unity of playing a great part,
and he shrank from it. When the crop sprang up which he had himself
helped to sow, he blighted it. But because he was personally
respectable, and because he held a middle course between contemporary
parties, he has found favour with historians, who are too apt to
forget that there is in politics, as in other things, a right course
and a wrong, and that to attempt to walk along both at once proves a
man to be a weak statesman, and does not prove him to be a great or
good man.

[Sidenote: The early career of Caius Gracchus.] In B.C. 126 Caius
Gracchus, seven years after he had been made one of the commissioners
for the allotment of public land, was elected quaestor. Sardinia was
at that time in rebellion, and it fell by lot to Caius to go there as
quaestor to the consul Orestes. It is said that he kept quiet when
Tiberius was killed, and intended to steer clear of politics. But
one of those splendid bursts of oratory, with which he had already
electrified the people, remains to show over what he was for ever
brooding. 'They slew him,' he cried, 'these scoundrels slew Tiberius,
my noble brother! Ah, they are all of one pattern.' He said this in
advocating the Lex Papiria, which proposed to make the re-election of
a tribune legal. But Scipio opposed the law, and it was defeated then,
to be carried, however, a few years later. Again, in the year of his
quaestorship, he spoke against the law of M. Junius Pennus, which
aimed at expelling all Peregrini from Rome. They were the very men by
whose help Tiberius had carried his agrarian law, and when Caius spoke
for them he was clearly treading in his brother's steps. At a later
time he declared that he dreamt Tiberius came to him and said, 'Why do
you hesitate? You cannot escape your doom and mine--to live for the
people and die for them.' Such a story would be effective in a speech,
and particularly effective when told to a superstitious audience; but
his day-dreams we may be sure were the cause and not the consequence
of his visions of the night. For there can be no doubt that the
younger brother had already one purpose and one only--to avenge the
death of Tiberius and carry out his designs.

Such omens as Roman credulity fastened on when the political air was
heavy with coming storm abounded now. With grave irony the historian
records: 'Besides showers of oil and milk in the neighbourhood of
Veii, a fact of which some people may doubt, an owl, i