Results

But such a bold player Tiberius Gracchus was not.  He was a tolerably capable, thoroughly well-meaning, conservative patriot, who simply did not know what he was doing; who in the fullest belief that he was calling the people evoked the rabble, and grasped at the crown without being himself aware of it, until the inexorable sequence of events urged him irresistibly into the career of the demagogue-tyrant; until the family commission, the interferences with the public finances, the further “reforms” exacted by necessity and despair, the bodyguard from the pavement, and the conflicts in the streets betrayed the lamentable usurper more and more clearly to himself and others; until at length the unchained spirits of revolution seized and devoured the incapable conjurer.  The infamous butchery, through which he perished, condemns itself, as it condemns the aristocratic faction whence it issued; but the glory of martyrdom, with which it has embellished the name of Tiberius Gracchus, came in this instance, as usually, to the wrong man.  The best of his contemporaries judged otherwise.  When the catastrophe was announced to Scipio Aemilianus, he uttered the words of Homer: 

“—­Os apoloito kai allos, otis toiauta ge pezoi—­”

and when the younger brother of Tiberius seemed disposed to come forward in the same career, his own mother wrote to him:  “Shall then our house have no end of madness?  Where shall be the limit?  Have we not yet enough to be ashamed of, in having confused and disorganized the state?” So spoke not the anxious mother, but the daughter of the conqueror of Carthage, who knew and experienced a misfortune yet greater than the death of her children.

Chapter III

The Revolution and Gaius Gracchus

The Commisssion for Distributing the Domains

Tiberius Gracchus was dead; but his two works, the distribution of land and the revolution, survived their author.  In presence of the starving agricultural proletariate the senate might venture on a murder, but it could not make use of that murder to annul the Sempronian agrarian law; the law itself had been far more strengthened than shaken by the frantic outbreak of party fury.  The party of the aristocracy friendly towards reform, which openly favoured the distribution of the domains—­headed by Quintus Metellus, just about this time (623) censor, and Publius Scaevola—­in concert with the party of Scipio Aemilianus, which was at least not disinclined to reform, gained the upper hand for the time being even in the senate; and a decree of the senate expressly directed the triumvirs to begin their labours.  According to the Sempronian law these were to be nominated annually by the community, and this was probably done:  but from the nature of their task it was natural that the election should fall again and again on the same men, and new elections in the proper sense occurred only when a place became