settled themselves in the provinces, and contributed to circulate the lifeblood of Italy throughout the empire. If the legions ceased to be recruited from Italy herself, they were still replenished from the mass of the Italians and Romans who constituted the ruling race in Greece and Africa and Asia Minor. The casual observations we are apt to make on the movement of population are commonly delusive when we are destitute of actual enumeration to guide and check us. It must, however, be admitted that a tremendous change was actually taking place at this time in the occupation of Italy, although this may be traced partly to natural causes, which no political action could have effectively controlled. It was common at the same period to other countries very differently circumstanced. The poverty of Greece experienced it perhaps as much as the wealth of Italy. These two peninsulas, which project so deeply into the Mediterranean, had both been famous at an earlier period for their crops of grain, and the dense population they nourished at the foot of their rugged mountains. But that was a time when both these regions were divided into numerous petty states, and occupations of land were necessarily small. Both, however, were peculiarly adapted to the nurture of cattle. They abounded in cool pastures among the mountains for the summer, and warmer tracts of level land for the winter. As soon as political restrictions were shaken off properties became enlarged, and embraced tracts of both hill and plain together. Then first these countries began to reap the fruits of their natural capabilities. Proprietors found it their interest to breed cattle in greater numbers, and to reduce in the same proportion their cultivation of grain. An attempt to check by legislation the course of this natural process could hardly fail to be attended with disastrous consequences.

The problem, indeed, admitted of no peaceable solution. To restrain the free cultivation of Italy by the assignment of lands to a few thousand free proprietors was a chimera. To leave the soil to the cultivation of slaves was to perpetuate and intensify a plaguespot which could not fail to issue in the corruption of the whole body. But the emancipation of the servile caste and the abolition of slavery were ideas entirely beyond the scope of the political reasoning of the ancients. Plato and Aristotle had attempted to defend the principle of slavery, but since their time it had been thought better to accept it as a fact and a necessity, but make no pretence of justifying it. The outbreak of the slaves in Sicily at this moment might serve to enhance the anxiety of Tiberius Gracchus, but the mass of his countrymen drew from it no political lesson whatever. They regarded their slaves as their actual enemies hardly less than the Gauls or the Carthaginians, and they resented their revolt and nerved themselves to repress it with the same

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determination with which they would have asserted their empire against the attack of a foreign invader. Often, indeed, had the Roman master been thus attacked by the slaves of his own household. The law had armed him with full authority to control and punish them, and this authority he still maintained by ever-increasing severity. But the revolt of Eunus, in Sicily, was a rebellion on a national scale. Throughout the whole of the island the slaves rose by hundreds of thousands. Among them there were men of intelligence and education as well as of active bravery; but the pretensions which their leader made to magical powers seem to show that he depended more on the energy of brutal fanaticism than on the higher qualities of civilized men. The policy of the Roman masters had always been to deprive their slaves of the means of concert among themselves, and they were now successful on a large scale, as they had so constantly been on a smaller. The insurgents gained, indeed, some victories over the generals who were first sent to repress them, but they were unable to maintain a campaign against practiced troops and leaders. After a year of desolating riots the revolt was finally put down; the decimated slaves were reduced to a condition worse, perhaps, than before, and things went on in their accustomed course of suffering on one side and insecurity on the other.

But Tiberius regarded the policy of his countrymen from another point of view also. His aims for the elevation of the lower class of citizens, by giving them the status of landed proprietors, embraced at the same time the depression of the magnates of the aristocracy. He observed the gulf that was ever widening between the two classes of the nobles and the commons: the one constantly enriched by the appropriation of political office, which was the surest road to wealth; the other kept in poverty and idleness by the contempt which as a nation of warriors it felt, and was encouraged to feel, for the lucrative pursuits of commercial enterprise. The nobles, who for the sake of their own monopoly encouraged and pandered to this prejudice, were content to nourish it by a stream of perpetual largesses, which the people mistook for generous liberality. Here again the young reformer mistook the real character of the evil which he wished to counteract. He might be shocked to hear the calculation made that the mass of free citizens amounted to 400,000, while of all this number not more than 2000 could be designated as men of property-as, at least, was asserted some years later; but it could have been of little avail to confer small portions of land upon 20,000 more. The evil would have soon recurred with unabated virulence. He should have aimed at opening the career of honors to a large number of citizens, and of honorable commerce to all. The first of these courses

was urged and, indeed, effected by the demagogues who succeeded him; the latter was ultimately brought into play by the force of circumstances, and the elevation of the knights and the publicans in the social scale, which resulted from the one and the other, was, in fact, the most beneficial revolution in the history of Rome. But the time was not yet come. The aristocracy was now allpowerful, and it was inspired with a vigorous determination to remain so.

There were two roads at Rome to honor and influence. The one lay through the ordinary course of the public magistracies, for which any citizen, indeed, was competent to sue, though none but men of birth and connections had ordinarily a chance of success. With these advantages Tiberius was richly endowed. He had reached the age when he might seek and enjoy the quæstorship; the next step would make him ædile; from thence he might in due time attain the prætorship; and lastly, but not before his forty-third year, the consulship. In the course of such a career many opportunities might occur for introducing salutary measures of reform. But it was a slow career; its success might be precarious. Tiberius was impatient. As a plebeian he was eligible at once to the tribuneship, which would give him power equal in some respects to the consulship itself, for it would enable him both to propose the most important measures himself, and by his single veto to frustrate the measures of his opponents in the highest magistracies. Further, it would confer upon him personal inviola bility-a security much needed in the violent struggles which in violent hands it was calculated to provoke. Tiberius sued for the tribuneship, and the people, already aware of the ends he had in view, elected him with acclamation, and encouraged him to pursue them, and recover the public land for the poor citizens.

The young reformer immediately proposed the revival of the Licinian law, limiting the possession of public domain to the exU.C. 621. tent of 500 jugera. He allowed, indeed, a certain addiB.C. 133. tional assignment to proprietors who had children, and he devised some measure for the indemnification of those who were at once to be deprived of their actual occupations. The enactment was no doubt within the terms of the existing law, and from the strictly legal point of view might seem even moderate and indulgent; but as a measure of practical justice it must fairly be regarded as harsh and illiberal, while its expediency was even more questionable, for it plainly could not be carried against the prejudices and interests of the great landholders without a violent revolution. Long and fierce were the debates that ensued; but the question could not fail to be removed from the region of debate, and the voice of reason became drowned in the clamor of

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the populace. Then the Senate resorted to the means it had of defeating an obnoxious tribune by securing the veto of one of his colleagues. A tribune named Octavius was prevailed upon thus to interfere. Tiberius was roused to fury, and obtained from the assembly of the tribes the expulsion of his opponent from office. A riot ensued, in which Octavius was wounded as well as defeated. Tiberius himself, with his brother Caius and his father-in-law Appius Claudius, were nominated triumvirs for carrying his measure, the lex Sempronia, into effect.

This commission, however, proved disastrous to the cause. The young tribune had, perhaps, been too moderate in his proposed enactment. A simpler and more arbitrary measure would have been easier to carry into execution. The provisions for compensation were complicated, and required time and patience. The nobles took advantage of the delay, and had recourse to the old artifice, which had succeeded against a Cassius, a Manlius, and a Mælius, of instilling into the minds of the people a prejudice against their champion. They insinuated that he had accepted a diadem and purple robe as presents from foreign emissaries, and they drove him in return to strengthen himself by the lavish distribution among the people of the treasures bequeathed to the state by Attalus, king of Pergamus. The decree for this purpose, proposed by a tribune and carried by the tribes, was a glaring encroachment upon the legal prerogative of the Senate. Again the nobles retaliated; again Tiberius joined issue with them. He proposed to admit the knights to a place in the tribunals with the senators. The privilege of presiding at political trials was highly valued and coveted. It gave influence; perhaps it led to the attainment of still more tangible advantages. It conferred authority over the lives and fortunes of the highest servants of the state, if impeached by the agents of faction; and doubtless it became, in the growing corruption of the times, an instrument for the extortion of pecuniary payments. Whether or not the knights should sit in the Judicia became from this time forth one of the urgent questions of the age.

Time went on; the tribune must vacate his office in due season, and then his person would be no longer protected. It was necessary for him to obtain a renewal of his term. He demanded reelection for the following year. The nobles exclaimed that the re-election would be illegal. Tumults again ensued. The partisans of Tiberius were broken in force; many of them were engaged with their harvests in the country. Amid the confusion Tiberius called on his friends to help him, and raised, it was said, his hand to his head to guard it from blow or menace. "He demands the diadem," exclaimed his opponents. Scipio Nasica,

a chief of the nobles, the foremost man of the time, urged the consul Scævola to slay the tyrant, as the patriot consuls had done before him. When he hesitated, Scipio himself leaped forward, throwing the skirt of his toga over his head, as one about to perform an act of sacrifice, and called on the citizens to avenge themselves upon the traitor. A conflict ensued, in which some lives were lost by blows, some by falling over the edge of the Tarpeian rock; for the tumult had been shifted from the comitia to the Capitol. Tiberius sought refuge in the temple of Jupiter, but the doors were closed against him by the priests. He stumbled over a dead body, and before he could recover himself was struck with a club by Saturninus, one of his own treacherous colleagues in the tribuneship. Thus assailed he was soon despatched, and as many as three hundred of his partisans perished in the fray. Their corpses were dragged ignominiously to the Tiber and cast into the stream. This was the first blood shed in the civil disturbances of the republic. It was but the beginning of bloodshed and of the wars of citizen against citizen which distracted her during the century that still intervened before she could be transformed into an empire.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Scipio Emilianus defends the interests of the nobles against the claims of the commons.-The Italian states seek to force themselves into the privileges of the Roman aristocracy, and choose Scipio as their champion.— His mysterious death.-The commons undertake the cause of the Italians. Caius Gracchus, tribune of the people, advocates an agrarian law, and other measures in the interest of the commons.-He founds colonies at Capua, Tarentum, and Carthage. The Senate arms the consul Opimius with extraordinary powers, and he is overthrown and slain. (B.C. 130-121.)

THE nobles had effected the destruction of their enemy, and had cast a slur upon his memory. To this slander, indeed, the people might attach little importance; but their views were baffled by the inherent difficulties of the measure which their champion had effected. Appius Claudius died about this time, and the places of the deceased triumvirs were supplied by M. Fulvius Flaccus and C. Papirius Carbo. The attempts they still made to put the new law in force served only to increase their embarrassments. Every partition they proposed was parried by excuses and evasions. The occupiers resisted, documents were lost, limitations were contested. The tribunes, some hostile, others lukewarm, gave no aid to the