ul in 614), Scipio's elder friend and
his political instructor and confidant, had conceived the plan of
proposing the resumption of the Italian domain-land which had not
been given away but had been temporarily occupied, and of giving
relief by its distribution to the visibly decaying Italian farmers;
but he desisted from the project when he saw what a storm he was
going to raise, and was thenceforth named the "Judicious." Scipio was
of the same opinion. He was fully persuaded of the greatness of the
evil, and with a courage deserving of honour he without respect of
persons remorselessly assailed it and carried his point, where he
risked himself alone; but he was also persuaded that the country
could only be relieved at the price of a revolution similar to that
which in the fourth and fifth centuries had sprung out of the question
of reform, and, rightly or wrongly, the remedy seemed to him worse than
the disease. So with the small circle of his friends he held a middle
position between the aristocrats, who never forgave him for his advocacy
of the Cassian law, and the democrats, whom he neither satisfied nor
wished to satisfy; solitary during his life, praised after his death
by both parties, now as the champion of the aristocracy, now as
the promoter of reform. Down to his time the censors on laying
down their office had called upon the gods to grant greater power
and glory to the state: the censor Scipio prayed that they might
deign to preserve the state. His whole confession of faith lies
in that painful exclamation.

Tiberius Gracchus

But where the man who had twice led the Roman army from deep decline
to victory despaired, a youth without achievements had the boldness to
give himself forth as the saviour of Italy. He was called Tiberius
Sempronius Gracchus (591-621). His father who bore the same name
(consul in 577, 591; censor in 585), was the true model of a Roman
aristocrat. The brilliant magnificence of his aedilician games, not
produced without oppressing the dependent communities, had drawn upon
him the severe and deserved censure of the senate;(24) his interference
in the pitiful process directed against the Scipios who were personally
hostile to him(25) gave proof of his chivalrous feeling, and perhaps of
his regard for his own order; and his energetic action against the
freedmen in his censorship(26) evinced his conservative disposition.
As governor, moreover, of the province of the Ebro,(27) by