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Rh the aspirations of the latter which assumed corporate form in Catiline and the Gracchi? They wanted a fair share in the public lands and they demanded a voice in the discussion of state affairs. In the ancient communities the individual citizen had a remarkably highly developed sense of respect and responsibility for the welfare of the commonwealth, and also for the duties and privileges arising from his connection with it. He seemed to think that taken alone, he was a contemptible fragment, but fitted into his proper place in the structure of the state, he became a complete and rounded whole. The Roman plebeian looked upon himself as the unjustly despised and disinherited son of a wealthy house, and merely demanded his seat at the paternal board, and his share in the family discussions—the thought of rebelling against the surrounding conditions of political and social life, never occurred to him. He was proud of them, and paid them willing and delighted homage. He looked up to the patrician on account of his rank and neither envied him his lineage, nor the outward symbols of his exalted position. He contentedly took that position on the scale of social rank which the accident of his birth had assigned to him, and although he glanced with reverential awe at the aristocratic and senatorial families above him, he could experience a sensation of self-esteem and satisfaction when he looked down upon the multitudes of slaves and freed-men beneath him.

Far deeper was the discontent of those slaves who rose in insurrection again and again, during that corrupt age when the republic was being merged into an empire, protesting with their life-blood against the existing arrangement of society, in battles whose tragic pathos is beyond description. In those nameless multitudes who form the living pedestal for the grand figure of Spartacus,