It was so with Caius Gracchus.
THE FISHERMAN
But the real cause of the civil war lay much deeper than the work of any single man or group of men. It was, in the main, the fact that while Rome had grown, and grown into a new world, the old system of government remained, and did not fit this new world. Rome was beginning to be a great trading empire. Yet wealth and power was jealously held by a small class in Rome in their own hands. The men of this class grew rich. They went out to the provinces, to Sicily, Greece, and Spain, as governors and made great fortunes. They came home with their riches and bought up the land that had once belonged to peasants and farmers, and worked this land with slaves. The condition of these slaves in the country was miserable, especially that of those who lived herded in camps. The greed of the agents of the tax-collecting companies made the Roman name hated in the provinces. In Italy, too, there was deep discontent. To keep the Roman poor quiet the ruling classes gave them games and bread-doles; they altered the laws so that no Roman citizen could be condemned to death for any offence. This kept the Romans quiet, but it made the Italians, who had no share in it, increasingly restive.
THE RICH MATRON
It had been clear to the far-seeing mind of Caius Gracchus that unless Rome could draw fresh blood and life and energy from Italy it must perish. The material wealth that was pouring into the city from all parts of the world, from Carthage and Corinth and the conquered kingdoms of the East, was doing more harm than good. Too many men, rich as well as poor, were beginning to care only for pleasure and for money as a means to pleasure. The luxury and extravagance of the rich made the poverty of the poor bitter, and these poor, uneducated, idle, accustomed to be kept in a good temper by splendid shows and presents of corn and wine, were ready at any moment to rise in disorder and destroy those who tried to help them. Most of them were not liable to military service—that was still confined to the old classes of men who held land; but they had votes, while the Italians had none. The town mob was swollen by freedmen—slaves who had saved enough money to buy themselves off—they too had votes.
The Roman voters cared nothing for the wrongs of the Italians, or of the people of the provinces. Like the rich, who lived on the revenues of the tax-collecting companies, they thought the rest of the world was there merely to supply them with comfort and luxuries. But while in Rome itself people were more and more sharply divided between the ‘have nots’ and the ‘haves’, all round them there was a growing dissatisfaction and discontent. The strife at home meant that enterprises abroad were badly managed. Many army commanders and provincial governors were incompetent and corrupt. There was no longer the old high Roman sense of duty and honesty. In its stead were pride, greed, and cruelty. The spirit that had shown itself in the savage destruction of Carthage and Corinth was shown again in the treatment of Jugurtha.