Titus Sempronius Gracchus, the plebeian tribune, having proposed an
Agrarian law, (contrary to the sense of the senate, and the equestrian
order,) to the effect that no person should hold more than five hundred
acres of the public lands, wrought himself up to such a degree of
passion that he deprived his colleague, Marcus Octavius, of his
authority by a law which he made, and appointed himself, together with
his brother Caius, and his father-in-law Appius Claudius, commissioners
for dividing the lands. He also proposed another Agrarian law, by which
the land was still more at his disposal, that the same commissioners
should be authorized to determine which was public and which private
land. When afterwards it appeared that there was not land sufficient to
be divided so as to satisfy the people, whose hopes he had raised to
cupidity by the expectations held out to them, he declared that he would
propose a law, that all those, who by the law of Sempronius were
entitled to such grant, should be paid in money out of the bequest of
king Attalus. But Attalus, king of Pergamus, son of Eumenes, had made
the Romans his heirs. The senate was roused to indignation at such
repeated ill-treatment; and chiefly Publius Mucius, the consul, who,
having delivered a severe invective against Gracchus in the senate, was
seized by him, dragged before the people, and accused; nevertheless he
continued to inveigh against him from the rostrum. Gracchus,
endeavouring to procure his re-election as tribune, was slain in the
Capitol, by the chief nobles, by the advice of Publius Cornelius Nasica,
after having been beaten first with the fragments of the seats, and was
thrown, without the rites of sepulture, into the river, together with
some others who fell in the tumult. Various engagements, with various
success, against the slaves in Sicily are recorded.