Tiberius, like Licinius, met with violent opposition, but he had not like him the patience and the fortitude to wait the slower but safer process of legitimate agitation.  He adopted a course[8] which is always dangerous and especially so in great political movements.  Satisfied with the justice of his bill and stung by taunts and incensed by opposition, he resolved to carry it by open violation of law.  He caused his colleague, Octavius, who had interposed his veto, to be removed from office by a vote of the citizens—­a thing unheard of and, according to the Roman constitution, impossible—­and in this way his bill for the division of the public land was carried and became a law.  It required the appointing of three commissioners to receive and apportion the public domain.[9] This collegium of three persons,[10] who were regarded as ordinary and standing magistrates of the state, and were annually elected by the assembly of the people, was entrusted with the work of resumption and distribution.  The important and difficult task of legally settling what was domain land and what was private property was afterward added to these functions.  Tiberius himself, his brother Caius, then at Numantia, and his father-in-law, Claudius, were nominated, according to the usual custom of intrusting the execution of a law to its author and his chosen adherents.[11] The distribution was designed to go on continually and to embrace the whole class that should be in need of aid.  The new features of this agraria lex of Sempronius, as compared with the Licinio-Sextian, were, first, the clause in favor of the hereditary possessors; secondly, the payment of quit-rent, and inalienable tenure proposed for the new allotments; thirdly, and especially, the permanent executive, the want of which, under the older law, had been the chief reason why it had remained without lasting practical application.[12]

The dissatisfaction of the supporters of the law concurred with the resistance of its opponents in preventing its execution or at least greatly embarrassing the collegium.  The senate refused to grant the customary outfit to which the commissioners[13] were entitled.  They proceeded without it.  Then the landowners denied that they occupied any of the public land, or else asked such enormous indemnities as to render the recovery impossible without violence.  This roused opposition.  The ager publicus had never been surveyed, private boundaries had in many cases been obliterated, and, except where natural boundaries marked the limit of the domain land, it was impossible to ascertain what was ager publicus and what ager privatus.  To avoid this difficulty the commission adopted the just but hazardous expediency of throwing the burden of proof upon the occupier.  He was summoned before their tribunal and, unless he could establish his boundaries or prove that the land in question had never been a part of the domain land, it was declared ager publicus and confiscated.[14]