The Domain Question under the Restoration

All those measures which were devised by Gaius Gracchus for the promotion of the public welfare—­the best but, as may readily be conceived, also the most unpopular part of his legislation—­were allowed by the aristocracy to drop.  Nothing was so speedily and so successfully assailed as the noblest of his projects, the scheme of introducing a legal equality first between the Roman burgesses and Italy, and thereafter between Italy and the provinces, and—­inasmuch as the distinction between the merely ruling and consuming and the merely serving and working members of the state was thus done away—­ at the same time solving the social question by the most comprehensive and systematic emigration known in history.  With all the determination and all the peevish obstinacy of dotage the restored oligarchy obtruded the principle of deceased generations—­that Italy must remain the ruling land and Rome the ruling city in Italy—­afresh on the present.  Even in the lifetime of Gracchus the claims of the Italian allies had been decidedly rejected, and the great idea of transmarine colonization had been subjected to a very serious attack, which became the immediate cause of Gracchus’ fall.  After his death the scheme of restoring Carthage was set aside with little difficulty by the government party, although the individual allotments already distributed there were left to the recipients.  It is true that they could not prevent a similar foundation by the democratic party from succeeding at another point:  in the course of the conquests beyond the Alps which Marcus Flaccus had begun, the colony of Narbo (Narbonne) was founded there in 636, the oldest transmarine burgess-city in the Roman empire, which, in spite of manifold attacks by the government party and in spite of a proposal directly made by the senate to abolish it, permanently held its ground, protected, as it probably was, by the mercantile interests that were concerned.  But, apart from this exception—­in its isolation not very important—­the government was uniformly successful in preventing the assignation of land out of Italy.

The Italian domain-question was settled in a similar spirit.  The Italian colonies of Gaius, especially Capua, were cancelled, and such of them as had already been planted were again broken up; only the unimportant one of Tarentum was allowed to subsist in the form of the new town Neptunia placed alongside of the former Greek community.  So much of the domains as had already been distributed by non-colonial assignation remained in the hands of the recipients; the restrictions imposed on them by Gracchus in the interest of the commonwealth—­the ground-rent and the prohibition of alienation—­had already been abolished by Marcus Drusus.  With reference on the other hand to the domains still possessed by right of occupation—­which, over and above the domain-land enjoyed by the Latins, must have mostly consisted of the estates left with