world by individual grants and recruiting for the legions. The laws of debt were emended by the just bankruptcy laws of Caesar and Augustus, and even the leges frumentariae required but a slight modification to make them a genuine scheme of poor-relief.[1] The equites, too, the class to whom C. Gracchus had given an official recognition, became a still more recognised order under the Principate and a most useful wheel in the administrative machinery.
It is more difficult to decide whether the radical change of government to which the agitation led can be considered a genuine triumph for the reformers. Military monarchy may be regretted by those who see in it a confession of incapacity to combine imperial government with Republican institutions; but, from the point of view of the reforming party, it was only a disappointment if we conceive that their leaders thought that government by comitia might replace the rule of the Senate. But there is hardly a trace of this idea. No effort was made throughout the whole of this period to make the comitia a workable or really democratic institution; and personal rule, as the only expression of democracy, had asserted itself at the beginning of the movement. The only open question was whether it should be a Periclean tyrannis of the type enjoyed by C. Gracchus or a Napoleonic rule such as that of Caesar. As a matter of fact the Principate learnt a lesson from both solutions—that of the Gracchan and that of the Marian epoch—and established itself on a joint basis of the tribunicia potestas and the proconsulare imperium.
If we look round for other possible solutions, we find two faintly foreshadowed, but both doomed to failure. The first was a reformed Senate, not merely the existing body artificially bolstered up, as it had been by Sulla, but a body really made representative of Italy through the free inclusion of novi homines. The idea was held by Cicero, but no scheme was ever considered which would have made it a reality. For such an object to be attained, election to those magistracies from which the Senate was recruited must cease to be in the hands of the Roman comitia; but no one to our knowledge, with the exception of the Emperor Augustus, thought of the possibility of election by
- ↑ Caesar reduced the number of the recipients of the corn-dole from 320,000 to 150,000 (Suet. Caes. 41). In the Principate it stood at about 200,000. See Marquardt Staatsverw. ii. p. 118.
