CHAPTER II

The Reform Movement and Tiberius Gracchus

The Roman Government before the Period of the Gracchi

For a whole generation after the battle of Pydna the Roman state enjoyed a profound calm, scarcely varied by a ripple here and there on the surface.  Its dominion extended over the three continents; the lustre of the Roman power and the glory of the Roman name were constantly on the increase; all eyes rested on Italy, all talents and all riches flowed thither; it seemed as if a golden age of peaceful prosperity and intellectual enjoyment of life could not but there begin.  The Orientals of this period told each other with astonishment of the mighty republic of the west, “which subdued kingdoms far and near, and whoever heard its name trembled; but it kept good faith with its friends and clients.  Such was the glory of the Romans, and yet no one usurped the crown and no one paraded in purple dress; but they obeyed whomsoever from year to year they made their master, and there was among them neither envy nor discord.”

Spread of Decay

So it seemed at a distance; matters wore a different aspect on a closer view.  The government of the aristocracy was in full train to destroy its own work.  Not that the sons and grandsons of the vanquished at Cannae and of the victors at Zama had so utterly degenerated from their fathers and grandfathers; the difference was not so much in the men who now sat in the senate, as in the times.  Where a limited number of old families of established wealth and hereditary political importance conducts the government, it will display in seasons of danger an incomparable tenacity of purpose and power of heroic self-sacrifice, just as in seasons of tranquillity it will be shortsighted, selfish, and negligent—­the germs of both results are essentially involved in its hereditary and collegiate character.  The morbid matter had been long in existence, but it needed the sun of prosperity to develop it.  There was a profound meaning in the question of Cato, “What was to become of Rome, when she should no longer have any state to fear?” That point had now been reached.  Every neighbour whom she might have feared was politically annihilated; and of the men who had been reared under the old order of things in the severe school of the Hannibalic war, and whose words still sounded as echoes of that mighty epoch so long as they survived, death called one after another away, till at length even the voice of the last of them, the veteran Cato, ceased to be heard in the senate-house and in the Forum.  A younger generation came to the helm, and their policy was a sorry answer to that question of the old patriot.  We have already spoken of the shape which the government of the subjects and the external policy of Rome assumed in their hands.  In internal affairs they were, if possible, still more disposed to let the ship drive before the wind:  if we