Page:Roman Constitutional History, 753-44 B.C..djvu/184

170 for their political activity — something the oligarchy had long known and practised. He had helped to restore and was now helping to ruin Italian agriculture. He had helped to improve and was now corrupting the people, and attracting all the shiftless, bankrupt, and worthless, citizens to Rome. He was also imposing a great burden on the public treasury and in the end on the provinces.

Further, he renewed the agrarian law of Tiberius, although legally it was still in force. Probably he restored their former jurisdiction to the commissioners, and he may have allowed the Latins to share in the distribution of land.

Law concerning Equestrian Jurymen. — Besides these measures for protecting and strengthening himself and his party, Gaius Gracchus carried others with the view of dividing and weakening the hostile party, the nobles and the rich. In general, the senators had so.far been the judges, or jurymen, in civil cases, in special commissions, and in the special court on provincial extortion (pp. 145-146). In his first tribunate, Gracchus seems to have proposed that three hundred knights should be admitted to the senate, and hence be eligible for jurymen. But as this proposal did not meet with the acceptance of the nobility, he provided, by a law of 122 (lex judiciaria), that as a rule all jurymen should be selected from the freeborn citizens (ingenui) who were thirty years of age and possessed the equestrian census ($22,000), but were not senators. He was himself authorized to draw up the first panel of jurors (album judicum).

The haughty nobles had looked down upon the rich knights, and had at times come into collision with them in the provinces, when trying to check their greed. Now the latter were, to some extent, placed on an equality with the nobility, they formed a more compact and distinct class, and became a controlling power. They were the judges of the nobles in the lawsuits, which affected all relations in