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Updated: May 1, 2025
Perhaps the dissatisfaction with the senatorial government was not now less than it was then; but several of the hopes, which had brought to the Gracchi their most faithful adherents, had in the meanwhile been recognized as illusory, and there had sprung up in many minds a misgiving that this Gracchan agitation tended towards an issue whither a very large portion of the discontented were by no means willing to follow it.
But, on the whole, the Gracchan scheme of colonisation was, as we have seen, commercial rather than agricultural, and was probably intended to benefit a class that was not adapted to rural occupations, either by association or training. By this enterprise Caius Gracchus showed that he saw with perfect clearness the true reason, and the final evidence, of the stagnation of the middle class.
If we combine with such considerations the fact, that Sulla allowed the principal foundations of the Gracchan constitution to stand and disturbed neither the equestrian courts nor the largesses of grain, we shall find warrant for the opinion that the Sullan arrangement of 666 substantially adhered to the status quo subsisting since the fall of Gaius Gracchus; he merely, on the one hand, altered as the times required the traditional rules that primarily threatened danger to the existing government, and, on the other hand, sought to remedy according to his power the existing social evils, so far as either could be done without touching ills that lay deeper.
Fannius, as a moderate, was an excellent exponent of senatorial views, and it was believed that many noble hands had collaborated in the crushing speech which inflicted one of its death-blows on the Gracchan proposal. The opportunity for active opposition had at last arrived, and the senate was emboldened to repeat the measure which four years earlier had swept the aliens out of Rome.
Never hitherto had the Roman aristocracy been so utterly deficient in men of statesmanly and military capacity, as it was during this epoch of restoration between the Gracchan and the Cinnan revolutions. Marcus Aemilius Scaurus A significant illustration of this is afforded by the chief of the senatorial party at this time, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus.
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.
Dowries had been swallowed up in the soil, and the Gracchan law was confiscating personal as well as real property, taking the wife's fortune as well as the husband's. Nay, if the history of the public land were traced, could it not be shown that such value as it now possessed had been given it by its occupiers or their ancestors?
But the reaction did not immediately attack the distributions of grain, the taxation of the province of Asia, or the Gracchan arrangement as to the jurymen and courts; on the contrary, it not only spared the mercantile class and the proletariate of the capital, but continued to render homage, as it had already done in the introduction of the Livian laws, to these powers and especially to the proletariate far more decidedly than had been done by the Gracchi.
The work begun by Lucullus had been completed by Pompeius; the hitherto formally independent states of Bithynia, Pontus, and Syria were united with the Roman state; the exchange which had been recognized for more than a hundred years as necessary of the feeble system of a protectorate for that of direct sovereignty over the more important dependent territories, had at length been realized, as soon as the senate had been overthrown and the Gracchan party had come to the helm.
The Gracchan constitution resembled a fortress without a commander; the walls and garrison were uninjured, but the general was wanting, and there was no one to take possession of the vacant place save the very government which had been overthrown. The Restored Aristocracy So it accordingly happened.
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