own circle stared him in the face, seized the first available means of stifling them.  The world had moved too fast for him.  As censor, instead of beseeching the gods to increase the glory of the State, he begged them to preserve it.  And no doubt he would have greatly preferred that the gods should act without his intervention.  Brave as a man, he was a pusillanimous statesman; and when confronted by the revolutionary spirit which he and his friends had helped to evoke, he determined at all costs to prop up the senatorial power. [Sidenote:  His unpopularity with the Senate.] But the Senate hated him, partly as a trimmer, and partly because by his personal character he rebuked their baseness.  He had just impeached Aurelius Cotta, a senator, and the judices, from spite against him, had refused to convict.  So he turned to the Italian land-owners, and became the mouthpiece of their selfishness, for a selfish or at best a narrow-minded end.  The nobles must have, at heart, disliked his allies; but they cheered him in the Senate, and he succeeded in practically strangling the commission by procuring the transfer of its jurisdiction to the consuls.  The consul for the time being immediately found a pretext for leaving Rome, and a short time afterwards Scipio was found one morning dead in his bed. [Sidenote:  His death.] He had gone to his chamber the night before to think over what he should say next day to the people about the position of the country class, and, if he was murdered, it is almost as probable that he was murdered by some rancorous foe in the Senate as by Carbo or any other Gracchan.  It was well for his reputation that he died just then.  Without Sulla’s personal vices he might have played Sulla’s part as a politician, and his atrocities in Spain as well as his remark on the death of Tiberius Gracchus—­words breathing the very essence of a narrow swordsman’s nature—­showed that from bloodshed at all events he would not have shrunk.  It is hard to respect such a man in spite of all his good qualities.  Fortune gave him the opportunity of playing a great part, and he shrank from it.  When the crop sprang up which he had himself helped to sow, he blighted it.  But because he was personally respectable, and because he held a middle course between contemporary parties, he has found favour with historians, who are too apt to forget that there is in politics, as in other things, a right course and a wrong, and that to attempt to walk along both at once proves a man to be a weak statesman, and does not prove him to be a great or good man.

[Sidenote:  The early career of Caius Gracchus.] In B.C. 126 Caius Gracchus, seven years after he had been made one of the commissioners for the allotment of public land, was elected quaestor.  Sardinia was at that time in rebellion, and it fell by lot to Caius to go there as quaestor to the consul Orestes.  It is said that he kept quiet when Tiberius was killed, and intended to steer clear of politics.  But