reaty with the Numantines, which the Senate refused to
ratify.[61] In passing through Etruria, on his way to Spain, Tiberius
had observed with grief and indignation the deserted state of that
fertile country. Thousands of foreign slaves were tending the flocks
and cultivating the soil of the wealthy landowners, while Roman
citizens, thus thrown out of employment, could scarcely procure their
daily bread, and had not a clod of earth to call their own. He now
conceived the design of applying a remedy to this state of things, and
with this view became a candidate for the Tribunate, and was elected for
the year B.C. 133.

Tiberius, however, did not act with precipitation. The measure which he
brought forward had previously received the approbation of some of the
wisest and noblest men in the state; of his own father-in-law Appius
Claudius; of P. Mucius Scaevola, the great jurist, who was then Consul;
and of Crassus, the Pontifex Maximus. It was proposed to re-enact the
Licinian Law of B.C. 364--which had, in fact, never been repealed--but
with some modifications and additions. As in the Licinian Law, no one
was to be allowed to possess more than 500 jugera of public land; but,
to relax the stringency of this rule, every possessor might hold in
addition 250 jugera for each of his sons. All the rest of the public
land was to be taken away from them and distributed among the poor
citizens, who were not to be permitted to alienate these lots, in order
that they might not be again absorbed into the estate of the wealthy. An
indemnity was to be given from the public treasury for all buildings
erected upon lands thus taken away. Three commissioners (Triumviri) were
to be elected by the tribes in order to carry this law into execution.

The Law affected only Public Lands, but it was no less a revolutionary
measure. It is true that no prescription can, as a general rule, be
pleaded against the rights of the state, but the possessors of the
public lands had enjoyed them without question for so long a period that
they had come to regard these lands as their private property. In many
cases, as we have already said, they had been acquired by _bona fide_
purchase, and the claim of the state, now advocated by Gracchus, was
regarded as downright robbery. Attacks upon property have produced the
greatest convulsions in all states, and the Roman landowners were ready
to have recourse to any measures to defeat the law. But the thousands
who w