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REPUBLIC] imported from beyond the sea, and with the foreign slave-labour purchased by the capital of wealthier men. Farming became unprofitable, and the hard laborious life with its scanty returns was thrown into still darker relief when compared with the stirring life of the camps with its opportunities of booty, or with the cheap provisions, frequent largesses and gay spectacles to be had in the large towns. The small holders went off to follow the eagles or swell the proletariat of the cities, and their holdings were left to run waste or merged in the vineyards, olive yards and above all in the great cattle farms of the rich, and their own place was taken by slaves. The evil was worst in Etruria and in southern Italy; but everywhere it was serious enough to demand the earnest attention of Roman statesmen. Of its existence the government had received plenty of warning in the declining numbers of able-bodied males returned at the census, in the increasing difficulties of recruiting for the legions, in servile outbreaks in Etruria and Apulia, and

between 200 and 160 a good deal was attempted by way of remedy. In addition to the foundation of twenty colonies, there were frequent allotments of land to veteran soldiers, especially in Apulia and Samnium. In 180, 40,000 Ligurians were removed from their homes and settled on vacant lands once the property of a Samnite tribe, and in 160 the Pomptine marshes were drained for the purpose of cultivation. But these efforts were only partially successful. The colonies planted in Cisalpine Gaul and in Picenum flourished, but of the others the majority slowly dwindled away, and two required recolonizing only eight years after their foundation. The veterans who received land were unfitted to make good farmers; and large numbers, on the first opportunity, gladly returned

as volunteers to a soldier's life. Moreover, after 160 even these efforts ceased, and with the single exception of the colony of Auximum in Picenum (157) nothing was done to check the spread of the evil, until in 133 Tiberius Gracchus, on his election to the tribunate, set his hand to the work.

The remedy proposed by Gracchus amounted in effect to the resumption by the state of as much of the “common land” as was not held in occupation by authorized persons and conformably to the provisions of the Licinian law, and the distribution in allotments of the land

thus rescued for the community from the monopoly of a few. It was a scheme which could quote in its favour ancient precedent as well as urgent necessity. Of the causes which led to its ultimate failure something will be said later on; for the present we must turn to the constitutional conflict which it provoked. The senate from the first identified itself with the interests of the wealthy occupiers, and Tiberius found himself forced into a struggle with that body, which had been no part of his original plan. He fell back on the legislative sovereignty of the assembly; he resuscitated the half-forgotten powers of interference vested in the tribunate in order to paralyse the action of the senatorial magistrates, and finally lost his life in an attempt to make good one of the weak points in the tribune's position by securing his own re-election for a second year. But the conflict did not end with his death. It was

renewed on a wider scale, and with a more deliberate aim by his

brother Gaius, who on his election to the tribunate (123) at once came forward as the avowed enemy of the senate. The latter suddenly found its control of the administration threatened at a variety of points. On the invitation of the popular tribune the assembly proceeded to restrict the senate's freedom of action in assigning the provinces. It regulated the taxation of the province of Asia and altered the conditions of military service. In home affairs it inflicted two serious blows on the senate's authority by declaring the summary punishment of Roman citizens by the consuls on the strength of a senatus consultum to be a violation of the law of appeal, and by taking out of the senate's hands the control of the newly established court for the trial of cases of magisterial misgovernment in the provinces. Tiberius had committed the mistake of relying too exclusively on the support of one section only of the community; his brother endeavoured to enlist on the popular side every available ally. The Latins and Italians had opposed an agrarian scheme which took from them land which they had come to regard as rightfully theirs, and gave them no share in the benefit of the allotments. Gaius not only removed this latter grievance, but ardently supported and himself brought forward the first proposals made in Rome for their enfranchisement. The indifference of the city populace, to whom the prospect of small holdings in a remote district of Italy was not a tempting one, was overcome by the establishment of regular monthly doles of corn at a low price. Finally, the men of business—the publicans, merchants and money-lenders—were conciliated by the privilege granted to them of collecting the tithes of the new province of Asia, and placed in direct rivalry with the senate by the substitution of men of their own class as judges in the “quaestio de repetundis,” in place of senators. The organizer of this concerted attack upon the position of the senate fell, like his brother, in a riot.

The agrarian reforms of the two Gracchi had little permanent effect. Even in the lifetime of Gaius the clause in his brother's law rendering the new holdings inalienable was repealed, and the process of absorption recommenced. In 118 a stop was put to further allotment of occupied

lands, and finally, in 111, the whole position of the agrarian question was altered by a law which converted all land still held in occupation into private land. The old controversy as to the proper use of the lands of the community was closed by this act of alienation. The controversy in future turns, not on the right of the poor