laboured.  These Scipio did not touch.  Gaius Laelius (consul in 614), Scipio’s elder friend and his political instructor and confidant, had conceived the plan of proposing the resumption of the Italian domain-land which had not been given away but had been temporarily occupied, and of giving relief by its distribution to the visibly decaying Italian farmers; but he desisted from the project when he saw what a storm he was going to raise, and was thenceforth named the “Judicious.”  Scipio was of the same opinion.  He was fully persuaded of the greatness of the evil, and with a courage deserving of honour he without respect of persons remorselessly assailed it and carried his point, where he risked himself alone; but he was also persuaded that the country could only be relieved at the price of a revolution similar to that which in the fourth and fifth centuries had sprung out of the question of reform, and, rightly or wrongly, the remedy seemed to him worse than the disease.  So with the small circle of his friends he held a middle position between the aristocrats, who never forgave him for his advocacy of the Cassian law, and the democrats, whom he neither satisfied nor wished to satisfy; solitary during his life, praised after his death by both parties, now as the champion of the aristocracy, now as the promoter of reform.  Down to his time the censors on laying down their office had called upon the gods to grant greater power and glory to the state:  the censor Scipio prayed that they might deign to preserve the state.  His whole confession of faith lies in that painful exclamation.

Tiberius Gracchus

But where the man who had twice led the Roman army from deep decline to victory despaired, a youth without achievements had the boldness to give himself forth as the saviour of Italy.  He was called Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (591-621).  His father who bore the same name (consul in 577, 591; censor in 585), was the true model of a Roman aristocrat.  The brilliant magnificence of his aedilician games, not produced without oppressing the dependent communities, had drawn upon him the severe and deserved censure of the senate;(24) his interference in the pitiful process directed against the Scipios who were personally hostile to him(25) gave proof of his chivalrous feeling, and perhaps of his regard for his own order; and his energetic action against the freedmen in his censorship(26) evinced his conservative disposition.  As governor, moreover, of the province of the Ebro,(27) by his bravery and above all by his integrity he rendered a permanent service to his country, and at the same time raised to himself in the hearts of the subject nation an enduring monument of reverence and affection.