The striking point in the last extract is his remark about a ’small thing.’  It is likely, enough that the losses of the proprietors as a body would not be overwhelming, and that the opposition was rendered furious almost as much by the principle of restitution, and interference with long-recognised ownership, as by the value of what they were called on to disgorge.  Five hundred jugera of slave-tended pasture-land could not have been of very great importance to a rich Roman, who, however, might well have been alarmed by the warning of Gracchus with regard to the army, for in foreign service, and not in grazing or ploughing, the fine gentleman of the day found a royal road to wealth. [Sidenote:  Grievances of the possessors.] On the other hand it is quite comprehensible both that the possessors imagined that they had a great grievance, and that they had some ground for their belief.  A possessor, for instance, who had purchased from another in the full faith that his title would never be disturbed, had more right to be indignant than a proprietor of Indian stock would have, if in case of the bankruptcy of the Indian Government the British Government should refuse to refund his money.  There must have been numbers of such cases with every possible complexity of title; and even if the class that would be actually affected was not large, it was powerful, and every landowner with a defective title would, however small his holding (provided it was over 30 jugera, the proposed allotment), take the alarm and help to swell the cry against the Tribune as a demagogue and a robber.  This is what we can state about the agrarian law of Tiberius Gracchus.  It remains to be told how it was carried.

[Sidenote:  How the law was carried.] Gracchus had a colleague named Octavius, who is said to have been his personal friend.  Octavius had land himself to lose if the law were carried, and he opposed it.  Gracchus offered to pay him the value of the land out of his own purse; but Octavius was not to be so won over, and as Tribune interposed his veto to prevent the bill being read to the people that they might vote on it.  Tiberius retorted by using his power to suspend public business and public payments.  One day, when the people were going to vote, the other side seized the voting urns, and then Tiberius and the rest of the Tribunes agreed to take the opinion of the Senate.  The result was that he came away more hopeless of success by constitutional means, and doubtless irritated by insult.  He then proposed to Octavius that the people should vote whether he or Octavius should lose office—­a weak proposal perhaps, but the proposal of an honest, generous man, whose aim was not self-aggrandisement but the public weal.  Octavius naturally refused.  Tiberius called together the thirty-five tribes, to vote whether or no Octavius should be deprived of his office. [Sidenote:  Octavius deprived of the Tribunate.] The first tribe voted in the affirmative, and Gracchus implored Octavius even now to give way, but in vain.  The next sixteen tribes recorded the same vote, and once more Gracchus interceded with his old friend.  But he spoke to deaf ears.  The voting went on, and when Octavius, on his Tribunate being taken from him, would not go away, Plutarch says that Tiberius ordered one of his freedmen to drag him from the Rostra.