Gracchi brothers

His wife, Aemilia, was the daughter of Paulus, who fell at Cannae, and the sister of him who afterwards conquered Perseus of Macedonia.

His daughter, Cornelia, afterwards became the mother of the famous Gracchi.

Next to Caesar, Scipio was Rome's greatest general.

During the campaign in the East, he met Hannibal at the court of Antiochus.

The aristocracy again armed itself.

Gaius, with three thousand of his friends, was murdered in one twenty-one, and the Senate was once more master of the situation.

However, the results obtained by the Gracchi still remained.

Forty thousand peasants had been settled on public land.

political emancipation has enabled social discontent to organize itself and find permanent utterance and we are to-day facing some of the demands to satisfy which the gracchi sacrificed their lives more than two thousand years ago With us, indeed, the wages question is of more prominence than the land question, because we are a manufacturing nation.

But the principles at stake are much the same.

At Rome, social agitation was generally agrarian, and the first thing necessary towards understanding the Groc and revolution is to gain a clear conception of the history of the public land.

The ground round a town like Rome, the ager publicus, was originally cultivated by the inhabitants, some of whom, as more food and clothing were required, would settle on the soil.

From them the ranks of the army were recruited, and thus doubly oppressed by military service and by the land tax, which had to be paid in coin, the small husbandman was forced to borrow from some richer man in town.

On the other hand, the poor had always one glaring act of robbery to cast in the teeth of the rich.

A sanguine tribune might hope permanently to check a growing evil by fresh supplies of free labour.

his poor partisan again had a direct pecuniary interest in getting the land selfish and philanthropic motives therefore went hand in hand and in advocating the distribution of land a statesman would be sure of enlisting the sympathies of needy italians even more than those of the better provided for poor of rome incidental mention has been made of the condition of the slaves in italy it was the sight of the slave gangs which partly at least roused tiberius gracchus to action and some remarks on roman slavery follow naturally an inquiry into the nature of the public land the most terrible characteristic of slavery is that it blights not only the unhappy slaves themselves but their owners and the land where they live it is an absolutely unmitigated evil as roman conquests multiplied and luxury increased enormous fortunes became more common and the demand for slaves increased also ten thousand are said to have been landed and sold at delos in one day What proportion the slave population of Italy bore to the free at the time of the Gracchi we cannot say.