Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/289

IX system with admiration and awe, little dreaming of the troubles that were to come upon her, and apparently blind to the social rottenness lying beneath the imposing structure of her constitution. Within a few years after Polybius recorded his observations, Rome was torn asunder by stasis, which under varying phases lasted for a whole century, and brought with it evils as terrible and as weakening as those described by Thucydides.

The revolution begun by Tiberius Gracchus in 133 B.C. cannot indeed be aptly compared to the little storms, furious as they sometimes were, which raged in the small City-States of the Greeks. No sooner do we try to probe to the bottom this great stasis of Rome, than we find it complicated by so many side-issues, and by problems so vast in their reach and complexity, that we instinctively feel ourselves passing into a new region of politics, in which, if we are to judge fairly, we must adjust our judgment by some other standard than that of the.

But it is true indeed that this stasis sprang, as Aristotle says all such quarrels will, from inequality and from inequality in the distribution of wealth; in its first beginning it can be treated as the stasis of a City-State. The oligarchy which had been so long in power, and had steered Rome through so many perils, had also slowly absorbed the land of the State; to inequality in power they added inequality of wealth, and the "people," accustomed to have their affairs managed by trustees in whom they placed implicit confidence, tacitly