Italy was but a step-mother to the greater number of her inhabitants, it was the more certain to rouse the wrath of those who heard him; and though he was attended home by a crowd of delighted partisans, perhaps that very day, perhaps after some other speech as bitter, he never came forth again, but was found dead in his bed, on the following morning. Some said he died a natural death; 67 others declared him poisoned or killed by his adversaries; and there were a few to charge Carbo or Gracchus directly with his murder.69 Gracchus, at all events, needs no defence; but the slander against him is a sufficient symptom of the sickliness prevailing through a Commonwealth in which such a citizen as he could be so accused, and such as Scipio imagined to be so slain. It is plain, nevertheless, that there were many extreme expedients in practice amongst the popular leaders of the day to sustain the cause they professed to have at heart. Papirius Carbo, Tribune in the second year following the death of Tiberius Gracchus, devoted the leisure he had from the common duties of his office and those of the Agrarian commission, to the passage of two laws: one allowing the reëlection of a Tribune as often as he desired and the Tribes consented, and the other empowering the people to vote by ballot concerning the laws submitted to their decision.70 Whatever might be the abstract merit or 69 67 "Ut plures." Vell. Pat., 129, four years from the fall of Ti II. 4. 68 Liv., Epit. LIX. App., Bell. Civ., I. 20. This was in A. C. berius. 69 Liv., Epit. LIX. demerit of these measures, their passage, at this moment of general distress for land and food and peaceful occupation, while the Agrarian law already passed lay idle, was as much as to bid the populace of Rome renounce their better hopes, and wear their lives away, content with the Forum and its assemblies, unless it pleased them to be soldiers, and die or fight afar from the land in which they had no homes. Sometimes a Tribune, without attempting to improve even the political position of his constituents, preferred to seek his own authority, while they disputed amongst themselves or starved. Atinius Labeo, one of Carbo's successors, incensed at being ejected" from the Senate by the Censor Metellus Macedonicus, in the preceding year, determined to use the strength of his tribuneship in revenge. Meeting his enemy one day, as he was returning home at noon, when the Forum and the Capitol were empty of the crowds that thronged there at other hours, the Tribune seized the Censor, and hurrying him, with the aid of his attendants, up to the Tarpeian rock, swore that Metellus should be hurled from it as a traitor. The servants of Metellus vainly strove to rescue their master; nor does it appear that he would have been saved from instant destruction, had not the alarm spread rapidly, and a Tribune been persuaded to interpose his veto against the audacious outrage of his colleague. So far, however, from Atinius being called to account, he was able to carry a law 71 Plin., Nat. Hist., VII. 45. Cic., Pro Dom., 47. Cf. Liv., Epit. 72 that the Tribunes should always have a place in the Senate independently of the pleasure of the Censors. If such were the liberty to do evil in Rome, it is no marvel that the liberty to do good should have failed Tiberius Gracchus, as has been described. 73 Caius Gracchus, though willing to assist Carbo, and eager, doubtless, to declare his dissent from the opinions which Scipio Africanus would have enforced upon his countrymen, was rather a looker-on than an actor in these ominous scenes. On one occasion, indeed, he appeared in the Forum, earnest to defend a friend against apparently perilous prosecution; but the joy with which he was saluted by the people and the admiration excited by his eloquence did not yet tempt him to change his resolution of living apart from the political commotions in which his brother had been sacrificed; and, with the exception of his charge as one of the Agrarian commissioners, he bore no office and sought none. There was little in the efforts of others to move him from his usual silence, or, as it may have been, after what had passed, his hopelessness;74 and he rather shunned 72 Aul. Gell., XIV. 8. 73 All the other orators," says Plutarch, 66 were but children to him." C. Gr., 1. Compare Diod. Sic., Reliq., XXXIV. - XXXV. 24. 74 In the Scholia published by Angelo Mai, with the oration of Cicero, Pro Sull., 9, there is a passage given as from a discourse of Caius Gracchus, which must have been spoken somewhere about this time : "Si vellem apud vos verba facere et vobis postulare, quum genere summo ortus essem, et quum fratrem propter vos amisissem, nec quisquam de P. Africani et Tib. Gracchi familia nisi ego et puer restaremus, ut pateremini hoc tempore me quiescere, ne a stirpe genus nostrum interiret, et uti aliqua propago generis nostri reliqua esset : haud scio an lubentius a vobis im than waited the time when his own duties were to unfold themselves. This time was close at hand; and when Junius Pennus, a Tribune, in the seventh year75 after the death of Tiberius, proposed the expulsion of aliens 76 by law from the city, Caius, who had been his brother's abettor in offering citizenship to the Italians, did not forsake them or the other strangers who had come to dwell in Rome. Sometimes it is said that he wished them in aid of his schemes, or else it is declared that their ejection was a mere act of opposition to the nobility, who desired their brawling support against the Roman citizens; but in either case, there is small hazard in attributing to Caius the disposition to defend for their own sakes the hungry or the greedy multitude that sought amongst their and their fathers' conquerors the bread or the lucre denied them in the places whence they came. A greater purpose still may have risen to his mind; and a line that has been preserved of his discourse in the Forum, where he said that "a commonwealth must be composed of many different classes,"" seems to indicate his knowledge of the need there was to refresh the liberty of his country with new blood in its veins, new vigor in its limbs. The bill, petrassem." See another extract, perhaps from the same sad speech, in Cic., De Orat., III. 56. 75 A. C. 126. 76 Peregrini. See Book II. ch. 10, pp. 54-56. The law of Pen nus is described in Cic., De Off., III. 11; with which compare Brut., 77" Respublicas multarum civitatum pluraliter dixit. . . . . . Ex nationes, cum aliis rebus, per avaritiam atque stultitiam, respublicas suas amiserunt." Festus, s. v. Respublicas. notwithstanding, passed; and the city was cleared of strangers as though they had been its enemies. Caius Gracchus was evidently weary of inaction and unavailing sorrow. The love he bore his mur dered brother would have been a sufficient motive in itself to impel him towards aims that were worthy of the name he bore and the memories he appeared to personify in the eyes of all who had loved or hated the departed. As if avoiding, however, the Forum, to him still haunted by the spirit of Tiberius and his fallen friends, Caius sought78 a place in the quæstorship, which he obtained in an army about to enter upon service in Sardinia, where, as very frequently happened, there was a rebellion to be suppressed. While he was engaged in his canvass according to the common routine, but more than usually fatigued and excited by his return to the public life from which, with few exceptions, he had stood aloof for seven years, he seemed one night to see his brother in his dreams, and to hear Tiberius's wellremembered voice upbraid him for his doubts and delays. "Why linger, Caius," it breathed, "when the same death by which I perished is before thee likewise?" 79 The hesitation and the sorrow of the sleeper were dispelled; and he woke, not, indeed, to joyful hope of future triumph, but to the far more marvellous resolution of employing aright and fervently the life that yet remained before the coming of its mournful end. 78 The authority of Cicero (De 79 Cic., De Div., I. 26. Div., I. 26) is here more reliable than that of Plutarch (C. Gr., 1). |