like a man mortally wounded who throws himself on his foe. The mother thought more nobly; but the son with his deeply provoked, passionately excited, thoroughly Italian nature-has been more lamented than blamed by posterity."* The popular enthusiasm which had welcomed Caius on his first appearance as the defender of his friend Vettius, when we are told "all the rest of the orators seemed to the people mere children in comparison with Gracchus," and the eloquence he had displayed in discussing the rogations of Carbo and of Pennus, warned the nobles that their new adversary was as dangerous as he was determined. They attempted to keep him in Sardinia by prolonging the command of the proconsul Aurelius; but Gracchus returned on his own responsibility (B.C. 124). His conduct in Sardinia had added to his own reputation and to the jealousy of the nobles. The young quæstor's personal influence had procured supplies of clothing from the islanders, after they had successfully appealed to the Senate against the consul's requisitions, and the Numidian king Micipsa had proved his respect for the grandson of Africanus by sending corn to Sardinia at a time of scarcity. The attempt to call Gracchus to account before the censors as a deserter only gave him the opportunity of recounting his unrequited services.† His military career had lasted twelve years, instead of the legal term of ten; he had acted as quæstor two full years, instead of one; and, what was a singular distinction in that age, he could add, that his quarters had been free from luxury and the use of slaves for prostitution, as well as his hands from all corruption :"When I left Rome, Quirites, I took my bags full of money, and I have brought them back from the province empty. Others have taken with them jars filled with wine; they have carried them back home crammed with silver." The story that he was tried and acquitted as one of the instigators of the revolt of Fregellæ is of doubtful authority.

Caius Gracchus now came forward as a candidate for the tribu

* Mommsen, History of Rome, vol. iii. p. 109. In quoting this passage, as admirably descriptive of the true position of Caius Gracchus, we have purposely stopped short of the conclusion, "and posterity has been right in its judgment." The lessons of ancient history are better learned by a careful study of the events and their consequences than by a partisan discussion of the conduct and motives of the actors.

It is conjectured that, when he appeared before the censors to give up his “public horse" at the expiration of his service as an Eques, it was sought to visit him with the stigma of taking away the horse ignominiously. The difficulties of this view are discussed by Mr. Long, Decline, &c., vol. i., p. 245.

nate, and he was elected for the year B.c. 123 in an unusually large assembly of the people, who crowded from all parts of Italy to the Comitia. The vehement opposition of the nobility was, however, so far successful that Gracchus only stood fourth on the poll of the ten new tribunes. His first object was to command the passions of the populace by that vehement oratory of which no Roman was ever a greater master, and to convince them that his every movement was made at the risk of sharing his brother's fate. Cicero quotes a passage which was still in every one's mouth when he was a boy :-" Where shall an unhappy man like myself fly for protection? To the Capitol? But it streams with my brother's blood. To my own house? What! to see my wretched mother weeping and in despair?" His words were accompanied with actions, gestures and tones, which moved all his hearers alternately to rage and tears. Plutarch has preserved a vivid record of the traditional reputation of the two Gracchi as orators: -"In the character and expression of his countenance and in his movements, Tiberius was mild and sedate; Caius was animated and impetuous. When Tiberius harangued the people, he would stand composedly on one spot; but Caius was the first Roman who moved about on the Rostra and pulled his toga from his shoulder while he was speaking, as Cleon the Athenian is said to have been the first popular orator at Athens who threw his cloak from him and struck his thigh. The manner of Caius was awestriking and vehemently impassioned; the manner of Tiberius was more pleasing, and calculated to stir the sympathies: the language of Tiberius was pure and elaborated to great nicety; that of Caius was persuasive and exuberant." And Cicero, who was able to enliven his own judgment on the extant speeches of Caius by the reminiscences of those who had heard him,* speaks of him as a man whose surpassing genius was quickened by ardent study and by the learning he had acquired from his boyhood, and commends the avowal of Brutus, that he read scarcely any other orator. "I know not," he adds, "whether he had any equal in eloquence. His language was elevated, his thoughts full of wisdom, his style grave and solemn: the finishing touch was wanting there was much which was excellently designed, but it was not brought to absolute perfection. This orator, if any other, should be read by young men ; for he had the power not

C. Gracchus was killed in B. c. 121; Cicero was born at the beginning of B. c. 106, an interval of less than fifteen years.

only to sharpen, but to mature the mind."* Nor can this eulogy of the orator be quoted, without adding the testimony which Cicero, in spite of the part he had himself taken, bears to the politician and the man :-"The Roman state and Latin literature suffered loss by his untimely death. Would that he had not chosen to set his affection for his brother above his duty to his country! How easily, with such powers as his, might he, if he had lived longer, have attained to the glory of his father or his grandfather!"

Before commencing his reforms, Caius resolved to guard against the interference which had impeded the measures of Tiberius, and the attacks to which he and his followers had succumbed. To deter any tribune from repeating the opposition of Octavius, he proposed a bill disabling any magistrate who had been deposed by the people from again holding any office-a sentence upon Octavius of perpetual exclusion from the honours of the state. He withdrew this measure at the request of his mother Cornelia; but he carried another for giving effect to the ancient right of appeal to the citizens in criminal cases. The terms of the law are somewhat obscurely stated, but its purport seems to have been that no judicial proceeding affecting the life or statust of a Roman citizen should be instituted without the previous sanction of the people. The chief object of the law was to prevent the repetition of such proceedings as had taken place under the inquisition against the partisans of Tiberius. Popillius, who had conducted that inquisition, was arraigned before the people, and retired into voluntary exile without waiting for their sentence. After the fall of Gracchus, he was restored to his status by a vote procured by the tribune L. Calpurnius Bestia (B.C. 121).

Having thus established his power against the party of the nobles, Caius Gracchus proceeded with his legislation, which effected nothing short of a complete revolution in the Roman state. He began with the great economical mistake of supplying corn to the citizens at a price below its market value. "Cornlaws" (leges frumentaria)-a term that had at Rome its natural

* Brutus, c. 33. In another passage, Cicero tells us that C. Gracchus was liable, in impassioned phrases, to raise his voice to a scream, and at other times to let it fall into a weak key. To remedy both defects he had a man placed behind him to sound an ivory pitch-pipe from time to time, that he might recover the proper tone,—an example of that care in the artificial mechanism of rhetoric, which the Romans had now begun to learn from the Greeks.-De Oratore, iii. 60.

In Roman language, a capital charge, that is, one affecting not only the life, but the condition (caput) of the accused.

sense of laws designed to aid, not to restrict, the supply of corn to the people-had been known from a very early period. The general object of these laws was the distribution to the poor citizens, at a nominal price, of the tithes of corn that were paid by subject states. But the Sempronian corn-law went much further. Every citizen, who made personal application at Rome, was to receive monthly a certain measure of corn at a fixed price.* The balance of loss was of course borne by the treasury, and the state had to keep on hand large stores of grain in public granaries, for the building of which Gracchus provided. The distribution was not confined to the poor, but formed a privilege of every citizen; and the consular, L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi, who had been assailed with bitter invective by Gracchus for speaking against the law, availed himself of the opportunity to make a practical comment on its working. Caius was in the act of addressing the people who had come to claim their portions, when he saw Piso among the applicants; and he asked him how he could apply for corn, especially after he had spoken against the law. Whereupon Piso answered, "I should have been better content if you had not chosen to distribute my property among the Roman citizens, but if you will do it, I shall demand my share."

The law was doubtless intended for the relief of the poor, but its practical working was to pauperize them more and more, while it wasted the resources of the state. Moreover, as the distribution was made at Rome, a crowd of the idlest and lowest of the rural citizens were attracted to the capital, where, with the corresponding class of townspeople, looking up to the tribune for their daily bread, they were always at hand to support him in the Comitia, to guard his person, and, in case of need, to attack his enemies. It would probably be unfair to Gracchus to say that this was the chief object of the law; but it was a part of its working to which he could not have been indifferent. His memory has to bear its part of the responsibility of a system which has been used, even down to our own time, as the means of securing the favour of a turbulent civic populace, sometimes by the chiefs of a democracy, and sometimes by a despot who claims to rule by the people's will. The citizens were relieved from a part of their military burthens by the supply of clothing to the soldiers without any deduction from their pay; and youths under

*The quantity appears to have been 5 modii, about 14 bushel; the price 6} ases, about 3d., per modium, which was less than the half of a low average price.

seventeen were exempted from the levy. But these regulations seem to belong to the second tribunate of Caius Gracchus. There is considerable doubt about the genuineness of the fragment of Sallust, on the authority of which Caius is said to have made a change in the order of voting in the Comitia Centuriata-namely, the determining by lot the order in which the centuries of the first class should vote, in place of that "prærogative" of the first century, which had given a preponderance of voices to the rich.

Next to the Corn Law, and the re-enactment of his brother's Land Law, the most important measure of Caius Gracchus was the law by which, in public trials before a magistrate, the jury (Judices) were to be taken from the Knights (Equites) instead of from the Senate alone as heretofore. It has already been seen that certain of those offences against the state, which by the old constitutional law were tried by the whole body of the people, had been transferred to a special court, appointed from time to time, in which a large body of Judices give the verdict by their vote. This form of trial had been first instituted by the Calpurnian law de Repetundis (B.c. 149); and it was as yet almost exclusively applied to offences committed by magistrates in their office. Now, as the Senate was composed of the men who had held the magistracies, they formed a court directly interested in screening such wrong-doers. Appian tells us that there were now pending some trials for misconduct in provincial governments of so scandalous a sort that the Senate were fain to yield. It is commonly stated that the Lex Judiciaria of Caius Gracchus excluded the senators from acting as jurymen; but it would rather seem to have added 600 Knights to the 300 Senators already inscribed in

*

Repetundæ, or Pecuniæ Repetundæ (literally, money sought to be recovered), was the term applied both to the form of action and to the offence itself, which consisted in the illegal acquisition by a magistrate of money or other valuables from the allies or subjects of Rome, whether states or individuals. The great example of this action was the accusation of Verres by Cicero, a trial as celebrated in Roman history as that of Warren Hastings in our own. The earliest complaints of such extortion were made by the Italian allies about B.C. 173, and were tried under a special process instituted by the Senate. The first law on the subject (the Lex Calpurnia de Repetundis), was carried by the tribune L. Calpurnius Piso, in the first year of the Third Punic War (B.c. 149). It applied only to provincial magistrates, charges against whom were to be tried before a prætor, the penalty being a pecuniary fine. The sentence of banishment appears to have been added by the Junian law (about B.C. 126), and was certainly enacted in the Servilian law, which referred such actions to the prætor peregrinus and a jury of 450 judices, who must not be senators (B.c. 100). Other laws on the subject were the Cornelian (B. C. 81) and the Julian (B.C. 59), enacted by Sulla and Julius Cæsar.