[Sidenote:  Grievances of the Latins and allies.] At the time of the Gracchi discontent was seething among the Latins and allies.  There were two classes among them—­the rich landlords and capitalists, who prospered as the rich at Rome prospered, and the poor who were weighed down by debt or were pushed out of their farms by slave-labour, or were hangers-on of the rich in the towns and eager for distributions of land.  The poor were oppressed no doubt by the rich men both of their own cities and of Rome.  The rich chafed at the intolerable insolence of Roman officials.  It was not that Rome interfered with the local self-government she had granted by treaty, but the Italians laboured under grievous disabilities and oppression.  So late as the Jugurthine war, Latin officers were executed by martial law, whereas any Roman soldier could appeal to a civil tribunal.  Again, while the armies had formerly been recruited from the Romans and the allies equally, now the severest service and the main weight of wars fell on the latter, who furnished, moreover, two soldiers to every Roman.  Again, without a certain amount of property, a man at Rome could not be enrolled in the army; but the rule seems not to have applied to Italians.  Nor was the civil less harsh than the military administration.  A consul’s wife wished to use the men’s bath at Teanum; and because the bathers were not cleared out quickly enough, and the baths were not clean enough, M. Marius, the chief magistrate of the town, was stripped and scourged in the market-place.  A free herdsman asked in joke if it was a corpse that was in a litter passing through Venusia, and which contained a young Roman.  Though not even an official, its occupant showed that, if lazy, he was at least alive, by having the peasant whipped to death with the litter straps.  In short, the rich Italians would feel the need of the franchise as strongly as the old plebeians had felt it, and all the more strongly because the Romans had not only ceased to enfranchise whole communities, but were chary of giving the citizenship even to individuals.  The poor also had the ordinary grievances against their own rich, and were so far likely to favour the schemes of any man who assailed the capitalist class, Roman or Italian, as a whole; but they none the less disliked Roman supremacy, and would be easily persuaded to attribute to that supremacy some of the hardships which it did not cause.

[Sidenote:  State of the transmarine provinces.] While such fires were slowly coming to the surface in Italy, and were soon to flame out in the Social War, the state of the provinces out of the peninsula was not more reassuring.  The struggle with Viriathus and the Numantine war had revealed the fact that the last place to look for high martial honour or heroic virtue was the Roman army.  If a Scipio sustained the traditions of Roman generalship, and a Gracchus those of republican rectitude, other commanders would have stained the military annals of any nation. [Sidenote: