“—­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 vacant through death.  Thus in the place of Tiberius Gracchus there was appointed the father-in-law of his brother Gaius, Publius Crassus Mucianus; and after the fall of Mucianus in 624(1) and the death of Appius Claudius, the business of distribution was managed in concert with the young Gaius Gracchus by two of the most active leaders of the movement party, Marcus Fulvius Flaccus and Gaius Papirius Carbo.  The very names of these men are vouchers that the work of resuming and distributing the occupied domain-land was prosecuted with zeal and energy; and, in fact, proofs to that effect are not wanting.  As early as 622 the consul of that year, Publius Popillius, the same who directed the prosecutions of the adherents of Tiberius Gracchus, recorded on a public monument that he was “the first who had turned the shepherds out of the domains and installed farmers in their stead”; and tradition otherwise affirms that the distribution extended over all Italy, and that in the formerly existing communities the number of farms was everywhere augmented—­for it was the design of the Sempronian agrarian law to elevate the farmer-class not by the founding of new communities,