Gaius Carbo, once the ally of the Gracchi, had for long been a convert,(1) and had but recently shown his zeal and his usefulness as defender of Opimius.  But he remained the renegade; when the same accusation was raised against him by the democrats as against Opimius, the government were not unwilling to let him fall, and Carbo, seeing himself lost between the two parties, died by his own hand.  Thus the men of the reaction showed themselves in personal questions pure aristocrats.  But the reaction did not immediately attack the distributions of grain, the taxation of the province of Asia, or the Gracchan arrangement as to the jurymen and courts; on the contrary, it not only spared the mercantile class and the proletariate of the capital, but continued to render homage, as it had already done in the introduction of the Livian laws, to these powers and especially to the proletariate far more decidedly than had been done by the Gracchi.  This course was not adopted merely because the Gracchan revolution still thrilled for long the minds of its contemporaries and protected its creations; the fostering and cherishing at least of the interests of the populace was in fact perfectly compatible with the personal advantage of the aristocracy, and thereby nothing further was sacrificed than merely the public weal.

The Domain Question under the Restoration

All those measures which were devised by Gaius Gracchus for the promotion of the public welfare—­the best but, as may readily be conceived, also the most unpopular part of his legislation—­were allowed by the aristocracy to drop.  Nothing was so speedily and so successfully assailed as the noblest of his projects, the scheme of introducing a legal equality first between the Roman burgesses and Italy, and thereafter between Italy and the provinces, and—­inasmuch as the distinction between the merely ruling and consuming and the merely serving and working members of the state was thus done away—­ at the same time solving the social question by the most comprehensive and systematic emigration known in history.  With all the determination and all the peevish obstinacy of dotage the restored oligarchy obtruded the principle of deceased generations—­that Italy must remain the ruling land and Rome the ruling city in Italy—­afresh on the present.  Even in the lifetime of Gracchus the claims of the Italian allies had been decidedly rejected, and the great idea of transmarine colonization had been subjected to a very serious attack, which became the immediate cause of Gracchus’ fall.  After his death the scheme of restoring Carthage was set aside with little difficulty by the government party, although the individual allotments already distributed there were left to the recipients.  It is true that they could not prevent a similar foundation by the democratic party from succeeding at another point:  in the course of the conquests beyond the Alps which Marcus Flaccus had begun, the colony of Narbo (Narbonne)