to have in his neighborhood an estate to his taste, he caused it to be ceded to him; sometimes he seized it while the lawful owner was fighting far away under the Roman eagles. By degrees all the small proprietors were despoiled, in order to form vast estates for the privileged class of public functionaries. Parks, gardens, and expensive fish-ponds took the place of cultivated fields. Laborers disappeared, and the country was peopled with slaves, dangerous by their numbers, and also by their robber habits, which they practised with impunity. Some masters, it is said, shared the profits of robbery with these wretches.'
The great social evils of the day—the extinction of the old peasant proprietors of Italy; and the vast increase of slaves, the danger of which had been already manifested by several servile revolts in Sicily; and the congregation in the towns, and especially in Rome, of vast masses of population, not living as the artisans and traders in modern towns do, by honest industry, but living in noisy idleness upon the alms of the provinces and the sums they received for their votes—these social evils must have struck many generous hearts among the Romans. The man, however, on whom they produced so decided an impression as to lead him to devote his life to their removal, was Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, the son of a plebeian of rank who had attained distinction in the Spanish wars, and of Cornelia, the daughter of the great Scipio. Abandoning, in its first stage, the more tempting career which led through the quæstorship, edileship, and prætorship to the consulship, Tiberius chose rather the office of tribune of the people, which was more suitable for the purposes of political agitation. Elected to this office B. C. 133, in the twenty-ninth year of his age, he propounded his schemes of reform. His grand project was a revival, with some modifications, of the famous agrarian law of Licinius, which had long fallen into tacit desuetude. All citizens who were in possession of a larger extent of the state land than the 500 jugera allowed by the Licinian law (unless in the case of fathers of two sons, who were to be allowed 250 jugera in addition for each of them), were to be deprived of the surplus; the buildings, vine-presses, etc., which were erected on these surplus lands to be purchased at a fair valuation; and the whole land thus seized was to constitute a stock out of which the pauper plebeians of the city were to be furnished with little farms for the honest support of themselves and families, these farms to be incapable of alienation by the persons to whom they should be allotted. Utterly revolutionary as this measure would seem in modern legislation, and sufficiently sweeping as it was, even in a Roman point of view, considering that however unjustly the ancestors of many of the large proprietors had come by their lands, yet long possession and frequent transference had in many cases sanctified the ownership—still the measure was strictly in the spirit of Roman law, and one of the supporters of Gracchus in proposing it was the eminent jurist Mucius Scævola. Tiberius and his associates probably thought that the ends proposed—the removal of the venal mob out of Rome, and the restoration in Italy of a population of hard-working peasant proprietors, instead of the gangs of bandit slaves—were difficult enough to require, and glorious enough to justify, somewhat revolutionary means. Accordingly, advocating by his eloquence in the Forum the scheme which he had matured in private, he did not cease until, in spite of the most obstinate resistance on the part of the senators, who used as their instrument against him one of
