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Updated: May 1, 2025
It was easy to arouse the train of thought that centred round the two Gracchan movements and the terrible moments of their catastrophe. The new movement against the senate was in fact but the old movement in another form.
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.
But when the few old men who had seen the first storms of revolution and heard the words of the Gracchi, compared that time with the present they found that everything had in the interval changed countrymen and citizens, state-law and military discipline, life and manners; and well might those painfully smile, who compared the ideals of the Gracchan period with their realization.
The wicked authors of the sedition must be punished; but the Gracchan legislation might remain untouched. More than one motive probably contributed to shape this view. In the first place, the traditional policy of Rome regarded reaction as equivalent to revolution.
It is obvious that the intrinsic inconsistency of the Gracchan policy in abetting at once the effort of the excluded to obtain admission into the circle of the privileged, and the effort of the privileged to maintain their distinctive rights had passed over to their successors; while Caesar and his friends on the one hand held forth to the Transpadanes the prospect of the franchise, they on the other hand gave their assent to the continuance of the disabilities of the freedmen, and to the barbarous setting aside of the rivalry which the industry and trading skill of the Hellenes and Orientals maintained with the Italians in Italy itself.
New Arrangement as to Jurymen With respect to the position of jurymen, the regulation of Sulla, that the roll of the senators was to serve as the list of jurymen, was no doubt abolished; but this by no means led to a simple restoration of the Gracchan equestrian courts.
A similar effect would have been produced by the age qualification. The Gracchan jurors were to be over thirty and under sixty, while a large number of the military equites were under the former limit of age, in consequence of the practice of retiring from the corps after the attainment of the quaestorship or selection into the senate.
The Gracchan party, which suggested these extensions of territory beyond the Alps, evidently wished to open up there a new and immeasurable field for their plans of colonization, a field which offered the same advantages as Sicily and Africa, and could be more easily wrested from the natives than he Sicilian and Libyan estates from the Italian capitalists.
If it was the Licinian law of the middle of the fourth century, this law must have been renewed, or must still have continued to be observed, at a period not very long anterior to the Gracchan proposal; for Cato could point his argument against the declaration of war with Rhodes by an appeal to a provision attributed to this measure an appeal which would have been pointless, had the provision fallen into that oblivion which persistent neglect of an enactment must bring to all but the professed students of law.
Now, if ever, the time had come for completing the unfinished work of restoration of 633, for making the Gracchan constitution share the fate of the tyrant, and for replacing the governing oligarchy in the sole possession of political power. Collision between the Senate and Equites in the Administration of the Provinces Everything depended on recovering the nomination of the jurymen.
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