Character of the Constitution of Gaius Gracchus

This was the political constitution which Gaius Gracchus projected and, in its most essential points, carried out during the two years of his tribunate (631, 632), without, so far as we can see, encountering any resistance worthy of mention, and without requiring to apply force for the attainment of his ends.  The order of sequence in which these measures were carried can no longer be recognized in the confused accounts handed down to us, and various questions that suggest themselves have to remain unanswered.  But it does not seem as if, in what is missing, many elements of material importance have escaped us; for as to the principal matters we have quite trustworthy information, and Gaius was by no means, like his brother, urged on further and further by the current of events, but evidently had a well-considered and comprehensive plan, the substance of which he fully embodied in a series of special laws.  Now the Sempronian constitution itself shows very clearly to every one who is able and willing to see, that Gaius Gracchus did not at all, as many good-natured people in ancient and modern times have supposed, wish to place the Roman republic on new democratic bases, but that on the contrary he wished to abolish it and to introduce in its stead a -tyrannis—–­ that is, in modern language, a monarchy not of the feudal or of the theocratic, but of the Napoleonic absolute, type—­in the form of a magistracy continued for life by regular re-election and rendered absolute by an unconditional control over the formally sovereign comitia, an unlimited tribuneship of the people for life.  In fact if Gracchus, as his words and still more his works plainly testify, aimed at the overthrow of the government of the senate, what other political organization but the -tyrannis- remained possible, after overthrowing the aristocratic government, in a commonwealth which had outgrown primary assemblies and for which parliamentary government did not exist?  Dreamers such as was his predecessor, and knaves such as after-times produced, might call this in question; but Gaius Gracchus was a statesman, and though the formal shape, which that great man had inwardly projected for his great work, has not been handed down to us and may be conceived of very variously, yet he was beyond doubt aware of what he was doing.  Little as the intention of usurping monarchical power can be mistaken, as little will those who survey the whole circumstances on this account blame Gracchus.  An absolute monarchy is a great misfortune for a nation, but it is a less misfortune than an absolute oligarchy; and history cannot censure one who imposes on a nation the lesser suffering instead of the greater, least of all in the case of a nature so vehemently earnest and so far aloof from all that is vulgar as was that of Gaius Gracchus.  Nevertheless it may not conceal the fact that his whole legislation was pervaded in a most pernicious way by conflicting aims; for on the