The friends of Tiberius were now thoroughly alarmed for his safety. A large throng accompanied him to his home, and kept watch before his doors all night. Before going to the comitia tributa in the morning Tiberius is reported to have told his friends that if he considered himself in danger, during the day's proceedings, and thought it necessary for his friends to repel force by force, he would raise his hand to his head. No means seems to have been adopted, however, for any concerted or effectual resistance, and none of his friends who attended the meeting of the comitia tributa went armed.
On the morning of the second meeting of the comitia tributa the Senate also met close by in the temple of Faith. Nasica demanded of the consul Scævola, who presided, to take steps to prevent the reëlection of Tiberius Gracchus. The consul refused to interfere. At this stage one of the senators, Fulvius Flaccus, who was friendly to Tiberius, hastened from the temple to inform him that his death was about to be resolved upon by the Senate. Upon hearing this news the friends of Gracchus began hastily to arm themselves with staves, for the protection of their leader, and Gracchus gave the agreed signal by raising his hand to his head.
Seizing every opportunity to attack the motives of Gracchus, his opponents raised the cry that he was asking for a crown, and this report was carried into the Senate. Nasica, the bitterest of the enemies of Gracchus and of his reforms, shouted, "The consul is betraying the republic! Those who would save their country, follow me!" and rushed out from the meeting of the Senate. He was followed by many of the senators, and by their slaves and adherents, those who were not already armed breaking up the benches to make clubs for themselves. The followers of Gracchus, without any organization among themselves, were unable to offer effectual resistance to the attack, and soon fled in all directions. Tiberius Gracchus attempted to take refuge in the temple of Jupiter, but the priests closed the doors against him, and, stumbling over a bench, he was killed by repeated blows on the head before he could rise. In this riot more than three hundred of the followers of Gracchus were killed by clubs, or by being driven over the wall at the edge of the Tarpeian rock. The hatred toward Tiberius Gracchus, on the part of the special interests of the time, did not end with his murder. Gaius Gracchus was refused permission, which he sought, to bury his brother, and it was decreed by the Senate that the bodies of Tiberius Gracchus and his followers should be thrown into the Tiber before daybreak on the following morning.
Very divergent views have been taken of the conduct of Tiberius Gracchus and that of his opponents by different classes of historians. Historians, equally with politicians, inevitably fall into one of the two classes into which mankind is divided, the class of the radicals on the one hand, or of the conservatives on the other; into the class of those who favor progress and the recognition of the supreme right of manhood, or into the class of those who wish to keep things as they are, and worship before the shrine of vested interests. No single incident in history better serves to bring out the bias of the historian than does that of the efforts of Tiberius Gracchus in behalf of his agrarian law. No historian can write this page of Roman history without throwing open for the inspection of the world the inmost workings of his mind and sympathies. That class of historians who can see more pathos in the execution of King Louis XVI than in the combined misery of the downtrodden millions who lived and died in France under the two centuries of Bourbon misrule, have attempted to cast upon Tiberius Gracchus the stigma of a demagogue, of a reckless leader, of a violator of his country's most fundamental laws; while the conduct of the leaders of the conservative party, who did not hesitate at the crisis to resort even to murder rather than surrender their unlawful profits, is excused as being rendered necessary by the violence of Tiberius Gracchus.
Yet there are few prominent characters in whose public actions the impartial critic can find so little to criticize as in that of the greatest of all Roman tribunes—Tiberius Gracchus. At the outset the whole policy of Gracchus was moderate and even conciliatory, and it was only the unyielding selfishness of the great landowners which forced him into a position where he must either surrender all for which he was fighting or adopt a more vigorous plan of campaign; which, finally, against his will, compelled him to adopt those tactics for which he has been so severely censured by certain historians.
The legality of the deposition of Octavius has already been discussed. It only remains to consider the action of Tiberius Gracchus in presenting himself as a candidate for reëlection as tribune. Of the vital necessity for this action, both to secure the enforcement of the agrarian law and the personal safety of Tiberius himself, there can be no doubt. It must be admitted, however, that this by itself is not a sufficient defense of the action of Gracchus on this occasion. The fundamental principles of government in any country cannot, generally, be safely violated merely to meet a temporary exigency. The worst possible government is generally better, for those who are to live under it, than anarchy; and the condition of a country where laws can be habitually broken with impunity is but one step from that of a country where no laws exist. The breaking of a law with good motives is often more disastrous than the breaking of it with bad intentions; because in a former case an example is set which, being looked upon with approval by a large class of the best people in the community, is apt to furnish a precedent for future violations of the law, with the worst motives and for the most dangerous purposes. No true republic can long continue to exist unless a sense of reverence for and obedience to law is bred into the mass of its citizens. The right of overthrowing a corrupt government and of establishing a new civic system must ever reside with the people; but such a right must be resorted to only as an extreme, exceptional, and desperate remedy, and the frequent recurrence of revolutions and rebellions in a republic results in a substitution of the rule of force for the peaceful rule of the majority, and is inconsistent with any true idea of democracy.
If, then, Tiberius Gracchus had attempted to override the fundamental law of Rome for the purpose of obtaining some temporary personal or partisan advantage he might well have deserved the attacks which have been made upon his memory. Tiberius Gracchus, however, violated no provision of the Roman constitution. No evidence exists that there was ever any law making a Roman tribune ineligible for reëlection.
The prohibition would seem to have arisen from long-continued custom rather than from law, and to have been of a character not unsimilar to the so-called "conventions of the English Constitution," or to the rule in this country that no man shall be elected for a third term as President. If a law declaring a tribune to be ineligible for reëlection was ever enacted in Rome (and with the absence of a full list of Roman laws this is a point on which absolute certainty is impossible) it was, in all probability, of a directory rather than a mandatory character. Such was the character of all Roman laws relative to the qualification of officers. Thus, the Roman laws provided a regular order in which the principal offices at Rome should be held, and prohibited any person holding any office until he had held all those named before it on the list, and until he had reached a certain specified age.
This law, while in the main followed, was frequently disregarded. The violations were in the main chargeable to the very class at Rome that was most bitter in the denunciation of Tiberius Gracchus for offering himself as a candidate for reëlection as tribune. Under the existing political conditions at Rome no great blame could be attached to an occasional disregard either of the law regulating the qualifications for office or the law, or custom, relative to the reëlection of a tribune. It is only on this one occasion in Roman history that the violation of either of these laws was denounced as an attack on the Roman constitution. Even in the exciting days preceding the passage of the Licinian Laws the tribunes Licinius and Sextius were reëlected year after year, without the legality of their election being questioned. Only ten years after the death of Tiberius Gracchus the reëlection to the office of tribune of his brother, Gaius Gracchus, was permitted. It is a striking comment upon the fairness of some of the historians who attack Tiberius Gracchus for his alleged violation of the law that they are able to find excuses for the action of that branch of the senatorial party whose members were so unwilling to surrender to the state their illegal profits that they resorted to force to break up a meeting of the comitia tributa and to murder Gracchus and three hundred of his adherents.
The years which intervened between the tribuneship of Tiberius Gracchus and that of his brother Gaius were filled with internal factional discord at Rome, but without any decisive results. Each party, in turn, was able to secure revenge upon its opponents, in the conflict connected with the death of Tiberius Gracchus. First, the popular party was successful in compelling Nasica to retire from Italy. Next, in 132 B.C., the Senate gave to the consuls a commission to inquire into the actions of those who had supported Tiberius Gracchus. By means of this commission the aristocratic party was enabled to bring about the execution of some of the partisans of Gracchus and the exile of others.