the voice

of a magistrate. This idea unquestionably made the leader of the moment

the practical head of the State during any crisis that called for

constant intervention on the part of the Comitia; but there is no reason

to suppose a belief on the part of Gracchus that such intervention would

be unremittingly demanded, would become as integral a part of the

every-day mechanism of government as the senate's direction of the

provinces or the knight's control of the courts. But even had he held

this view, the situation which it conjured up need not have borne a

close resemblance to monarchy. The natural vehicle for the expression of

the popular will would have been the tribunate--an office which by its

very nature presented such obvious hindrances to personal rule as the

existence of colleagues armed with the power of veto, the short tenure

of office, and the enjoyment of powers that were mainly negative. It is

true that the Gracchi themselves had shown how some of these

difficulties might be overcome. The attempt at re-election, the

accumulation of offices, the disregard of the veto, were innovations

forced on them by the knowledge, gained from bitter experience, that

reform could proceed only from a power that was to some extent outside

the constitution, and that the efficient execution of the contemplated

measures demanded the concentration of varied types of authority in a

single hand. Perhaps Caius faced the situation more frankly than his

brother; but his consciousness of the necessity of such an occasional

power in the State was accompanied by the belief that it would prove the

ruin of the man who grasped it, that the work might be done but that the

worker would be doomed. These gloomy anticipations were not the result

of disordered nerves, but the natural fruit of the coldly calculating

intellect which saw that supremacy either of or through the people was

an illusion, that the power of the nobility must be resisted by keener

and more durable weapons than the Comitia and its temporary leaders,

that the authority of the senate might yield to a slow process of

attrition, but would never be engulfed by any cataclysmic outburst of

popular hostility. It was no part of the statesman's task to pry into

the future and vex himself with the query whether a new and permanent

headship of the State might not be created, to play the all-pervading

part which destiny had assigned to the senate. The senate's power had

not vanished, it was not even vanishing. It was a solid fact, fully

accepted by the very masses who were howling against it. Its decadence

would be the work of time, and all the great Roman reformers of the past

had left much to time and to fortune. The materials with which the

Gracchi worked were far too composite to enable them to forecast the

shape of the structure of which they were laying the foundations. The

essential fact of the future monarchy, the growth of the military power,

must have been almost completely hidden from their eyes. It is true

that, in relation to the fall of the Republic and the growth of the

monarchical idea, the Gracchi were more than mere preparatory or

destructive forces. They furnished faint types, which were gladly

welcomed by subsequent pretenders, of what a constitutional monarch

should be. But it is ever hazardous to identify the destroyer with the

creator or the type with the prophet.