to enshrine in her heart the memory of her noble sons, could not forbear exclaiming, when she saw Caius about to follow in his brother's steps: "Shall then our house have no end of madness? Where shall be the limit? Have we not yet enough to be ashamed of, in having confused and disorganized the state?" In the following generations, the nobles placed Nasica on a level with the heroes of the old Republic, and Cicero went at last so far as to declare that Scipio Nasica did as good service to the state by the slaughter of Tiberius Gracchus as Scipio Emilianus by the destruction of Numantia.

But, for the time, Nasica had to bear the odium of his deed, and the Senate could only shield him from the popular indignation by sending him on a mission to Asia, though, as Pontifex Maximus, it was illegal for him to leave Rome. After wandering

*

about from place to place, a mark for general contempt, he ended his days at Pergamus. Nor did the death of Gracchus lead to the repeal of his enactments. The people were only the more resolute to keep what had been gained at so terrible a cost; and the moderate party of the nobles saw the necessity of executing the measure in good faith. We have seen how the hope that Scipio might compose the disorders of the state was disappointed by the part he took on his return from Spain; but, though he publicly approved the deed of Nasica, he supported Scævola in proposing to carry out the law of Gracchus. The same part was taken by the celebrated Q. Metellus Macedonicus, of whose censorship (B.c. 131)† some curious circumstances are recorded. At the solemn lustration he addressed the people on the duty of marriage, in order to replace the diminution in the free population of Italy. "If," said he, "Quirites, we could do without wives, we should avoid all this trouble, but since nature has so arranged that we can neither live very happily with them nor live in any way without them, we ought to have regard to the lasting interests of the state rather than to our own brief satisfaction." Another incident of his censorship gives an illustration of the collisions by which the conflict between the tribunes and the Optimates was envenomed. Metellus was one day coming home from the Campus Martius, when he was met by the tribune C. Atinius Labeo, whom he had expelled from the Senate. Without the shadow of a pretext to

*Vol. II. p. 565.

+ His colleague was Q. Pompeius Rufus; and this was the first year in which both the censors were plebeians. The quotation in the text is from Mr. Long's version of the speech ascribed to Metellus by Aulus Gellius.

excuse the act of personal revenge, Labeo ordered his attendants to seize the censor and fling him from the Tarpeian rock; and it was only by the intervention of another tribune that the pacificator of Macedonia escaped a traitor's death by such a sentence. If we may believe Pliny, the tribune actually succeeded in depriving Metellus of the use of his property for the remainder of his life by devoting it to religious uses with a strange form of incantation, which he went through upon the Rostra with the help of a flute-player and a brazier of live coals. We have already seen how, in the same year, the tribune Caius Papirius Carbo was prevented by the vehement opposition of Scipio from legalizing the re-election of a tribune in successive years, and how the vote by ballot was established at Rome.*

The execution of the Agrarian Law of Tiberius Gracchus appears to have begun immediately after his fall. In the party conflicts of a constitutional state, the opponents of a reform are often zealous in gaining the credit and advantage of its execution; and the enemies of Gracchus might be glad to convince the people that they had slain him for his intended tyranny and not for his legislation. The very same consul, P. Popillius, who directed the inquisitions against the Sempronian party, set up a monument by which he claimed to have been "the first who had turned the shepherds out of their domains and installed farmers in their stead." From this it would appear that the consul of B.c. 132 began the division of the lands in conjunction with the triumvirs, the place of Tiberius Gracchus having been supplied by Crassus Mucianus. † Some interruption must have been caused by the departure of Crassus for Asia; and about the time of his ignominious fall there, another vacancy was created by the death of Appius Claudius (B.c. 131). But the people showed their unfaltering resolution by filling up the places of these nobles with two of their own most active leaders, the late tribune C. Papirius Carbo, and M. Fulvius Flaccus, who had carried the warning to Gracchus on the day of his death. C. Gracchus was of course reelected; and the Senate, in which the moderate party had recovered the lead under Scævola and Scipio, directed the triumvirs to proceed with their labours.

Vol. II. pp. 564-5.

Caius Gracchus had returned to Rome after the fall of Numantia, and had taken part in the debate on the rogation of Carbo. The statement of Plutarch, that the dead body of Tiberius was refused to the prayers of Caius, was probably made, with that writer's usual want of accuracy, in forgetfulness of the fact that Caius was serving in Spain. See Vol. II. p. 551.

Land which bordered on the

The difficulties now arose which might have been foreseen, and on which Mr. Long well remarks that "if Tiberius foresaw them, we must admire his boldness more than his prudence." The first thing we are told is, that those who were in possession of public land neglected to make a return of their possessions, the limits of which they had often no means of determining themselves. The triumvirs were not the men to shrink from the only remedy for the want of such a return, an inquisitorial investigation. The result is described by Appian, in a most important passage:-"The commissioners gave notice that they would take the evidence of any persons who would give them information. A great crop of difficult suits soon sprung up. public land, and had been sold or distributed among the allies, was all subjected to investigation for the purpose of ascertaining the limits of the public land, and the owners were required to show how this land had been sold and how it had been assigned. All persons could not produce the instruments of sale nor the evidence of the assignments; and when the titles were found, there was matter for dispute in them. Now when the land was surveyed anew, some men were removed from land planted (with vines, olives, and the like) and with buildings on it, to land which was lying waste; and others from lands under cultivation to uncultivated lands, or marshes, or swamps; for neither had they originally, as we might expect in the case of land acquired by war, made any exact measurement of it, and the public notice, that any man might cultivate the land which was not assigned or distributed, had led many to till the parts (of the public land) which bordered on their own, and so to confound them together. Time also as it went on made many changes. Thus the wrong that the rich had done, though great, was difficult to ascertain exactly; and there was a general disturbance of everything, men being removed from one place and transferred to another."t

*

Caius Gracchus and his colleagues overrode these obstacles by their resolution that the law should not be frustrated. The new

*This expression seems to refer to the accurate survey now made for the first time, and not to imply a previous survey, the absence of which, indeed, was a chief cause of the present difficulties. And this is confirmed by the fact that the chief arrangements for determining the boundaries of lands and for marking them permanently by stones, date from the age of the Gracchi.

The quotation is made from Mr. Long's translation (Decline, &c., vol. i. pp. 223-4). One passage is marked with emphasis, as it points to the essence of the whole difficulty and shows by a decisive example the necessity of basing every reform in the law of landed property on a complete system of survey and registration of titles.

distribution appears to have extended over all Italy, and its result was seen in as marked an increase of the population as had followed the great distribution of new public lands after the Hannibalic War. The returns of the census, which we have seen falling off progressively for twenty years, rose in six years from 319,000 (in B.C. 131) to 395,000 (in B.c. 125). So long as the remonstrances against the working of the commission came only from partisans of the Roman oligarchy, the Senate could not venture to interfere. But when the Italian allies complained that lands which had been secured to them by treaties with the Republic were taken away by the arbitrary decisions of the triumvirs, the good faith of the Republic seemed to be brought into question, and a new source of danger opened in the heart of Italy. Scipio Emilianus took up the cause of the Italians, and induced the Senate to transfer the decision of all disputed rights of ownership from the triumvirs to the court of the consul C. Sempronius Tuditanus, who found the business so troublesome, that he was not sorry to be called away to conduct a war with the Illyrians. His departure was soon followed, as we have already seen, by the suspicious death of Scipio (B.c. 129).* The distribution of the public land was, however, put a stop to; and the interference of Scipio seems to have taken place just in time to deliver all parties from an inextricable dilemma. But the three commissioners whose action was thus suspended, Caius Gracchus, Carbo, and Flaccus, retained their position as leaders of the people, and began to prepare measures of a far more revolutionary character than any that had been proposed by Tiberius.

Their first object was to repair the mistake they had made in alienating the Italian allies, and to enlist them on the popular side. The relations between the Roman citizens and the Peregrini,† or aliens, had long been unsatisfactory. Many of the latter had been irregularly inserted by different censors on the burgess rolls of the capital, and the Italian states complained that they were weakened by the removal of their citizens to Rome. Hence it was on the demand, not of the Romans, but of the Italians themselves,

*See Vol. II. p. 566. Dr. Mommsen, who adopts the belief in Scipio's assassi nation, says of it:-"This much only is clear, that the instigator of the deed must have belonged to the Gracchan party; Scipio's assassination was the democratic reply to the aristocratic massacre at the temple of Fidelity."

Under this term were included the Latini, the Socii, and the Provinciales, such as the inhabitants of Gallia Cisalpina and Sicily, as opposed to the citizens of Rome itself, of the Roman colonies, and of the Municipia which had received the Roman franchise.

that the first "Alien Law" was passed in B.c. 177, requiring the Latins and allies to return home before the first of November. But when, on the conclusion of the African and Asiatic wars, Rome became the scene of violent political agitation, crowds of the Italians used to flock into the city and add disorder to the proceedings of the public assemblies. The temptation was great, to convert this tumultuous interference into a constitutional power; and we have seen that the enfranchisement of the allies was said to have been one of the measures contemplated by Tiberius Gracchus. At all events it was now revived; and the nobles resolved to anticipate the danger by a new law against aliens. In B.C. 120 the tribune, M. Junius Pennus, at the instigation of the Senate, moved in the assembly of the tribes for the banishment of all Peregrini from Rome. The measure was carried against the opposition of Caius Gracchus, who was on the point of setting out for Sardinia as Quæstor; and in the following year Flaccus, who was now consul, failed to carry a proposal for admitting to the franchise any of the allies who could obtain a special vote of the Comitia. Meanwhile, Carbo had gone over to the party of the nobles, and Flaccus, called away to effect the first conquests of the Republic in Transalpine Gaul, escaped the odium of fighting against those Italians whose cause he had been pleading (B.c. 125).

*

For the rejection of Flaccus's bill led to the first war in which an Italian state had ventured to withstand Rome for 150 years without foreign aid or instigation. The ancient Volscian town of FREGELLE (Ceprano), which stood on the borders of Latium and Campania, at the principal passage of the Liris, had been made a Latin colony in B.C. 328, and had remained faithful to Rome throughout the Hannibalic War. After the fall of Capua, it had grown into one of the most flourishing cities of the south, and had been the chief representative of the Italians in the recent discussions. It is doubtful whether a scheme was formed for a general rising of the Latin cities, or even whether any minor towns took part with Fregellæ ; but the plans of the leaders were betrayed by one of the chief citizens, Q. Numitorius Pullus, and the revolt of Fregellæ was at once crushed by the prætor, Lucius Opimius. The Senate seized the occasion to make an example which should terrify the rising spirit of Italian insurrection. Fregellæ was razed to the ground, its inhabitants dispersed, and its territory assigned to the Roman colony of Febrateria, which was founded in the fol

* Mr. Long points out that its revolt would have been unintelligible if it had been, as some writers assert, a Roman colony.