Carthage, gave them the opportunity of effecting his ruin.* Caius appears to have returned to Rome about the time of the consular elections of B.C. 122; and no doubt it was from the consciousness of increasing danger that he left his house on the Palatine, and went to live among the lower class of people near the Forum. Rome was again filled with crowds flocking in from the country; when, at the instance of the Senate, the consul Fannius put into force the law of Pennus for driving away all who were not citizens. Gracchus promised his support to those who should disobey the edict; but when the consul's lictors dragged away a friend of his before his eyes, he could offer no resistance. The failure of Caius Gracchus to obtain his re-election as tribune for the third time is ascribed by Plutarch to a fraudulent return of the poll. His greatest enemy, L. Opimius, the destroyer of Fregellæ, was elected to the consulship.

On his entrance upon office with the new year (B.c. 121), the consul lost no time in commencing the attack which Caius well knew would not stop short of his destruction. We are told in general that Opimius proposed the repeal of the Sempronian laws; but the specific ground of collision was the rogation to annul the act for colonizing Carthage. The assembly, like that in which Tiberius lost his life, was summoned in the Capitol; and Caius and his partisans went armed with daggers beneath their togas, though he himself steadfastly resisted the advice of his friends to appeal to force. While Fulvius was haranguing the assembly against the consul's motion, Caius turned aside with some of his attendants to walk in the porch of the Capitoline temple, either to meditate his speech, or from a presentiment which kept him aloof from the crowd. Under the portico, a certain Quintus Antullius (or Antyllus) was offering a sacrifice probably on the part of the consul. What followed is told with the confusion natural

to such a scene.

It seems that when Antullius saw Gracchus and his party approach, he ordered the "bad citizens" to depart and leave the sacred porch to "better men." A gesture, which was interpreted as an intention to enforce his warning by violence,† or a look of indignation from Gracchus, fired the train which hardly

* We have already had occasion to notice this attempt to found a Roman colony on the site of Carthage. Vol. II., p. 534.

"The other version was that Antyllus, having taken the hand of Gracchus, the reason for which the historian attempts to explain by three conjectures, entreated him to spare his country. This is most improbable, that a mere servant, a man who handled the viscera, should either make his country his chief thought or address a Roman noble in this way."-(Long, Decline, &c., vol. i., p. 281.)

needed a spark, and a stroke from the dagger of an attendant laid Antullius dead. The bystanders fled, carrying the news into the assembly, whither Caius also hastened to explain what had occurred. But all shrunk away from him as from a guilty and doomed man: a torrent of rain fell at the same moment: the meeting was adjourned: and Caius and Fulvius returned home. "Caius learned too late," says Mr. Long, "that a popular leader, when he is become a private citizen, will find no friends among those whom he has tried to save." The consul* passed the night in the temple of Castor and Pollux, in the Forum, where the whole area was filled by midnight with a crowd expecting mischief, and composed-it would seem-of the followers of the nobles. At daybreak the Capitol was occupied with a guard of Cretan archers, and the Senate was summoned by the consul. Just as their proceedings had commenced, the corpse of Antullius was borne past the door of the Senate-house. Opimius affected to wonder what the noise of lamentation meant, and the Senate went out to see the cause. On their return, Opimius had no difficulty in procuring the vote which, since the cessation of the dictatorship, was the formula for proclaiming martial law under the authority of the consul:"That the Consul provide that the Republic shall sustain no harm." He called on the Senators and Equites, with their retainers, to supply the want of an armed force; and it was found that the Order which Gracchus had raised as a rival to the Senate would take part with them against a common danger from the populace. The command was entrusted to Decimus Brutus, the conqueror of the Gallæci, who was supported by the venerable Q. Metellus Macedonicus. Meanwhile the two popular leaders had spent the night each in a manner consistent with their very different characters. Gracchus had remained quiet in his house, round which his followers watched and slept in turns, while that of Fulvius was the scene of riotous feasting and boasting of to

Opimius was the only consul present at Rome. His colleague, Q. Fabius Maximus, had gone to conduct the war with the Allobroges in Gaul.

"The usual formula, giving the power to both consuls, was Videant or dent operam consules ne quid respublica detrimenti capiat. The dictatorship, in the proper sense, 'rei gerundæ causd,' had ceased in B. C. 216. Dictators were appointed, merely for holding the elections in the absence of the consuls, down to the end of the Second Punic War, B.C. 202. When the title was revived by Sulla (B. C. 82), it was a mere attempt to cloak the nakedness of his despotism under a constitutional name. His office of 'dictator reipublicæ constituendæ causa' was utterly unknown to the Roman commonwealth. The same remark applies to the dictatorship of Cæsar, after whose death the office was for ever abolished."

morrow's deeds.* It is even said that Fulvius himself got drunk. As soon as the decree of the Senate was known, he armed his followers with the spoils of his Gallic campaign, and led them with tumultuous shouts to the old rallying-place of the plebeians on the Aventine. Thither C. Gracchus also repaired, dressed in his ordinary costume, and armed only with a short sword, having taken a last farewell of his wife Licinia and his infant son. "Caius went unarmed," says Mr. Long, "to join a body of armed men, and he must have foreseen what his fate would be. If his conduct seems strange, it is explained by the fact that he could not safely stay at home, nor could he venture to go to the Senate."

By these movements on both sides civil war was begun in the heart of Rome. According to Appian, Fulvius and Gracchus did not retire to the Aventine till they had been summoned to attend the Senate and explain their conduct; and it is agreed that such a mandate was the reply to overtures sent by the insurgents through the youthful son of Fulvius. It is said that Caius was willing to have gone; but his wish was overruled by Fulvius, who repeated his former message. This time the boy was kept a prisoner, and Opimius led the Senate and their followers to storm the Aventine. A conflict took place on the Clivus Publicius, the road up the northern face of the hill, in which P. Lentulus, the Father of the Senate, was severely wounded. The partisans of Flaccus were overpowered, and he himself fled with his infant son, and took refuge, some said in an empty bath, others in a shop. On the consul's threat to burn all the buildings in the street, the fugitives were given up and put to death. Caius Gracchus had refused to fight against the Senate. He had retired to the temple of Diana, which Servius Tullius had founded as the sanctuary of the Plebs; and would have put himself to death, but the two faithful friends who still followed him took away his sword and persuaded him to fly. "It is said that he went down on his knees in the temple, and stretching out his hands to the statue of the goddess, prayed that the Roman people for their ingratitude and treachery to him might always be slaves; for the greater part of them had openly gone over to the other side upon an amnesty being proclaimed." At the wooden bridge over the Tiber his two friends checked his pursuers at the cost of their own lives; and he continued his flight,

*The discrepancy between Plutarch and Cicero as to the interval of a day has no bearing on the result. It seems most probable that only one night intervened between the first assembly and the final conflict.

attended only by a Greek slave. The bystanders cheered him on, as if they had been the spectators of a race; but none answered his cries for help or for a horse. He just distanced his pursuers enough to reach the sacred grove of the goddess Furina, under whose gloomy shelter his faithful slave put him to death, and then slew himself on his master's corpse. A man, whom Plutarch names Septimuleius and Diodorus L. Vitellius, cut off the head of Caius Gracchus, and brought it to the consul. The transaction is best related in the words of Mr. Long:-" Proclamation had been made before the fight began that those who brought the heads of Caius and Fulvius should have the weight of them in gold. This is the first instance in Roman history of head-money being offered and paid, but it is not the last. The head of Caius was brought to Opimius stuck on the end of a spear, and it weighed '-says Plutarch-seventeen pounds and two-thirds in the scales. Septimuleius was a scoundrel and a knave here also, for he had taken out the brain, and dropped melted lead in its place.' Opimius was as great a knave as the man who brought the head, if he paid gold for lead instead of brains, for such a fraud was palpable. Plutarch says that those who brought the head of Fulvius got nothing, for they belonged to the lower class; and this was another knavish trick of Opimius, if he had promised to pay for both heads. Perhaps we may accept Appian's simpler story, that Opimius paid in gold the weight of both."

Like Popillius after the murder of Tiberius,* so now Opimius headed a commission of legal revenge on the partisans of Caius Gracchus. The captives taken at the storming of the Aventine were cast into prison and there strangled. The account followed by Plutarch and Orosius makes the victims no fewer than 3000.† The son of Flaccus, who had been sent as an envoy to the Senate, a youth of eighteen, universally beloved, was permitted to choose the manner of his death. The houses of Caius and Flaccus were plundered, and the latter demolished. The city was purified by a lustration, and the confiscated property of Gracchus and his adherents was devoted to the erection of a temple to Concord in the Forum, on the open space beneath the Capitol, in which Camillus had set up an altar to the same deity after the reconciliation of the

One of the measures that followed the fall of Caius Gracchus was the recal of Popillius from banishment, and his restitution to his civil rights.

+ Plutarch states this as the number of those who fell in the fight, which Orosins reckons at 250. Appian says nothing of the number that perished either in or after the conflict.

patricians and plebeians.* The inscription which commemorated the origin of the building received one night this addition from an unknown hand :

"The work of Discord makes the temple of Concord."

The statues of the two Gracchi were set up in Rome at a later period, perhaps when the nobles in general, and Opimius in particular, fell into contempt for their dealings with Jugurtha. Meanwhile their enemies, in denying them a place in their fathers' tomb, ensured for them the honour long since described by the lips of Pericles," the whole earth is the sepulchre of illustrious men," and they had a still nobler shrine in the heart of their heroic mother. Whether it was granted to Cornelia to perform for Caius those rites of sepulture which had been refused to Tiberius, is doubtful; and we are told that she was forbidden to wear mourning for his death.t Nor had she the consolation of seeing the race of the Gracchi continued; for the sons of Tiberius and Caius both died young. But her whole remaining life was spent in cherishing their honour rather than in sorrowing for her own loss. That life has been described by Plutarch in one of the most touching passages of ancient literature:-" Cornelia is said to have borne her misfortunes with a noble and elevated spirit, and to have said of the sacred ground on which her sons were murdered, that they had a tomb worthy of them. She resided in the neighbourhood of Misenum without making any change in her usual mode of life. She had many friends, and her hospitable table was always crowded with guests: Greeks and learned men were constantly about her, and kings sent and received presents from her. To all her visitors and friends she was a most agreeable companion: she would tell them of the life and habits of her father Africanus, and what is most surprising, would speak of her sons without showing sorrow or shedding a tear, relating their sufferings and their deeds to her enquiring friends, as if she was speaking of the men of olden time. This made some think that her understanding had been impaired by old age or the greatness of her sorrows, and that she was dull to all sense of her misfortunes, while in fact such people themselves were too dull to see

See Vol. II., p. 278.

+ Plutarch says that the bodies of Caius and the rest who fell on the same day were thrown into the Tiber; but Orosius states that the body of Caius was carried to his mother at Misenum. Both in his case, and that of Tiberius, it should be remembered that bodies thrown into the Tiber at Rome would probably be washed up at Ostia, if not sooner.