United States or Liberia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
His revenge was not satisfied even with the death of his victim; he forbade the burial of the dead bodies: he gave orders anticipated, it is true, in this respect by Sulla that the heads of the senators slain should be fixed to the rostra in the Forum; he ordered particular corpses to be dragged through the Forum, and that of Gaius Caesar to be stabbed afresh at the tomb of Quintus Varius, whom Caesar presumably had once impeached; he publicly embraced the man who delivered to him as he sat at table the head of Antonius, whom he had been with difficulty restrained from seeking out in his hiding-place, an slaying with his own hand.
The consul Lucius Opimius offered the usual sacrifice in the porch of the Capitoline temple; one of the attendants assisting at the ceremony, Quintus Antullius, with the holy entrails in his hand, haughtily ordered the "bad citizens" to quit the porch, and seemed as though he would lay hands on Gaius himself; whereupon a zealous Gracchan drew his sword and cut the man down.
A longer resistance was offered in Etruria by Populonium and above all by the impregnable Volaterrae, which gathered out of the remains of the beaten party an army of four legions, and stood a two years' siege conducted first by Sulla in person and then by the former praetor Gaius Carbo, the brother of the democratic consul, till at length in the third year after the battle at the Colline gate the garrison capitulated on condition of free departure.
While the rest of the ships took their station for the winter at Corcyra, a division under Gaius Claudius Cento proceeded to the Piraeeus to render assistance to the hard-pressed Athenians.
Marcus Octavius was at the bidding of Gracchus removed by the lictors from the tribunes' bench; and then, amidst universal rejoicing, the agrarian law was carried and the first allotment-commissioners were nominated. The votes fell on the author of the law along with his brother Gaius, who was only twenty years of age, and his father-in-law Appius Claudius.
The governor of Asia at that time, Lucius Lucullus, was directed to reestablish the system of farming the revenue introduced by Gaius Gracchus; and thus this important source of money and power was restored to the great capitalists. Renewal of the Censorship Lastly, the censorship was revived.
In like manner the army of the governor apparently of the Hither province Claudius Unimanus was destroyed, that of Gaius Negidius was vanquished, and the level country was pillaged far and wide.
The multitude entered into the matter the more readily, as Gaius Caesar especially kept them in good humour by the extravagant magnificence of his games in which all the equipments, even the cages of the wild beasts, appeared of massive silver and generally by a liberality which was all the more princely that it was based solely on the contraction of debt.
In other cases also death had already swept away the most notable of his opponents: of the leaders there survived only Gaius Norbanus, who laid hands on himself at Rhodes, while the -ecclesia- was deliberating on his surrender; Lucius Scipio, for whom his insignificance and probably also his noble birth procured indulgence and permission to end his days in peace at his retreat in Massilia; and Quintus Sertorius, who was wandering about as an exile on the coast of Mauretania.
Thereby the Romans gained time to encounter them with united forces in Italy. It was no season to resume as the democratic general would perhaps otherwise have done the interrupted scheme of conquest in Gaul, such as Gaius Gracchus had probably projected.
Word Of The Day