berius Gracchus was not. He was a tolerably
capable, thoroughly well-meaning, conservative patriot, who simply
did not know what he was doing; who in the fullest belief that he
was calling the people evoked the rabble, and grasped at the crown
without being himself aware of it, until the inexorable sequence of
events urged him irresistibly into the career of the demagogue-tyrant;
until the family commission, the interferences with the public
finances, the further "reforms" exacted by necessity and despair,
the bodyguard from the pavement, and the conflicts in the streets
betrayed the lamentable usurper more and more clearly to himself and
others; until at length the unchained spirits of revolution seized and
devoured the incapable conjurer. The infamous butchery, through which
he perished, condemns itself, as it condemns the aristocratic faction
whence it issued; but the glory of martyrdom, with which it has
embellished the name of Tiberius Gracchus, came in this instance,
as usually, to the wrong man. The best of his contemporaries judged
otherwise. When the catastrophe was announced to Scipio Aemilianus,
he uttered the words of Homer:

"--Os apoloito kai allos, otis toiauta ge pezoi--"

and when the younger brother of Tiberius seemed disposed to come forward
in the same career, his own mother wrote to him: "Shall then our house
have no end of madness? Where shall be the limit? Have we not yet
enough to be ashamed of, in having confused and disorganized the state?"
So spoke not the anxious mother, but the daughter of the conqueror of
Carthage, who knew and experienced a misfortune yet greater than the
death of her children.

Chapter III

The Revolution and Gaius Gracchus

The Commisssion for Distributing the Domains

Tiberius Gracchus was dead; but his two works, the distribution
of land and the revolution, survived their author. In presence
of the starving agricultural proletariate the senate might venture
on a murder, but it could not make use of that murder to annul
the Sempronian agrarian law; the law itself had been far more
strengthened than shaken by the frantic outbreak of party fury.
The party of the aristocracy friendly towards reform, which openly
favoured the distribution of the domains--headed by Quintus Metellus,
just about this time (623) censor, and Publius Scaevola--in concert with
the party of Scipio Aemilianus, which was at least not disinclined to
reform, gained the upper hand f