The speech of Scipio was naturally well received in the Senate; what its reception would have been on the second day, before the people in the Forum, is problematical. On the morning following his speech in the Senate Scipio was found dead in his bed. It is one of the unsolved mysteries of history whether Scipio died from natural causes or was murdered. Nor is it more certain, if he was murdered, as to who his murderers were. Strong suspicion was directed against Carbo, and that hypocritical demagogue was driven into a temporary political retirement, from which he emerged a few years later as one of the most serviceable tools of the senatorial party.
The importance, ability, and character of Scipio Africanus have been greatly over-praised by most historians. A. H. Beesly, however, in his work The Gracchi, Marius and Sulla, gives a discriminating criticism of this Roman general and statesman:
"He is usually extolled as a patriot who would not stir to humour a Roman rabble, but who, when downtrodden honest farmers, his comrades in the wars, appealed to him, at once stepped into the arena as their champion. In reality he was a reactionist who, when the inevitable results of those liberal ideas which had been broached in his own circle stared him in the face, seized the first available means of stifling them. The world had moved too fast for him. As censor, instead of beseeching the gods to increase the glory of the State, he begged them to preserve it. Brave as a man, he was a pusillanimous statesman. It was well for his reputation that he died just then. Without Sulla's personal vices he might have played Sulla's part as a politician, and his atrocities in Spain as well as his remark on the death of Tiberius Gracchus—words breathing the very essence of a narrow swordsman's nature—showed that from bloodshed at all events he would not have shrunk. It is hard to respect such a man in spite of all his good qualities. Fortune gave him the opportunity of playing a great part, and he shrank from it. When the crop sprang up which he had himself helped to sow, he blighted it. But because he was personally respectable, and because he held a middle course between contemporary parties, he has found favour with historians, who are too apt to forget that there is in politics, as in other things, a right course and a wrong, and that to attempt to walk along both at once proves a man to be a weak statesman, and does not prove him to be a great or good man."
The fillers in, who had occupied the stage of Roman politics for the years following the murder of Tiberius Gracchus, were now removed, and the stage was being rapidly set for the second and final act of the great historical tragedy of the Gracchi.
The political problems which confronted Rome at the time of the death of Scipio rapidly reached such an acute state that it became evident the solution of these problems, and the preservation of the Roman republic, must be the work of a Man, not of a manikin or a demagogue. At this crisis Rome was blessed with the best of fortune, only to be immediately thereafter cursed with the worst of misfortune. The good fortune consisted in the fact that at this time the man presented himself for the work; the bad fortune arose from the refusal of Rome to avail herself of his work.
The agitation of Carbo had added to the bitter contest between rich and poor, and one perhaps still more bitter, at least temporarily, between Romans and Italians. An attempt was made to reconcile the differences between the Romans and Italians by means of a compromise, by the terms of which the Italians were to consent to the carrying out of the Agrarian Law, and in return were to be admitted to Roman citizenship. This last proposal was viewed with great alarm by the Roman proletariat, most of whom were by this time possessed of nothing in the world except the rights and privileges of Roman citizenship, and who saw that the value of such rights and privileges would be greatly diminished by the great increase now proposed in the number of those by whom such rights and privileges were to be enjoyed.
The Italians, on their side, delighted at the prospect of obtaining these rights, began to come to Rome in great numbers. This migration added fuel to the flame, and in 126 B.C. the tribune, Junius Pennus, proposed an alien act by which foreigners were compelled to leave Rome. The law was passed, with unpleasant consequences at a later date. For the second time in his life Gaius Gracchus made a public speech, on this occasion appearing on the losing side.
The following year Gaius Gracchus served as quæstor and was sent to Sardinia under the consul Aurelius Orestes. The Senate, and the oligarchical party in general, had by this time come to regard the young Gaius Gracchus with mingled fear and suspicion, and in disregard of the laws he was first ordered to remain a second year in Sardinia, and later to remain a third year.
In the meantime, at Rome, events had been moving rapidly. Fulvius Flaccus, the old friend of Tiberius Gracchus, had been elected consul and had brought in a bill extending the franchise to all the Latin and Italian allies. Shortly thereafter, before the bill had been voted upon, Flaccus had been sent by the Senate upon foreign service, and the bill was sidetracked. The disappointment at such a result on the part of those who were denied the right of suffrage, after they had believed it won, culminated in the rebellion of the Latin city of Fregellæ. The force with which the city was reduced to submission, and the severity with which the outbreak was punished, destroyed any further thought on the part of the Latins and Italians of attempting to secure their rights by force, but increased the silent discontent of these people.
It was with these conditions existing at Rome that Gaius Gracchus returned to the city after two and one-half years' absence in Sardinia, defying the Senate by disobeying its order to finish out his third year in the island.