garded the young Tiberius Gracchus as a fit candidate to supplant Scipio in the favour of the people. The popular voice ratified the selection, and while one grandson of Africanus was engaged in his thankless toil before Numantia, the walls of Rome were placarded with invitations to another to care for the poor and for the deliverance of Italy. With such support, and with his projects openly avowed, Tiberius Gracchus was elected tribune of the plebs, and entered upon his office on the 10th of December, B.C. 134. The proposal which Gracchus laid before the people was, in appearance at least, most moderate and constitutional. It was simply the re-enactment of the celebrated Licinian Rogation on the possession of the public land, with some additions to adapt it to the existing state of things, and to prevent its again becoming a dead letter. The old law enacted that no citizen should possess more than 500 jugera (about 300 acres)† of public land, nor feed upon the public pastures more than 100 head of large and 500 head of small cattle. In resuming the possession of the whole domain by the state, with a view to its redistribution on the plan of Licinius, Gracchus proposed to leave to each of the present occupiers, besides his own 500 jugera, 250 for each of his sons, who were still under the "patria potestas," provided that the reserved quantity should not exceed 1000 jugera, and this was to be guaranteed as a permanent possession. Compensation appears to have been granted for buildings and plantations. The land thus resumed was to be broken up into lots of 30 jugera; and these were to be leased in perpetuity to Roman citizens and Italian allies, at a moderate rent. To prevent the re-absorption of these holdings into great estates or their returning to the state of waste, the holders were bound not to alienate their lots, and to keep them in cultivation. As former agrarian laws appeared to have fallen into desuetude mainly from the absence of a permanent executive machinery, three commissioners (triumviri) were to be appointed annually to conduct the business of resuming and re-distributing the public land. Their functions of course embraced the delicate task of deciding what was public and what was private property; and it seems that Gracchus annexed to his Agrarian Law, a supplementary Lex Judiciaria expressly to the effect-"ut Iviri judicarent qua publicus ager, qua privatus esset." It was intended that their labours should be continued till the whole class whom designed to elevate should be provided with their allot

it was

See Vol. II. p. 275.

The jugerum was a little less than five-eighths of an acre.

ments, a plan which would seem to have involved the purchase of additional land at the cost of the state, when the public domain should be exhausted. But this was as yet only a contingency in the future. The land to be dealt with at present was that which was held by possessors without payment to the state: that which had been regularly let on lease was exempted from the operation of the measure. As this Sempronian Rogation was ultimately passed, we may proceed to speak of it as a law.

The proposal of the Agrarian Law of Tiberius Gracchus is a fact of great significance in the political and social history, not of Rome only, but of the human race. The evils which it exposed, the remedies which it attempted, the spirit in which it was resisted, the means by which it was carried, are all connected with questions of constant recurrence in the history of civil society; but its bearing upon those questions has generally been grievously misunderstood. Our estimate of the Gracchi must not be taken from the eulogies which the orator, who was always striving to make good the position he had acquired among the nobles, is ever ready to lavish upon their murderers, the more freely as every honour heaped upon the suppressors of old seditions cast a reflected glory upon the queller of Catiline; nor must we assume the truth of the pointed sarcasm—

"Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes?"

Much less, confounding the cause of the possessors of the public domain with the rights of property, must we assume that the attack led by Tiberius Gracchus on the former was the beginning of the war of socialism and communism against the latter. But yet there is a certain admixture of truth in both these errors. Constituted as the Republic then was, the means used by Tiberius, and afterwards by his brother, to carry their laws were such as to involve them in the responsibility incurred, whether for evil or for good, by revolutionists; and though the proposal to resume the public lands was so far from an invasion of the rights of property that the state was only taking its own from the occupants who had justly forfeited the tenure which in many instances they had usurped, yet their wholesale and sudden ejection involved a disregard not only of the prescription acquired by a possession reaching back in some cases to three centuries, but of the rights for which very many of the present owners had given full consideration; for the public land had long been dealt with by purchase and sale, lease and mortgage, just like private property; it had been planted

with vines, olives, and timber, and its productiveness improved by culture; and farm-buildings, houses, and even family buryingplaces had been fixed upon it. Nor, if we remember the condition of the city populace, by whom the measure was carried and who were sure to reap from it the chief benefit-though such was not the intention of Gracchus and his noble associates-can it be denied that it tended to confiscate the property of the rich, in order to supply the wants of the poor, and that without really securing its destined purpose. But, if we would estimate the spirit of the law aright, we must keep abstract principles in the background, while we look at the actual evils under which Italy was groaning and the practical value of the remedies proposed.

When Gracchus mounted the rostra to recount to the people, with that dignified moderation which gave all the more effect to his deep convictions, his own vivid impressions of those evils, there was scarcely one of his hearers who could not add his testimony to the truth, which was attested by the very occupation of the two consuls. The decay of the martial energy of Rome was proved by the long resistance of Numantia to the demoralized armies that had spent ten years at the foot of its rock; and the system of slave cultivation had revealed its worst dangers in the servile war which still raged in Sicily. How things had come to such a pass need only here be briefly indicated.*

The Roman state was a small community of fellow-citizens in the midst of a rich country occupied by many other states, which it subdued one after the other by force of arms. The land of each conquered community became the property of the conquerors by right of war,—a right which was usually commuted by the absolute forfeiture of a portion, generally the third part of the whole territory. Of this, part was sold to capitalists, part was granted to the colonists who were planted in the conquered cities,† and the

It would be quite out of place in the present work to discuss the difficult questions connected with the Roman public land; and it is the less necessary as the English reader has now within his reach all the information on the subject that is of real value in Mr. Long's Decline of the Roman Republic, vol. i. chaps. x.-xii.

The following passage from Mr. Long's work will throw further light on what has been said concerning the Roman colonies:-"A part of the land acquired by conquest was given or assigned, as the Roman phrase was, in allotments of two jugera, sometimes more, to Roman citizens, who settled on their allotments. These settlers formed what the Romans called a colonia, a political community, not independent of, but part of the Roman state. . . . It was not only a garrison in a conquered country; it was also a body of cultivators, who took possession of some city that already existed, or occupied it together with some remnant of the former inhabitants. A Colonia was another Rome, a daughter of the city on the Tiber, a

rest became the Ager Publicus, or state domain. This domain was occupied by private persons (possessores) as tenants of the state, but we are not informed under what regulations; and it matters little, for all such regulations were soon set at nought. The possessors seem to have been in the first instance patricians only, who cultivated the land by means of their clients and, in a measure which increased very gradually, by slave labour. When the plebeians rose to social equality with the old citizens, the wealthy members of their body obtained a share in the assignments of the public land, and acquired a common interest with the older possessors. Thus the contest between these great public tenants and the citizens who were deprived of all share in the domain was no longer one between the patricians and the plebeians, but between the rich and the poor; in which the gain of the former was purchased at a heavy expense, not only to the latter, but to the commonwealth itself.

It is needless to follow the details of the process by which the holdings of the poor became absorbed in those of the rich :-immense tracts converted from arable into pasture, partly through the deficiency of labour, and partly through the demand for wool for clothing the troops, to whom corn was supplied from Sicily:the class of peasant cultivators replaced by gangs of slaves, the latter being supplied by those same wars in which the former were drafted off to serve, leaving their families to sink into poverty:-and the soil itself impoverished by bad cultivation. One effect of the indiscriminate use of the public land for pasturage is thus described by Mr. Long:-"The hills of Italy were covered in summer with animals which browsed on the grass and young shoots of the trees, and this was the beginning of the destruction of the forests on the hills and mountains, which was followed by the washing away of the soil, a calamity from which Italy has never recovered." The speeches in which Gracchus himself described the state of Italy were extant in the time of Cicero, and there is no good reason to doubt the genuineness of the fragments preserved by Plutarch and Appian. "The wild beasts," he said, "had their dens and holes and hiding-places, while the men who fought and died in defence of Italy enjoyed indeed the light and air, but nothing else: houseless, and without a spot of ground to rest upon, they wander about with their wives and children, while their commanders with a lie in their mouths exhort the soldiers in battle to defend their tombs

dutiful child which maintained itself and yielded obedience to its mother."-Decline of the Roman Republic, vol. i. p. 142.

and temples against the enemy; for out of so many Romans not one has a family altar or ancestral tomb; but they fight to maintain the luxury and wealth of others, and they die with the title of lords of the earth, without possessing a single clod to call their own. "The census-lists of the Roman burgesses," says Dr. Mommsen, "furnished the commentary on these words.† If matters were to go on at this rate, the burgess-body would resolve itself into planters and slaves; and the Roman state might at length, as was the case with the Parthians, purchase its soldiers in the slave-market."

Gracchus viewed all this with the eyes of a soldier and a statesman, as well as of an ardent friend of liberty. His aim was to restore their rights to the suffering Italians and the defrauded Roman citizens; to put an end to the miseries and social dangers involved in the vast gangs of foreign slaves, and to raise up once more a class of peasant possessors, whose labour should at once restore productiveness to the soil and rear a hardy race capable of defending it. "A country in which the land is much divided will always have a large supply of the best material for war. No other man can endure so much as he who has turned the soil and reaped the harvest. This was the opinion of the Censor Cato."‡ It is almost superfluous to point out that such a class could not be supplied by the emancipation of the slaves, a measure of philanthropy totally foreign to Roman ideas. Even had they been as fit for freedom as the recent events in Sicily had proved them unfit, their liberation and settlement on the public lands would have been the very means of shutting out the poor Romans and Latins whom it was intended to reinstate.

Thus far the object in view was clear: but the means of effecting it involved questions of principle as well as policy, which ultimately proved fatal. It was an incontestable truth, that the lands about to be reclaimed from the great possessors had never ceased to be the property of the Roman people. But they had been held by long prescription; many of the present owners had acquired them by bond fide purchase; and the boundaries were so indefinite as to create great difficulty in distinguishing, not only between the holdings of different possessors, but the public from private land.

Long, Decline, &c., vol. i. p. 176.

The following are the returns for a series of years, beginning with the highest point to which the numbers rose after the Second Punic War:-338,314 in B.C. 159; 324,000 in B.C. 154; 322,000 in B.C. 147; 317,823 in B.C. 131.-History of Rome, vol. ii. pp. 64, 65. Long, vol. i. p. 172.