THE GRACCHI.
137-122.
Young Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, the eldest of Cornelia's jewels, was
sent in the year 137 to join the Roman army in Spain. As he went through
Etruria, which, as every one knew, had been a thickly peopled, fertile
country in old times, he was shocked to see its dreariness and
desolation. Instead of farms and vineyards, there were great bare spaces
of land, where sheep, kids, or goats were feeding. These vast tracts
belonged to Romans, who kept slaves to attend to the flocks; while all
the corn that was used in Rome came from Sicily or Africa, and the
poorer Romans lived in the city itself--idle men, chiefly trusting to
distributions of corn, and unable to work for themselves because they
had no ground to till; and as to trades and handicrafts, the rich men
had everything they wanted made in their own houses by their slaves.
[Illustration: CORNELIA AND HER SONS.]
No wonder the Romans were losing their old character. This was the very
thing that the Licinian law had been intended to prevent, by forbidding
any citizen to have more than a certain quantity of land, and giving the
state the power of resuming it. The law was still there, but it had
been disused and forgotten; estates had been gathered into the hands of
families and handed down, till now, though there were 400,000 citizens,
only 2,000 were men of property.
While Tiberius was serving in Spain, he decided on his plan. As his
family was plebeian, he could be a tribune of the people, and as soon as
he came home he stood and was elected. Then he proposed reviving the
Licinian law, that nobody should have more than 500 acres, and that the
rest should be divided among those who had nothing, leaving, however, a
larger portion to those who had many children.
There was, of course, a terrible uproar; the populace clamoring for
their rights, and the rich trying to stop the measure. They bribed one
of the other tribunes to forbid it; but there was a fight, in which
Tiberius prevailed, and he and his young brother Caius, and his
father-in-law Appius Claudius, were appointed as triumvers to see the
law carried out. Then the rich men followed their old plan of spreading
reports among the people that Tiberius wanted to make himself a king,
and had accepted a crown and purple robe from some foreign envoy. When
his year of office was coming to an end, he sought to be elected tribune
again, but the patricians said it was against the law. There was a
great tumult, in the course of which he put his hand to his head, either
to guard it from a blow or to beckon his friends. "He demands the
diadem," shouted his enemies, and there was a great struggle, in which
three hundred people were killed. Tiberius tried to take refuge in the
Temple of Jupiter, but the doors were closed against him; he stumbled,
was knocked down with a club, and killed.
However, the Sempronian law had been made, and the people wanted, of
course, to have it carried out, while the nobles wanted it to be a dead
letter. Scipio Æmilianus, the brother-in-law of the Gracchi, had been in
Spain all this time, but he had so much disapproved of Tiberius' doings
that he was said to have exclaimed, on hearing of his death, "So perish
all who do the like." But when he came home, he did so much to calm and
quiet matters, that there was a cry to make him Dictator, and let him
settle the whole matter. Young Caius Gracchus, who thought the cause
would thus be lost, tried to prevent the choice by fixing on him the
name of tyrant. To which Scipio calmly replied, "Rome's enemies may well
wish me dead, for they know that while I live Rome cannot perish."
When he went home, he shut himself into his room to prepare his
discourse for the next day, but in the morning he was found dead,
without a wound, though his slaves declared he had been murdered. Some
suspected his wife Sempronia, others even her mother Cornelia, but the
Senate would not have the matter enquired into. He left no child, and
the Africanus line of Cornelius ended with him.
Caius Gracchus was nine years younger than his brother, and was elected
tribune as soon as he was old enough. He was full of still greater
schemes than his brother. His mother besought him to be warned by his
brother's fate, but he was bent on his objects, and carried some of them
out. He had the Sempronian law reaffirmed, though he could not act on
it; but in the meantime he began a regular custom of having corn served
out to the poorer citizens, and found work for them upon roads and
bridges; also he caused the state to clothe the soldiers, instead of
their doing it at their own expense. Another scheme which he first
proposed was to make the Italians of the countries now one with Roman
territory into citizens, with votes like the Romans themselves; but this
again angered the patricians, who saw they should be swamped by numbers
and lose their power.
He also wanted to found a colony of plebeians on the ruins of Carthage,
and when his tribuneship was over he went to Africa to see about it; but
when he came home the patricians had arranged an attack on him, and he
was insulted by the lictor of the consul Opimius. The patricians
collected on one side, the poorer sort around Caius on the Aventine
Hill; but the nobles were the strongest, the plebeians fled, and Caius
withdrew with one slave into a sacred grove, whence he hoped to reach
the Tiber; but the wood was surrounded, his retreat was cut off, and he
commanded the slave to kill him that he might not fall alive into the
hands of his enemies, after which the poor faithful fellow killed
himself, unable to bear the loss of his master. The weight of Caius'
head in gold had been promised by the Senate, and the man who found the
body was said to have taken out the brains and filled it up with lead
that his reward might be larger. Three thousand men were killed in this
riot, ten times as many as at Tiberius' death.
Opimius was so proud of having overthrown Caius, that he had a medal
struck with Hercules slaying the monsters. Cornelia, broken-hearted,
retired to a country-house; but in a few years the feeling turned,
great love was shown to the memory of the two brothers, statues were set
up in their honor, and when Cornelia herself died, her statue was
inscribed with the title she had coveted, "The mother of the Gracchi."
[Illustration: ROMAN CENTURION.]
Things were indeed growing worse and worse. The Romans were as brave as
ever in the field, and were sure in the end to conquer any nation they
came in contact with; but at home, the city was full of overgrown rich
men, with huge hosts of slaves, and of turbulent poor men, who only
cared for their citizenship for the sake of the corn they gained by it,
and the games exhibited by those who stood for a magistracy. Immense
sums were spent in hiring gladiators and bringing wild animals to be
baited for their amusement; and afterwards, when sent out to govern the
provinces, the expenses were repaid by cruel grinding and robbing the
people of the conquered states.