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Updated: May 9, 2025
Is there anything whatever that can be called so peculiarly the act of that man who, while clad in the robe of peace, was yet invested with both civil and military command in the republic, as a law of his? Ask for the acts of Gracchus, the Sempronian laws will be brought forward; ask for those of Sylla, you will have the Cornelian laws. What more?
The new features in the Sempronian agrarian law, as compared with the Licinio-Sextian, were, first, the clause in favour of the hereditary possessors; secondly, the leasehold and inalienable tenure proposed for the new allotments; thirdly and especially, the regulated and permanent executive, the want of which under the older law had been the chief reason why it had remained without lasting practical application.
His law was not a brief series of amendments, but a comprehensive statute, so completely covering the ground of the earlier Sempronian law that later legislation cites the law of Caius, and not that of Tiberius Gracchus, as the authority for the regulations which had revolutionised the tenure of the public land.
The Livian laws, which released the proletarians from paying rent for their lands, were ratified by the people as readily as the Sempronian laws had been. The foundation of the despotism of Gracchus was thus assailed by the Senate uniting with the proletarians. An opportunity was only wanted to effect his complete overthrow.
The laws under which he accomplished these beneficent changes are known, from the family to which the Gracchi belonged, as the Sempronian Laws. In carrying out the necessary legislation and in executing the laws, Caius labored himself with great assiduity, and his activity afforded his enemies the opportunity to say falsely that he made some private gain from them.
The "people" accordingly ratified the Livian laws as readily as it had before ratified the Sempronian.
Never since Rome stood had such power been united in the hands of a single man. The Democratic-Military Revolution The Gabinio-Manilian proposals terminated the struggle between the senate and the popular party, which the Sempronian laws had begun sixty-seven years before.
The democrats were fond of pointing out how much was still wanting towards the restoration of the Sempronian corn-laws in their full extent, and at the same time passed over in silence the fact that under the altered circumstances with the straitened condition of the public finances and the great increase in the number of fully-privileged Roman citizens that restoration was absolutely impracticable.
As the Sempronian laws first constituted the revolutionary party into a political opposition, the Gabinio- Manilian first converted it from an opposition into the government; and as it had been a great moment when the first breach in the existing constitution was made by disregarding the veto of Octavius, it was a moment no less full of significance when the last bulwark of the senatorial rule fell with the withdrawal of Trebellius.
Yet he might say that he had not lived in vain. It was to him, at least quite as much as to the author of the Sempronian law, that the Roman burgesses were indebted for an increase of nearly 80,000 new farm-allotments; he it was too who put a stop to this distribution of the domains, when it had produced such benefit as it could produce.
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