bitterest opponents of Gracchus spoke in the sitting;
when Tiberius moved his hand towards his forehead to signify
to the people, amidst the wild tumult, that his head was in danger,
it was said that he was already summoning the people to adorn his
brow with the regal chaplet. The consul Scaevola was urged to have
the traitor put to death at once. When that temperate man, by no
means averse to reform in itself, indignantly refused the equally
irrational and barbarous request, the consular Publius Scipio Nasica,
a harsh and vehement aristocrat, summoned those who shared his views
to arm themselves as they could and to follow him. Almost none of the
country people had come into town for the elections; the people of the
city timidly gave way, when they saw men of quality rushing along with
fury in their eyes, and legs of chairs and clubs in their hands.
Gracchus attempted with a few attendants to escape. But in his
flight he fell on the slope of the Capitol, and was killed by a
blow on the temples from the bludgeon of one of his furious pursuers
--Publius Satureius and Lucius Rufus afterwards contested the infamous
honour--before the statues of the seven kings at the temple of
Fidelity; with him three hundred others were slain, not one by
weapons of iron. When evening had come on, the bodies were thrown
into the Tiber; Gaius vainly entreated that the corpse of his
brother might be granted to him for burial. Such a day had never
before been seen by Rome. The party-strife lasting for more than
a century during the first social crisis had led to no such
catastrophe as that with which the second began. The better portion
of the aristocracy might shudder, but they could no longer recede.
They had no choice save to abandon a great number of their most
trusty partisans to the vengeance of the multitude, or to assume
collectively the responsibility of the outrage: the latter course was
adopted. They gave official sanction to the assertion that Gracchus
had wished to seize the crown, and justified this latest crime by
the primitive precedent of Ahala;(33) in fact, they even committed
the duty of further investigation as to the accomplices of Gracchus
to a special commission and made its head, the consul Publius Popillius,
take care that a sort of legal stamp should be supplementarily impressed
on the murder of Gracchus by bloody sentences directed against a large
number of inferior persons (622). Nasica, against whom above