The Restored Aristocracy

So it accordingly happened.  After the decease of Gaius Gracchus without heirs, the government of the senate as it were spontaneously resumed its place; and this was the more natural, that it had not been, in the strict sense, formally abolished by the tribune, but had merely been reduced to a practical nullity by his exceptional proceedings.  Yet we should greatly err, if we should discern in this restoration nothing further than a relapse of the state-machine into the old track which had been trodden and worn for centuries.  Restoration is always revolution; but in this case it was not so much the old government as the old governor that was restored.  The oligarchy made its appearance newly equipped in the armour of the -tyrannis- which had been overthrown.  As the senate had beaten Gracchus from the field with his own weapons, so it continued in the most essential points to govern with the constitution of the Gracchi; though certainly with the ulterior idea, if not of setting it aside entirely, at any rate of thoroughly purging it in due time from the elements really hostile to the ruling aristocracy.

Prosecutions of the Democrats

At first the reaction was mainly directed against persons.  Publius Popillius was recalled from banishment after the enactments relating to him had been cancelled (633), and a warfare of prosecution was waged against the adherents of Gracchus; whereas the attempt of the popular party to have Lucius Opimius after his resignation of office condemned for high treason was frustrated by the partisans of the government (634).  The character of this government of the restoration is significantly indicated by the progress of the aristocracy in soundness of sentiment.  Gaius Carbo, once the ally of the Gracchi, had for long been a convert,(1) and had but recently shown his zeal and his usefulness as defender of Opimius.  But he remained the renegade; when the same accusation was raised against him by the democrats as against Opimius, the government were not unwilling to let him fall, and Carbo, seeing himself lost between the two parties, died by his own hand.  Thus the men of the reaction showed themselves in personal questions pure aristocrats.  But the reaction did not immediately attack the distributions of grain, the taxation of the province of Asia, or the Gracchan arrangement as to the jurymen and courts; on the contrary, it not only spared the mercantile class and the proletariate of the capital, but continued to render homage, as it had already done in the introduction of the Livian laws, to these powers and especially to the proletariate far more decidedly than had been done by the Gracchi.  This course was not adopted merely because the Gracchan revolution still thrilled for long the minds of its contemporaries and protected its creations; the fostering and cherishing at least of the interests of the populace was in fact perfectly compatible with the personal advantage of the aristocracy, and thereby nothing further was sacrificed than merely the public weal.