So far his legislation had but given an outlet to the justifiable resentment of the people, and a guarantee for the security of their most primitive rights. This was to be followed by an appeal to their interests and a measure for securing their permanent comfort. The wonderful solidarity of Gracchus and his supporters, the crowning triumph of the demagogue which is to make each man feel that he is an agent in his own salvation, have been traced to this constructive legislation for the benefit of classes, which ancient authors, writing under aristocratic prepossessions, have described by the ugly name of bribery.[602] The poor of Rome, if we include in this designation those who lived on the margin as well as those who were sunk in the depths of destitution, probably included the majority of the inhabitants of the town. The city had practically no organised industries. The retail trader and the purveyor of luxuries doubtless flourished; but, in the scanty manufactures which the capital still provided, the army of free labour must have been always worsted by the cruel competition of the cheaper and more skilful slave or freedman. But the poor of Rome did not form the cowed and shivering class that are seen on the streets of a northern capital. They were the merry and vivacious lazzaroni of the pavement and the portico, composite products of many climes, with all the lively endurance of the southerner and intellects sharpened by the ingenious devices requisite for procuring the minimum sustenance of life. Could they secure this by the desultory labour which alone was provided by the economic conditions of Rome, their lot was far from unhappy. As in most ancient civilisations, the poor were better provided with the amenities than with the bare necessities of existence. Although the vast provision for the pleasures of the people, by which the Caesars maintained their popularity, was yet lacking, and even the erection of a permanent theatre was frowned on by the senate,[603] yet the capital provided endless excitement for the leisured mind and the observant eye. It was for their benefit that the gladiatorial show was provided by the rich, and the gorgeous triumph by the State; but it was the antics of the nobility in the law courts and at the hustings that afforded the more constant and pleasing spectacle. Attendance at the Contiones and the Comitia not only delighted the eye and ear, but filled the heart with pride, and sometimes the purse with money. For here the units, inconsiderable in themselves, had become a collective power; they could shout down the most dignified of the senators, exalt the favourite of the moment, reward a service or revenge a slight in the perfect security given by the secrecy of the ballot. Large numbers of the poorer class were attached to the great houses by ancestral ties; for the descendants of freedmen, although they could make no legal claim on the house which represented the patron of their ancestors, were too valuable as voting units to be neglected by its representatives, even when the sense of the obligations of wealth, which was one of the best features of Roman civilisation, failed to provide an occasional alleviation for the misery of dependants. From a political point of view, this dependence was utterly demoralising; for it made the recipients of benefits either blind supporters of, or traitors to, the personal cause which they professed. It was on the whole preferable that, if patronage was essential, the State should take over this duty; the large body of the unattached proletariate would be placed on a level with their more fortunate brethren, and the latter would be freed from a dependence which merely served private and selfish interests. A semi-destitute proletariate can only be dealt with in three ways. They may be forced to work, encouraged to emigrate, or partially supported by the State. The first device was impossible, for it was not a submerged fraction with which Rome had to deal, but the better part of the resident sovereign body; the second, although discredited by the senate, had been tried in one form by Tiberius Gracchus and was to be attempted in another shape by Caius; but it is a remedy that can never be perfect, for it does not touch the class, more highly strung, more intelligent, and at the same time more capable of degradation, which the luxury of the capital enthrals. The last device had not yet been attempted. It remained for Gracchus to try it. We have no analysis of his motives; but many provocatives to his modest attempt at state socialism may be suggested. There was first the Hellenic ideal of the leisured and independent citizen, as exemplified by the state payments and the "distributions" which the great leaders of the old world had thought necessary for the fulfilment of democracy. There was secondly the very obvious fact that the government was reaping a golden harvest from the provinces and merely scattering a few stray grains amongst its subjects. There was thirdly the consideration that much had been done for the landed class and nothing for the city proletariate. Other considerations of a more immediate and economic character were doubtless present. The area of corn production was now small. Sicily was still perhaps beggared by its servile war, and the granary of Rome was practically to be found in Africa. The import of corn from this quarter, dependent as it was on the weather and controlled purely by considerations of the money-market, was probably fitful, and the price must have been subject to great variations. But, at this particular time, the supply must have been diminished to an alarming extent, and the price proportionately raised, by the swarm of locusts which had lately made havoc of the crops of Africa.[604] Lastly, the purely personal advantage of securing a subsidised class for the political support of the demagogue of the moment—a consideration which is but a baser interpretation of the Hellenic ideal—must have appealed to the practical politician in Gracchus as the more impersonal view appealed to the statesman. He would secure a permanent and stable constituency, and guard against the danger, which had proved fatal to his brother, of the absence from Rome of the majority of his supporters at some critical moment.

From the imperfect records of Gracchus's proposal we gather that a certain amount of corn was to be sold monthly at a reduced price to any citizen who offered himself as a purchaser.[605] The rate was fixed at 6-1/3 asses the modius, which is calculated to have been about half the market-price.[606] The monthly distribution would practically have excluded all but the urban proletariate, and would thus have both limited the operation of the relief to the poor of the city and invited an increase in its numbers. But the details of the measure, which would be decisive as to its economic character, are unknown to us. We are not told what proportion the monthly quantity of grain sold at this cheap rate bore to the total amount required for the support of a family; whether the relief was granted only to the head of a house or also to his adult sons; whether any one who claimed the rights of citizenship could appear at the monthly sale, or only those who had registered their names at some given time. The fact of registration, if it existed, might have been regarded as a stigma and might thus have limited the number of recipients. Some of the economic objections to his scheme were not unknown to Gracchus; indeed they were pressed home vigorously by his opponents. It was pointed out that he was enervating the labourer and exhausting the treasury, The validity of the first objection depends to a large extent on the unknown "data" which we have just mentioned. Gracchus may have maintained that a greater standard of comfort would be secured for the same amount of work. The second objection he was so far from admitting that he asserted that his proposal would really lighten the burdens of the Aerarium.[607] He may have taken the view that a moderate, steady and calculable loss on corn purchased in large quantities, and therefore presumably at a reduced price, would be cheaper in the end than the cost entailed by the spasmodic attempts which the State had to make in times of crisis to put grain upon the market; and there may have been some truth in the idea that, when the State became for the first time a steady purchaser, competition between the publicans of Sicily or the proprietors of Africa might greatly reduce the normal market price. He does not seem to have been disturbed by the consideration that the sale of corn below the market price at Rome was hardly the best way of helping the Italian farmer. The State would certainly buy in the cheapest market, and this was not to be found in Italy. But it is probable that under no circumstances could Rome have become the usual market for the produce of the recently established proprietors, and that, except at times of unusual scarcity in the transmarine provinces, imported corn could always have undersold that which was grown in Italy. Under the new system the Italian husbandman would find a purchaser in the State, if Sicily and Africa were visited by some injury to their crops. A vulnerable point in the Gracchan system of sale was exhibited in the fact that no inquiry was instituted as to the means of the applicants. This blemish was vigorously brought home to the legislator when the aged noble, Calpurnius Piso surnamed "the Frugal," the author of the first law that gave redress to the provincials, and a vigorous opponent of Gracchus's scheme, gravely advanced on the occasion of the first distribution and demanded his appropriate share.[608] The object lesson would be wasted on those who hold that the honourable acceptance of relief implies the universality of the gift: that the restraining influences, if they exist, should be moral and not the result of inquisition. But neither the possibility nor the necessity of discrimination would probably have been allowed by Gracchus. It would have been resented by the people, and did not appeal to the statesmanship, widely spread in the Greek and not unknown in the Roman world, which regarded it as one of the duties of a State to provide cheap food for its citizens. The lamentations of a later day over a pauperised proletariate and an exhausted treasury[609] cannot strictly be laid to the account of the original scheme, Except in so far as it served as a precedent; they were the consequence of the action of later demagogues who, instructed by Gracchus as to the mode in which an easy popularity might be secured, introduced laws which sanctioned an almost gratuitous distribution of grain. The Gracchan law contained a provision for the building of additional store-houses for the accumulation of the great reserve of corn, which was demanded by the new system of regular public sales, and the Sempronian granaries thus created remained as a witness of the originality and completeness of the tribune's work.[610]

The Roman citizen was still frequently summoned from his work, or roused from his lethargy, by the call of military service; and the practice of the conscription fostered a series of grievances, one of which had already attracted the attention of Tiberius Gracchus. Caius was bound to deal with the question: and the two provisions of his enactment which are known to us, show a spirit of moderation which neither justifies the belief that the demagogue was playing to the army, nor accredits the view that his interference relaxed the bonds of discipline amongst the legions.[611] The most scandalous anomaly in the Roman army-system was the miserable pittance earned by the conscript when the legal deductions had been made from his nominal rate of pay. His daily wage was but one-third of the denarius, or five and one-third asses a day, as it had remained unaltered from the times of the Second Punic War, in spite of the fact that the conditions of service were now wholly different and that garrison duty in the provinces for long periods of years had replaced the temporary call-to-arms which the average Italian campaign alone demanded; and from this quota was deducted the cost of the clothing which he wore and, as there is every reason to believe, of the whole of the rations which he consumed. We should have expected a radical reformer to have raised his pay or at least to have given him free food. But Gracchus contented himself with enacting that the soldier's clothing should be given him free of charge by the State.[612] Another military abuse was due to the difficulty which commanders experienced in finding efficient recruits. The young and adventurous supplied better and more willing material than those already habituated to the careless life of the streets, or already engaged in some settled occupation: and, although it is scarcely credible that boys under the age of eighteen were forced to enlist, they were certainly permitted and perhaps encouraged to join the ranks. The law of Gracchus forbade the enlistment of a recruit at an age earlier than the completion of the seventeenth year.[613] These military measures, slight in themselves, were of importance as marking the beginning of the movement by which the whole question of army reform, utterly neglected by the government, was taken up and carried out by independent representatives of the people. But a Roman army was to a large extent the creation of the executive power; and it required a military commander, not a tribune, to produce the radical alterations which alone could make the mighty instrument, which had won the empire, capable of defending it.

The last boon of Gracchus to the citizen body as a whole was a new agrarian law.[614] The necessity of such a measure was chiefly due to the suspension of the work of the agrarian commission, which had proved an obstacle to the continued execution of his brother's scheme; and there is every reason for believing that the new Sempronian law restored their judicial powers to the commissioners. But experience may have shown that the substance of Tiberius's enactment required to be supplemented or modified; and Caius adopted the procedure usually followed by a Roman legislator when he renewed a measure which had already been in operation. His law was not a brief series of amendments, but a comprehensive statute, so completely covering the ground of the earlier Sempronian law that later legislation cites the law of Caius, and not that of Tiberius Gracchus, as the authority for the regulations which had revolutionised the tenure of the public land.[615] The new provisions seem to have dealt with details rather than with principles, and there is no indication that they aimed at the acquisition of territory which had been exempted from the operation of the previous measure, or even touched the hazardous question of the rights of Rome to the land claimed by the Italian allies. We cannot attempt to define the extent to which the executive power granted by the new agrarian law was either necessary or effective. Certainly the returns of the census during the next ten years show no increase in the number of registered citizens;[616] but this circumstance may be due to the steps which were soon to be taken by the opponents of the Gracchi to nullify the results of their legislation. It is possible, however, that the new corn law may have somewhat damped the ardour of the proletariate for a life of agriculture which would have deprived them of its benefits.

The first tribunate of Caius Gracchus doubtless witnessed the completion of these four acts of legislation, by which the debt to his supporters was lavishly paid and their aid was enlisted for causes which could only indirectly be interpreted as their own. But this year probably witnessed as well the promulgation of the enactments which were to find their fulfilment in a second tribunate.[617] Foremost amongst these was one which dealt with the tenure of the judicial power as exercised, not by the magistrate, but by the panels of jurors who were interpreters both of law and fact on the standing commissions which had recently been created by statute. The interest of the masses in this question was remote. A permanent murder court seems indeed to have had its place amongst the commissions; but, even though the corruption of its president had on one occasion been clearly proved,[618] it is not likely that senatorial judges would have troubled to expose themselves to undue influences when pronouncing on the caput of a citizen of the lower class. The fact that this justice was administered by the nobility may have excited a certain degree of popular interest; but the question of the transference of the courts from the hands of the senatorial judices would probably never have been heard of, had not the largest item in this judicial competence had a decisively political bearing. The Roman State had been as unsuccessful as others of the ancient world in keeping its judicial machinery free from the taint of party influences. It had been accounted one of the surest signs of popular sovereignty that the people alone could give judgment on the gravest crimes and pronounce the capital penalty,[619] and recent political thought had perhaps wholly adapted itself to the Hellenic view that the government of a state must be swayed by the body of men that enforces criminal responsibility in political matters. This vital power was still retained by the Comitia when criminal justice was concerned with those elemental facts which are the condition of the existence of a state. The people still took cognisance of treason in all its degrees—a conception which to the Roman mind embraced almost every possible form of official maladministration—and the gloomy record of trials before the Comitia, from this time onward to the close of the Republic, shows that the weapon was exercised as the most forcible implement of political chastisement. But chance had lately presented the opportunity of making the interesting experiment of assimilating criminal jurisdiction in some of its branches to that of the civil courts. The president and jurors of one of the newly established quaestiones formed as isolated a group as the judex of civil justice with his assessors, or the greater panels of Centumvirs and Decemvirs. They possessed no authority but that of jurisdiction within their special department; there seemed no reason why they should be influenced by considerations arising from issues whether legislative or administrative. But this appearance of detachment was wholly illusory, and the well-intentioned experiment was as vain as that of Solon, when he carefully separated the administrative and judicial boards in the Athenian commonwealth and composed both bodies of practically identical individuals. The new court for the trial of extortion, constituted by the Calpurnian and renewed later by a Junian law, was controlled by a detachment of the governing body which saw in each impeachment a libel on its own system of administration, and in each condemnation a new precedent for hampering the uncontrolled power exercised in the past or coveted for the future by the individual juror. This class spirit may have been more powerful than bribery in its production of suspicious acquittals; and the fact that prosecution was frankly recognised as the commonest of party weapons, and that speeches for the prosecution and defence teemed with irrelevant political allusions, reduced the question of the guilt of the accused to subordinate proportions in the eyes of all the participants in this judicial warfare. Charges of corruption were so recklessly hurled at Rome that we can seldom estimate their validity; but the strong suspicion of bribery is almost as bad for a government as the proved offence; and it was certain that senatorial judges did not yield to the evidence which would have supplied conviction to the ordinary man. Some recent acquittals furnished an excellent text to the reformer. L. Aurelius Cotta had emerged successfully from a trial, which had been a mere duel between Scipio Aemilianus for the prosecution and Metellus Macedonicus for the defence. The judges had shown their resentment of Scipio's influence by acquitting Cotta; and few of the spectators of the struggle seem even to have pretended to believe in the innocence of the accused.[620] The whole settlement of Asia had been so tainted with the suspicion of pecuniary influences that, when Manius Aquillius successfully ran the gauntlet of the courts,[621] it was difficult to believe that the treasures of the East had not co-operated towards the result, especially as the senate itself by no means favoured some of the features of Aquillius's organisation of the province. The legates of some of the plundered dependencies were still in Rome, bemoaning the verdict and appealing for sympathy with their helpless fellow subjects[622] Circumstances favoured the reformer; it was possible to bring a definite case and to produce actual sufferers before the people; while the senate, perhaps in consequence of the attitude of some honest dissentients, was unable to make any effectual resistance to the scandal and its consequences.

Had Gracchus thought of restoring this jurisdiction to the Comitia, he would have taken a step which had the theoretical justification that, of all the powers at Rome, the people was the one which had least interest in provincial misgovernment. But it would have been a retrograde movement from the point of view of procedure; it would not necessarily have abolished senatorial influence, and it would not have attained his object of holding the government permanently in check by the political recognition of a class which rivalled the senate in the definiteness of its organisation and surpassed it in the homogeneity of its interests. The body of capitalists who had assumed the titular designation of knights, had long been chafing at the complete subjection of their commercial interests to the caprice of the provincial governor and the arbitrary dispositions of the home government. Tiberius Gracchus, when he revealed the way to the promised land, had probably reflected rather than suggested the ambition of the great business men to have a more definite place in the administration assigned them. His appeal had come too late, or seemed too hopeless of success, to win their support for a reformer who had outraged their feelings as capitalists; but since his death ten years for reflection had elapsed, and they were years which witnessed a vast extension of their potential activity, and aroused an agonised feeling of helplessness at the subordinate part which they played both to senate and people when the disposal of kingdoms was in question. The suggestions for giving them a share in the control of the provincial world may have been numerous, and their variety is reflected in the different plans which Caius Gracchus himself advanced. The system at which his brother had hinted was that of a joint board composed of the existing senators with the addition of an equal number of equites; and we have already suggested the possibility that this House of Six Hundred was intended to be the senate of the future, efficient for all purposes and not exclusively devoted to the work of criminal jurisdiction. The same significance may attach to the scheme, which seems to have been propounded by Caius Gracchus during, or perhaps even before, his first tenure of the tribunate, and appears at intervals in proposals made by reformers down to the time of Sulla. Gracchus is said to have suggested the increase of the senate by the addition of three, or, as one authority states, six hundred members of the equestrian order.[623] The proposal, if it was one for an enlarged senate, and not for a joint panel of judices, in which a changing body of equites would act as a check on the permanent senatorial jurors, must soon have been seen to be utterly unsuited to its purpose. It is a scheme characteristic of the aristocrat who is posing as a friend of the mercantile class and hopes to deceive the vigilance of that keen-sighted fraternity. To give the senate a permanent infusion of new blood would be simply to strengthen its authority, while completely cutting away the links which bound the new members to their original class. Even the swamping of the existing body by a two-thirds majority of new members would have been transitory in its effects. The new member of the Curia would soon have shed his old equestrian views and assumed the outlook of his older peers. It might indeed have been possible to devise a system by which the senate would, at the recurring intervals of the lustra, have been filled up in equal proportions from ex-magistrates and knights: and in this way a constant supply of middle-class sentiment might have been furnished to the governing body. But even this scheme would have secured to the elected a life-long tenure of power, and this was a fatal obstacle both to the intentions of the reformer and the aspirations of the equestrian order. While the former desired a balance of power, the latter wished that the interests of their class should be enforced by its genuine representatives. Both knew that a participation in the executive power was immaterial, and that all that was needed might be gained by the possession of judicial authority alone. Gracchus's final decision, therefore, was to create a wholly new panel of judices which should be made up exclusively from the members of the titular class of knights.[624]

It was not necessary or desirable that the judiciary law should make any mention of a class, or employ the courtesy title of equites to designate the new judges. The effect might be less invidiously secured by demanding qualifications which were practically identical with the social conditions requisite for the possession of titular knighthood. One of the determining factors was a property qualification, and this was possibly placed at the modest total of four hundred thousand sesterces.[625] This was the amount of capital which seems at this period to have given its possessor the right of serving on horseback in the army and therefore the claim to the title of eques, but it was a sum that did not convey alarming suggestions of government by millionaires, but rather pointed to the upper middle class as the fittest depositaries of judicial power. Not only were magistrates and ex-magistrates excluded from the Bench, but the disqualification extended to the fathers, brothers and sons of magistrates and of past or present senators. The ostensible purpose of these provisions was doubtless to ensure that the selected jurors should be bound by no tie of kindred to the individuals who would appear before their judgment seat; but they must have had the effect of excluding from the new panel many of the true knights belonging to the eighteen centuries; for this select corps was largely composed of members of the noble families. A similar effect would have been produced by the age qualification. The Gracchan jurors were to be over thirty and under sixty, while a large number of the military equites were under the former limit of age, in consequence of the practice of retiring from the corps after the attainment of the quaestorship or selection into the senate. The aristocratic element in the equestrian order, if this latter expression be used in its widest sense to include both the military and civilian knights, was thus rigorously excluded: and there remained but the men whose business interests were in no way complicated by respect for senatorial traditions. The official list of the new jurors (album judicum) was probably to be made out annually; and there is every reason to suppose that there was a considerable change of personnel at each revision, since one of the conditions of membership of the panel—residence within a mile of Rome—could hardly have been observed by business men with world-wide interests for any extended period. The conception which still prevailed that judicial service was a burden (munus), would alone have led the revising authority to free past jurors from the service: and the practice must have been welcome to the capitalists themselves, many of whom may well have desired the share of power and perhaps of profit which jurisdiction over their superiors conferred. We are told that the selection of the first panel was entrusted to the legislator himself;[626] for the future the Foreign Praetor was to draw up the annual list of four hundred and fifty who were qualified to hear cases of extortion.[627] It is not known whether this was the full number of the new jurors, or whether there were additional members selected by a different authority for the trial of other offences. It is not probable that the judiciary law of Gracchus imposed the new class of judices directly on the civil courts. The judex of private law still retained his character of an arbitrator appointed by the consent of the parties, and it would have been improper to restrict this choice to a class defined by statute. But the practical monopoly of jurisdiction in important cases, which senators seem to have acquired, was henceforth broken through, and the judex in civil suits was sometimes taken from the equestrian order.[628]

The superficial aspect of this great change seemed full of promise for the future. The ample means of the new jurors might be taken as a guarantee of their purity; their selection from the middle class, as a security of the soundness and disinterestedness of their judgments. Perhaps Gracchus himself was the victim of this hope, and believed that the scourge of the nobility which he had placed in the hands of the knights, might at least be decorously wielded. The judgment of the after-world varied as to the mode in which they exercised their power. Cicero, in advocating the claims of the order to a renewed tenure of authority, could urge that during their possession of the courts for nearly fifty years, their judgments had never been tainted by the least suspicion of corruption.[629] This was a safe assertion if suspicion is only justified by proof; for the Gracchan jurors seem to have been from the first exempted from all prosecution for bribery.[630] This legal exemption is all the more remarkable as Gracchus himself was the author of a law which permitted a criminal prosecution for a corrupt judgment.[631] It is difficult to understand the significance of this enactment, for the magistrates, against whom it was directed, were in few cases judges of fact, except in the military domain. It could not have referred to the president of a standing commission who was a mere vehicle for the judgment of the jury; but Gracchus probably contemplated the occasional revival of special commissions sanctioned by the people, and it is possible that even the two praetors who presided over the civil courts may have been subject to the operation of the law, which may not have been directed merely against corrupt sentences in criminal matters, as was subsequently the case when the law was renewed by Sulla. It is even possible that the law dates from a period anterior to the creation of the equestrian judices; but, even on this hypothesis, the exclusion of the latter from its operation was something of an anomaly; for even the civil judex of Rome, on whose analogy the jurors of the standing commissions had been created, was in early times criminally, and at a later period at least pecuniarily, liable for an unjust sentence.[632] We shall elsewhere have occasion to dwell on the value which the equestrian order attached to this immunity, and we shall see that its relief at the freedom from vexatious prosecution is of itself no sign of corruption. One of our authorities does indeed emphatically assert the ultimate prevalence of bribery in the equestrian courts:[633] and circumstances may be easily imagined which would have made this resort natural, if not inevitable. A band of capitalists eager to secure a criminal verdict, which had a purely commercial significance, would scarcely be slow to employ commercial methods with their less wealthy representatives on the Bench, and votes might have been purchased by transactions in which cash payments played no part. But the corruption of individuals was of far less moment than the solidarity of interest and collective cupidity of the mercantile order as a whole. The verdicts of the courts reflected the judgment of the Exchange. It was even possible to create a prosecution[634] simply for the purpose of damning a man who, in the exercise of his authority, had betrayed tendencies which were interpreted as hostile to capitalism.

The future war between the senate and the equites would not have been waged so furiously, had not Gracchus given his favoured class the chance of asserting a positive control, in virtue of an almost official position, over the richest domains of the Roman world. The fatal bequest of Attalus was still the plaything of parties; but the prize which Tiberius had destined for the people was used by Caius to seal his compact with the knights. The concession, which could not be openly avowed, was accomplished by means so indirect that its meaning must have escaped the majority of the voters who sanctioned it, and its consequences may not have been fully grasped by the legislator himself. The masses who applauded the new law about the province of Asia, may have seen in it but a promise of the increase of their revenues; while the desire of swelling the public finances, which he had so heavily burdened, of putting an end to the anomalous condition of a district which was neither free nor governed, neither protectorate nor province, perhaps even of meeting the wishes of some of the Asiatic provincials, who preferred regular to irregular exactions, may have been combined in the mind of Gracchus with the wish to see the equites confront the senate in yet another sphere. The change which he proposed was one concerned with the taxation of the province. It cannot be determined how far he was responsible for the infliction of new burdens on Rome's Asiatic subjects. The increase of the public revenue, of which he boasted in one of his speeches to the people,[635] the new harbour dues with which he is credited,[636] may point to certain creations of his own; but the end at which he aimed seems to have been mainly a revival of the system of taxation which had been current in the kingdom of the Attalids, accompanied by a new and, as he possibly thought, better system of collection. It could not have been he who first burdened the taxpayer with the payment of tithes; for this method of revenue was of immense antiquity in all Hellenised lands and is not likely to have been unknown to the kings of Pergamon. It is a method that, from its elastic nature, bears less heavily on the agriculturist than that of a direct impost; for the payment is conditioned by the size of the crops and is independent of the changing value of money. The chief objection to the tax, considered in itself and apart from its accompanying circumstances, was the immensity of the revenue which it yielded; the sums exacted by an Oriental despot were unnecessary for the economical administration of Rome; and the Roman administration of half a century earlier might have reduced the tithe to a twentieth as it had actually cut down the taxes of Macedonia to one-half of their original amount. Sicily, indeed, furnished an example of the tithe system; but the expenses of a government decrease in proportion to the area of administration, and Sicily could not furnish the ample harbour dues and other payments in money, which should have made the commercial wealth of Asia lighten the burden on the holder of land. The rating of the new province was, in fact, an admission of a change in the theory of imperial taxation. Asia was not merely to be self-supporting; her revenues were to yield a surplus which should supplement the deficit of other lands, or aid in the support of the proletariate of the capital.

The realisation of this principle may not have imposed heavier burdens than Asia had known in the time of her kings. But the fiction that the new dependency was to be maintained in a state of "freedom," which even after the downfall of Aristonicus seems to have exercised some influence on Roman policy, had led to a suspension of regular taxation for the purposes of the central government, which caused the Gracchan proposals to be regarded by certain political circles at Rome in the light of a novelty, and probably of a hardship.[637] They could hardly have borne either character to the Asiatic provincials themselves. The war indemnities and exactions which followed the great struggle, must have been a more grievous burden than the system of taxation to which they were inured: and it is incredible that during the six years which had elapsed since the suppression of the revolt, or even the three years that had passed since the completion of Aquillius's organisation, no revenues had been raised by Rome from her new subjects for administrative purposes. They probably had been raised, but in a manner exasperating because irregular. What was needed was a methodical system, which should abolish at once the fiction of "freedom" and the reality of the exactions meted out at the caprice of the governor of the moment. Such a system was supplied by Gracchus, and it was doubtless reached by the application of the characteristic Roman method of maintaining, whether for good or ill, the principles of organisation which were already in existence in the new dependency.

The novelty of the Gracchan system lay, not in the manner of taxation, but in the method adopted for securing the returns. The greatest obstacle to the tithe system is the difficulty of instituting an efficient method of collection. To gather in taxes which are paid in kind and to dispose of them to the best advantage, is a heavy burden for a municipality. The desire for a system of contract is sure to arise, and in an Empire the efficient contractor is more likely to be found in the central state than in any of its dependencies. It was of this feeling that Gracchus took advantage when he enacted that the taxes of Asia should be put up for auction at Rome,[638] and that the whole province should be regarded as a single area of taxation at the great auction which the censor held in the capital. It was certain that no foreign competition could prevail in this sale of a kingdom's revenues. The right to gather in the tithes could be purchased only by a powerful company of Roman capitalists. The Decumani of Asia would represent the heart and brain of the mercantile body; they would form a senate and a Principate amongst the Publicani.[639] They would flood the province with their local directors, their agents and their freedmen; and each station would become a centre for a banking business which would involve individuals and cities in a debt, of which the tithe was but a fraction. Nor need their operations be confined to the dominions of Rome; they would spread over Phrygia, rendered helpless by the gift of freedom, and creep into the realms of the neighbouring protected kings, safe in the knowledge that the magic name of "citizen of Rome" was a cover to the most doubtful transaction and a safeguard against the slightest punishment. The collectors were liable to no penalties for extortion, for that crime could be committed only by a Roman magistrate: and their possession of the courts enabled them to raise the spectre of conviction on this very charge before the eyes of any governor who might attempt to check the devastating march of the battalions of commerce.

As merchants and bankers the Knights would be sufficiently protected by the judicial powers of their class; but their operations as speculators in tithes needed another safeguard. The contracts made with the censor would extend over a period of five years, and the keenness of the competing companies would generally ensure to the State the promise of an enormous sum for the privilege of farming the taxes. But the tithe might be reduced in value by a bad harvest or the ravages of war, and the successful company might overreach itself in its eagerness to secure the contract. The power of revising such bargains had once assured to the senate the securest hold which it possessed over the mercantile class.[640] This complete dependence was now to be removed, and Gracchus, while not taking the power of decision from the senate, formulated in his law certain principles of remission which it was expected to observe.[641]

By these indirect and seemingly innocent changes in the relations of the mercantile order to the senate, a new balance of power had been created in the State. The Republic, according to the reflection of a later writer, had been given two heads,[642] and this new Janus, more ominous than the old, was believed to be the harbinger of deadly conflict between the rival powers. In moments of calm Gracchus may have believed that his reforms were but a renewed illustration of that genius for compromise out of which the Roman constitution had grown, and that he had but created new and necessary defences against a recently developed absolutism; but, in the heat of the conflict into which he was soon plunged, his vindictive fancy saw but the gloomier aspect of his new creation, and he boasted that the struggle for the courts was a dagger which he had hurled into the Forum, an instrument which the possessor would use to mangle the body of his opponent.[643]

But even these limitations of senatorial prerogative were not deemed sufficient. A proposal was made which had the ingenious scope of limiting the senate's control over the more important provinces in favour of the magistrates, the equestrian order and the people. One of the most valuable items of patronage which the senate possessed was the assignment of the consular provinces. They claimed the right of deciding which of the annual commands without the walls should be reserved for the consuls of the year, and by their disposition in this matter could reward a favourite with wealth or power, and condemn a political opponent to impotence or barren exile. This power had long been employed as a means of coercing the two chief magistrates into obedience to the senate's will, and the equestrian order must have viewed with some alarm the possibility of Asia becoming the prize of the candidates favoured by the nobility. Had Gracchus declared that the direct election to provincial commands should henceforth be in the hands of the people, the change would have been but a slight departure from an admitted constitutional precedent; for there is little more than a technical difference between electing a man for an already ascertained sphere of operations, as had been done in the cases of Terentius Varro and the two Scipios during the Punic wars, and attaching a special command to an individual already elected. But Gracchus preferred the traditional and indirect method. He did not question the right of the senate to decide what provinces should be assigned to the consuls, but he enacted that this decision should be made before these magistrates were elected to office.[644] The people would thus, in their annual choice of the highest magistrates, be electing not only to a sphere of administration at home, but to definite foreign commands as well; the prize which the senate had hitherto bestowed would be indirectly the people's gift, and the nominees of the Comitia would find themselves in possession of departments which were presumably the most important that lay at the disposal of the senate. To secure the finality of the arrangement made by the senate, and to prevent this body subsequently reversing an awkward assignment to which it had unwittingly committed itself, Gracchus ordained that the tribunician veto should not be employed against the senate's decision as to what provinces should be reserved for the future consuls;[645] for he knew that the tribune was often the instrument of the government, and that the suspensory veto of this magistrate could cause the question of assignment to drag on until after the consuls were elected, and thus restore to the senate its ancient right of patronage. The change, although it produced the desired results of freeing the magistrates from subservience, the mercantile order from a reasonable fear, and the people from the pain of seeing their favourite nominee rendered useless for the purposes for which he was appointed, cannot be said to have added anything to the efficiency of provincial administration. It may even be regarded as a retrograde step, as the commencement of that system of routine in provincial appointments, which regarded proved capacity for the government and defence of the subjects of Rome as the last qualification necessary for foreign command. The senate in its award may often have been swayed by unworthy motives; but it was sometimes moved by patriotic fears. Of the two consuls it might send the one of tried military ability to a province threatened by war and dismiss the mere politician to a peaceful district. But now, without any regard to present conditions or future contingencies, it was forced to assign departments to men whose very names were unknown. The people, in the exercise of their elective power, were acting almost as blindly as the senate; for the issues of a Roman election were often so ill-defined, its cross-currents, due to personal influence and the power of the canvass, so strong and perplexing, that it was rarely possible to predict the issue of the poll. On the other hand, if there was a candidate so eminent that his return could be predicted as a certainty, the senate might assign some insignificant spheres of administration as the provinces of the future consuls; and thus, in the one case where the decision might be influenced by knowledge and reason, the Gracchan law was liable to defeat its own ends. A further weakness of the enactment, from the point of view of efficiency, was that it made no attempt to alter the mode in which the designated provinces were to be occupied by their claimants. If the consuls could not come to an agreement as to which provincia each should hold, the chance of the lot still decided a question on which the future fortunes of the empire might turn.

It is a relief to turn from this work of demolition, which in spite of its many justifications is pervaded by a vindictive suspicion, to some great constructive efforts by which Gracchus proved himself an enlightened and disinterested social reformer. He did not view agrarian assignation as an alternative to colonisation, but recognised that the industrial spirit might be awakened by new settlements on sites favourable to commerce, as the agricultural interest had been aroused by the planting of settlers on the desolated lands. Gracchus was, indeed, not the first statesman to employ colonisation as a remedy for social evils; for economic distress and the hunger for land had played their part from the earliest times in the military settlements which Rome had scattered over Italy. But down to his time strategic had preponderated over industrial motives, and he was the first to suggest that colonisation might be made a means of relief for the better classes of the urban proletariate, whose activities were cramped and whose energies were stifled by the crowded life and heated atmosphere of the city. His settlers were to be carefully selected. They were actually to be men who could stand the test of an investigation into character.[646] It seems clear that the new opportunities were offered to men of the lower middle class, to traders of cramped means or of broken fortunes. His other proteges had been cared for in other ways; the urban masses who lived on the margin of destitution had been assisted by the corn law, and the sturdy son of toil could look for help to the agrarian commission. Of the many settlements which he projected for Italy,[647] two which were actually established during his second tribunate[648] occupied maritime positions favourable for commerce. Scylacium, on the bay which lies southward of the Iapygian promontory, was intended to revivify a decayed Greek settlement and to reawaken the industries of the desolated Bruttian coast; while Neptunia was seemingly the name of the new entrepot which he founded at the head of the Tarentine Gulf. It was apparently established on the land which Rome had wrested from Tarentum, and may have originally formed a town distinct from this Greek city, once the great seaport of Calabria, but retaining little of its former greatness since its partial destruction in the Punic wars.[649] Its Hellenism was on the wane, and this decline in its native civilisation may account for the fact that the new and the old foundations seem eventually to have been merged into one, and that Tarentum could receive a purely Latin constitution after the close of the Social War.[650] Its purple fisheries and rich wine-producing territory were worthy objects of the enterprise of Gracchus. Capua was a still greater disgrace to the Roman administration than Tarentum. Its fertile lands were indeed cultivated by lessees of Rome and yielded a large annual produce to the State. But the unredeemed site, on which had stood the pride of Southern Italy, was still a lamentable witness to the jealousy of the conqueror. Here Gracchus proposed to place a settlement[651] which through its commercial promise might amply have compensated for a loss of a portion of the State's domain. Neither he nor his brother had ever threatened the distribution of the territory of Capua, and it is, therefore, probable that in this case he did not contemplate a large agricultural foundation, but rather one that might serve better than the existing village to focus the commerce of the Campanian plain. But the revenue from the domain, and the jealousy of Rome's old and powerful rival, which might be awakened in all classes, were strong weapons in the hands of his opponents, and the renewal of Capua was destined to be the work of a later and more fortunate leader of the party of reform. The colonising effort of Gracchus was plainly one that had the regeneration of Italy, as well as the satisfaction of distressed burgesses, as its object; none of the three sites, on which he proposed to establish his communes of citizens, possessed at the time an urban centre capable of utilising the vast possibilities of the area in which it was placed. But this twofold object was not to be limited to Italy. He dreamed of transmarine enterprise taking a more solid and more generally useful form than that furnished by the vagrant trader or the local agent of the capitalist.[652] The idea and practice of colonisation across the sea were indeed no new ones; isolated foundations for military purposes, such as Palma and Pollentia in the Balearic Isles, were being planted by the direction of the government. But these were small settlements intended to serve a narrow purpose; they doubtless spread Roman customs and formed a basis for Roman trade; but, if these motives had entered into their foundation, the experiment would have been tried on a far larger scale. In truth the idea of permanent settlement beyond the seas did not appeal either to the Roman character or to the political theories of the governing classes. It is questionable whether an imperial people, forming but a tiny minority amongst its subjects, and easily reaping the fruits of its conquests, could ever take kindly to the adventure, the initial hardships, and the lasting exclusion from the dazzling life of the capital, which are implied in permanent residence abroad. The Roman in pursuit of gain was a restless spirit, who would voyage to any land that was, or was likely to be, under imperial control, establish his banking house and villa under any clime, and be content to spend the most active years of his life in the exploitation of the alien; but to him it was a living truth that all roads led to Rome. The city was the nucleus of enterprise, the heart of commerce; and such sentiment as the trader possessed was centred on the commercial life of the Forum and the political devices on which it fed. Such a spirit is not, favourable to true colonisation, which implies a detachment from the affairs of the mother city; and it was not by this means, but rather by the spontaneous evolution of natural centres for the teeming Italian immigrants already settled in the provinces, that the Romanisation of the world was ultimately assisted. Consequently no great pressure had ever been put on the government to induce it to relax the principles which led it to look with indifference or disfavour on the foundation of Roman settlements abroad. There was probably a fear that the establishment of communities of Roman citizens in the provinces might awaken the desire of the subject states to participate in Roman rights. It was deemed better that the highest goal of the provincial's ambition should be the freedom of his state, and that he should never dream of that absorption into the ruling body to which the Italian alone was permitted to aspire. Added to this maxim of statecraft was one of those curious superstitions which play so large a part in imperial politics and attain a show of truth from the superficial reading of history. It was pointed out by the wise that colonies had often proved more potent than their parent states, that Carthage had surpassed Tyre, Massilia Phocaea, Syracuse Corinth, and Cyzicus Miletus. In the same way a daughter of Rome might wax greater than her mother, and the city that governed Italy might be powerless to cope with a rebellious dependency in the provinces.[653] This was not altogether an idle fear in the earlier days of conquest; for at any period before the war with Pyrrhus a transmarine city of Italian blood and customs might have proved a formidable rival. Nor at the stage which the empire had reached at the time of Gracchus was it without its justification; for Rome was by no means a convenient centre for a government that ruled in Asia as well as in Europe. It is more likely that the dread of rivalry was due to the singular defects of the aspect and environment of Rome, of which its citizens were acutely conscious, rather than to the awkwardness of its geographical position; but, had the latter deficiency been realised, it would be unfair to criticise the narrowness of view which failed to see that the change of a capital does not necessarily involve the surrender of a government. But, whether the objections implied in this superstition were shadowy or well defined, they could not have been lessened by the choice which was made by Gracchus and his friends of the site for their new transmarine settlement. It was none other than Carthage, the city which had been destroyed because the blessings of nature had made a mockery of conquest, the city that, if revived, would be the centre of the granary of Rome. A proposal for the renewal of Carthage under the name of Junonia was formulated by Rubrius, one of the colleagues of Gracchus in his first tribunate.[654] The number of the colonists, which was less than six thousand, was specified in the enactment, and the proportion of the emigrants to the immense territory at his disposal rendered it possible for the legislator to assign unusually large allotments of land. A better and an inferior class of settlers were apparently distinguished, the former of whom were to hold no less than two hundred jugera apiece.[655] The recipients of all allotments were to maintain them in absolute ownership, a system of tenure which had hitherto been confined to Italy being thus extended to provincial soil.[656] Caius Gracchus and Fulvius Flaccus were named amongst the triumvirs who were to establish the new colony.[657] It is probable that Roman citizens were alone considered eligible for the colonies both in Italy and abroad, when these foundations were first proposed, and that it was not until Gracchus had embarked on his enterprise of enfranchising the Latins, that he allowed them to participate in the benefits of his colonial schemes and thus indirectly acquire full Roman citizenship.

But the commercial life of Italy might be quickened by other means than the establishment of colonies whether at home or abroad. Gracchus saw that the question of rapid and easy communication between the existing towns was all important. The great roads of Rome betrayed their military intent in the unswerving inflexibility of their course. The positions which they skirted were of strategic, but not necessarily of industrial, importance. To bring the hamlet into connection with the township, and the township into touch with the capital, a series of good cross-roads was needed; and it was probably to this object that the law of Gracchus[658] was directed. But ease of communication may serve a political as well as a commercial object. The representative character of the Comitia would be increased by the provision of facilities for the journey to Rome; and perhaps when Gracchus promulgated his measure, there was already before his mind the possibility of the extension of the franchise to the Latins, which would vastly increase the numbers of the rural electorate. In any case, the measure was one which tended to political centralisation, and Gracchus must have known that the attainment of this object was essential to the unity and stability of a popular government.

The great enterprise was carried through with extraordinary rapidity during his second tribunate. But the hastiness of the construction did not impair the beauty of the work. We are told that the roads ran straight and fair through the country districts, showing an even surface of quarried stone and tight-packed earth. Hollows were filled up, ravines and torrent beds were bridged, and mounting-blocks for horsemen lay at short and easy distances on both sides of the level course.[659] Although the initial expense of this construction may have borne heavily on the finances of the State, it is probable that the future maintenance of the roads was provided for in other ways. The commerce which they fostered may have paid its dues at toll-gates erected for the purpose:[660] and the ancient Roman device of creating a class of settlers on the line of a public road, for the purpose of keeping it in repair,[661] was probably extended. Road-making was often the complement of agrarian assignation,[662] and the two may have been employed concurrently by Gracchus. It was the custom to assign public land on the borders of a highway to settlers, the tenure of which was secured to them and their heirs on condition of keeping the road in due repair. Sometimes their own labour and that of their slaves were reckoned the equivalent of the usual dues; at other times the dues themselves were used by the public authorities for the purpose. Gracchus may thus have turned his agrarian law to an end which was not contemplated by that of Tiberius.

The execution of the law must have been a heavy blow to the power and prestige of the senate. Its control of the purse was infringed and it ceased to be the sole employer of public labour. For Gracchus, in defiance of the principle that the author of a measure should not be its executant,[663] was his own road-maker, as his brother Tiberius had been his own land commissioner. He was the patron of the contractor and the benefactor of the Italian artisan. The bounties which he now gave were the reward of labour, and not subject to the criticism which had attended his earlier efforts for the relief of poverty in Rome; but some pretended to take the sinister view that the bands of workmen by which he was surrounded might be employed for a less innocent purpose than the making of roads.[664].

The proceedings of Gracchus during his first year of office had made it inevitable that he should hold the tribunate for a second time. Enough had been performed to win him the ardent support of the masses; enough had been promised to make his return to office desirable, not only to the people, but to the expectant capitalists. The legal hindrances to re-election had been removed, or could be evaded, and the continuity of power, which was essential to the realisation of an adequate programme of reform, could now for the first time be secured. In the present state of public feeling there was little probability of the veto being employed by any one of his future colleagues, although some of these would inevitably be moderates or members of the senatorial party. But Gracchus was eager that his cause should be represented in another department of the State, which presented possibilities of assistance or of mischief, and that the spectacle of the tribunate as the sole focus of democratic sentiment, exalting itself in opposition to the higher magistracies of the people, should, if possible, be averted. In one of his addresses to the commons he said he had to ask a favour of them. Were it granted, he would value it above all things; should they think good to refuse, he would bear no grudge against them. Here he paused; the favour remained undisclosed; and he left popular imagination to revel in the possibilities of his claims. It was a happy stroke; for he had filled the minds of his auditors with a gratifying sense of their own boundless power, and with suspicions of illegal ambitions, with which it was well that they should become familiar, but which one dramatic moment would for the time dispel. His words were interpreted as a request for the consulship: and the prevalent opinion is said to have been that he desired to hold this office in combination with the tribunate. The time for the consular elections was approaching and expectation was roused to its highest pitch, when Gracchus was seen conducting Gaius Fannius into the Forum and, with the assistance of his own friends, accosting the electors in his behalf.[665] The candidate was a man whose political temperament Caius had had full opportunities of studying. As a tribune he had been much under the influence of Scipio Aemilianus,[666] and as he rose slowly through the grades of curule rank,[667] he must still have retained his character as a moderate. He was therefore preferable to any candidate put forward by the optimates: and the influence of Gracchus secured Fannius the consulship almost at the moment when, without the trouble of a canvass or even of a formal candidature, he himself secured his second term of office. His position was further strengthened by the return of the ex-consul Fulvius Flaccus, as one of his colleagues in the tribunate.

It was now, when the grand programme was actually being carried through, and the execution of the most varied measures was being pressed on by a single hand, that the possibilities of personal government were first revealed in Rome. The fiery orator was less to be dreaded than the unwearied man of action, whose restless energy was controlled by a clearness of judgment and concentration of purpose, which could distinguish every item of his vast sphere of administration and treat the task of the moment as though it were the one nearest to his heart. Even those who hated and feared Gracchus were struck with amazement at the practical genius which he revealed; while the sight of the leader in the midst of his countless tasks, surrounded by the motley retinue which they involved, roused the wondering admiration of the masses.[668] At one moment he was being interviewed by a contractor for public works, at another by an envoy from some state eager to secure his mediation; the magistrate, the artisan, the soldier and the man of letters besieged his presence chamber, and each was received with the appropriate word and the kindly dignity, which kings may acquire from training, but men of kingly nature receive from heaven as a seal of their fitness to rule. The impression of overbearing violence which had been given by his speeches, was immediately dispelled by contact with the man. The time of storm and stress had been passed for the moment, and in the fruition of his temporary power the true character of Gracchus was revealed. The pure intellectual enjoyment which springs from the sense of efficiency and the effective pursuit of a long-desired task, will not be shaken by the awkward impediments of the moment. All the human instruments, which the work demands, reflect the value of the object to which they contribute: and Gracchus was saved from the insolent pride of the patrician ruler and the helpless peevishness of the mere agitator whom circumstances have thrust into power, by the fact that his emotional nature was mastered by an intellect which had outlived prejudice and had never known the sense of incapacity. By the very character of its circumstances the regal nature was forced into a style of life which resembled and foreshadowed that of the coming monarchy. The accessibility to his friends and clients of every grade was the pride of the Roman noble, and doubtless Gracchus would willingly have modelled his receptions on the informal pattern which sufficed the proudest patrician at the head of the largest clientele. But Gracchus's callers were not even limited to the whole of Rome; they came from Italy and the provinces: and it was found to be essential to adopt some rules of precedence, which would produce a methodical approach to his presence and secure each of his visitors an adequate hearing. He was the first Roman, we are told, to observe certain rules of audience. Some members of the crowd which thronged his ante-chamber, were received singly, others in smaller or in larger groups.[669] It is improbable that the mode of reception varied wholly with the official or social rank of those admitted; the nature of the client's business must also have dictated the secrecy or publicity of the interview; but the system must have seemed to his baffled enemies a welcome confirmation of their real or pretended fears—a symptom of the coming, if not actual, overthrow of Republicanism, the suspicion of which might one day be driven even into the thick heads of the gaping crowds, who stood by the portals to gaze at the ever-shifting throng of callers and to marvel at the power and popularity of their leader. Had Gracchus been content to live in the present and to regard his task as completed, it is just possible that the diverse interests which he had so dexterously welded together might have enabled him to secure, not indeed a continuity of power (for that would have been as strenuously resisted by the middle as by the upper class), but immediate security from the gathering conspiracy, the preservation of his life, and the probability of a subsequent political career. It is, however, difficult, to conceive that the position which Gracchus held could be either resigned or forgiven; and, although we cannot credit him with any conscious desire for holding a position not admitted by the laws, yet his genius unconsciously led him to identify the commonwealth with himself, while his mind, as receptive as it was progressive, would not have readily acquiesced in the view that a political creation can at any moment be called complete. The disinterested statesman will cling to power as tenaciously as one devoured by the most sordid ambition: and even on the lowest ground of personal security, the possession of authority is perhaps more necessary to the one than to the other. So indissolubly blended are the power and the projects of a leader, that it is idle to raise the question whether personal motives played any part in the project with which Gracchus was now about to delight his enemies and alienate his friends. He took up anew the question of the enfranchisement of the Italians—a question which the merest political tyro could have told him was enough to doom the statesman who spoke even a word in its favour. But Caius's position was no ordinary one, and he may have regarded his present influence as sufficient to induce the people to accept the unpalatable measure, the success of which might win for himself and his successors a wider constituency and a more stable following. The error in judgment is excusable in one who had never veiled his sympathy with the Italian cause, and had hitherto found it no hindrance to his popularity; but so clear-sighted a man as Gracchus must have felt at times that he was staking, not only his own career, but the fate of the programme and the party which he had built up, on the chance of securing an end, which had ceased to be regarded as the mere removal of an obstacle and had grown to be looked on as the coping-stone of a true reformer's work.

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 protege, 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.