the state. The distribution of the domains was not
an abolition, but an exercise, of the right of property; all jurists
were agreed as to its formal legality. But the attempt now to carry
out these legal claims of the state was far from being politically
warranted by the circumstance that the distribution of the domains
neither infringed the existing constitution nor involved a violation
of right. Such objections as have been now and then raised in our
day, when a great landlord suddenly begins to assert in all their
compass claims belonging to him in law but suffered for a long period
to lie dormant in practice, might with equal and better right be
advanced against the rogation of Gracchus. These occupied domains
had been undeniably in heritable private possession, some of them for
three hundred years; the state's proprietorship of the soil, which
from its very nature loses more readily than that of the burgess the
character of a private right, had in the case of these lands become
virtually extinct, and the present holders had universally come
to their possessions by purchase or other onerous acquisition.
The jurist might say what he would; to men of business the measure
appeared to be an ejection of the great landholders for the benefit
of the agricultural proletariate; and in fact no statesman could give
it any other name. That the leading men of the Catonian epoch formed
no other judgment, is very clearly shown by their treatment of a similar
case that occurred in their time. The territory of Capua and the
neighbouring towns, which was annexed as domain in 543, had for
the most part practically passed into private possession during
the following unsettled times. In the last years of the sixth
century, when in various respects, especially through the influence
of Cato, the reins of government were drawn tighter, the burgesses
resolved to resume the Campanian territory and to let it out for
the benefit of the treasury (582). The possession in this instance
rested on an occupation justified not by previous invitation but
at the most by the connivance of the authorities, and had continued
in no case much beyond a generation; but the holders were not
dispossessed except in consideration of a compensatory sum disbursed
under the orders of the senate by the urban praetor Publius Lentulus
(c. 589).(34) Less objectionable perhaps, but still not without
hazard, was the arrangement by which the new allotments bore
th