ad 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 all
others the multitude breathed vengeance, and who had at least the
courage openly to avow his deed before the people and to defend it,
was under honourable pretexts despatched to Asia, and soon afterwards
(624) invested, during his absence, with the office of Pontifex
Maximus. Nor did the moderate party dissociate themselves from these
proceedings of their colleagues. Gaius Laelius bore a part in the
investigations adverse to the partisans of Gracchus; Publius Scaevola,
who had attempted to prevent the murder, afterwards defended it in the
senate; when Scipio Aemilianus, after his return from Spain (622), was
challenged publicly to declare whether he did or did not approve the
killing of his brother-in-law, he gave the at least ambiguous reply
that, so far as Tiberius had aspired to the crown, he had been
justly put to death.

The Domain Question Viewed in Itself

Let us endeavour to form a judgment regarding these momentous events.
The appointment of an official commission, which had to counteract
the dangerous diminution of the farmer-class by the comprehensive
establishment of new small holdings from the whole Italian landed
property at the disposal of the state, was doubtless no sign of a
healthy condition of the national economy; but it was, under the
existing circumstances political and social, suited to its purpose.
The distribution of the domains, moreover, was in itself no political
party-question; it might have been carried out to the last sod without
changing the existing constitution or at all shaking the government
of the aristocracy. As little could there be, in that case, any
complaint of a violation of rights. The state was confessedly
the owner of the occupied land; the holder as a possessor on mere
sufferance could not, as a rule, ascribe to himself even a bonafide
proprietary tenure, and, in the exceptional instances where he could
do so, he was confronted by the fact that by the Roman law prescription
did not run against