two attendants turned to face his pursuers and allowed
themselves to be cut down, Marcus Pomponius at the
Porta Trigemina under the Aventine, Publius Laetorius
at the bridge over the Tiber where Horatius Cocles
was said to have once singly withstood the Etruscan
army; so Gracchus, attended only by his slave Euporus,
reached the suburb on the right bank of the Tiber.
There, in the grove of Furrina, were afterwards found
the two dead bodies; it seemed as if the slave had
put to death first his master and then himself.
The heads of the two fallen leaders were handed over
to the government as required; the stipulated price
and more was paid to Lucius Septumuleius, a man of
quality, the bearer of the head of Gracchus, while
the murderers of Flaccus, persons of humble rank, were
sent away with empty hands. The bodies of the
dead were thrown into the river; the houses of the
leaders were abandoned to the pillage of the multitude.
The warfare of prosecution against the partisans of
Gracchus began on the grandest scale; as many as 3000
of them are said to have been strangled in prison,
amongst whom was Quintus Flaccus, eighteen years of
age, who had taken no part in the conflict and was
universally lamented on account of his youth and his
amiable disposition. On the open space beneath
the Capitol where the altar consecrated by Camillus
after the restoration of internal peace(29) and other
shrines erected on similar occasions to Concord were
situated, these small chapels were pulled down; and
out of the property of the killed or condemned traitors,
which was confiscated even to the portions of their
wives, a new and splendid temple of Concord with the
basilica belonging to it was erected in accordance
with a decree of the senate by the consul Lucius Opimius.
Certainly it was an act in accordance with the spirit
of the age to remove the memorials of the old, and
to inaugurate a new, concord over the remains of the
three grandsons of the conqueror of Zama, all of whom—first
Tiberius Gracchus, then Scipio Aemilianus, and lastly
the youngest and the mightiest, Gaius Gracchus—had
now been engulfed by the revolution. The memory
of the Gracchi remained officially proscribed; Cornelia
was not allowed even to put on mourning for the death
of her last son; but the passionate attachment, which
very many had felt towards the two noble brothers
and especially towards Gaius during their life, was
touchingly displayed also after their death in the
almost religious veneration which the multitude, in
spite of all precautions of police, continued to pay
to their memory and to the spots where they had fallen.
CHAPTER IV
The Rule of the Restoration
Vacancy in the Government