The outstanding achievement of modern civilization in any country is the creation of that attitude of mind towards human life which rejects the weapon of war as an instrument of domestic politics. The most truly civilized states today are those in which the home government can be carried on, or changes of government effected, without bloodshed; and, emphatically, the mark now of a backward people is the impatient political use of armed force and the firing-squad.

Ancient Rome at about the date of the birth of Antony, viewed from this angle, was astonishingly uncivilized; and its political life can find no comparison in modern times save with that of some tragicomic East European or South American state where blustering revolutions are of frequent occurrence, and fights, murders, executions, and hair-raising adventures are the commonplaces of administration. Yet, even so, the comparison is not exact; for Rome conducted its political battles with an indifference to human suffering which is now more or less extinct, and the horror, moreover, is accentuated by the fact that the butchers and the butchered were usually educated men, accustomed to the amenities of a cultured life far more fastidious than that which is associated with political savagery today. The barbarous cruelty of these highly civilized Roman party-leaders provides a paradox which has no parallel in the modern world.

Antony was born at a time when no Roman except the very obscure could feel sure that he would survive the next change of government: there was always the danger of finding himself upon the defeated side, and in that case the chance of his being put to death was by no means negligible. Active politics, and even the mere holding of an official post, brought that chance to a man's elbow; and the familiar presence of the menace was followed at length by an indifference to it which was less than heroic only because it was no more than normal. Every man who meddled in public affairs staked his head in so doing; and at a crisis he was quick to take his opponent's life in order to safeguard his own.

Matters had not always been so. The Romans in the past had managed their internal affairs with surprising restraint; but during the fifty years previous to Antony’s birth in 83 BC political violence had become less and less able to be checked. Thus, to understand the conditions amidst which Antony was brought up, and which reached their crisis in the world-war at the end of his life, it is necessary to go back to the days of the Gracchi; for it was then that the two great political parties, hopelessly confused in the final struggle, first arrayed themselves against one another to decide by force how Rome and her growing empire should be governed.

In theory the government was in the hands of the Senatus Populusque Romanus, the “Senate and People of Rome”. According to the constitution a mixed assembly of Patricians, or men descended from the original chieftains of primitive Rome, and Plebeians, or men whose lineage, though often long and illustrious, was not in early history noble, annually elected two chief magistrates, the Consuls, who held joint office for the one year; and these Consuls nominated the men to fill the vacancies in the Senate. There were at this time three hundred members in the Roman Senate, all appointed for life, and most of them were Patricians, though a few were of Plebeian birth, which does not mean to say, of course, that their sympathies were democratic. Besides the Senate there was the Comitia, the People's Assembly, held in the open air; and technically this Assembly had equal power with the Senate, the two institutions corresponding in certain ways to the Upper and Lower Houses in modern governments. Gradually, however, the Senate had come to represent the aristocracy and upper classes; and the people, overawed, had allowed the rôle of the Comitia to become a very secondary matter. It was the Gracchi who, in the latter part of the Second Century BC, aroused the masses to a new consciousness of their strength.

At that time the most pressing trouble was the condition of the agricultural population belonging to the country around Rome which had once been the backbone of the State. Foreign conquests, and particularly the annexation of Greece, had brought cheap corn into the metropolis from abroad in such quantities that there was no longer any profit in growing it at home; and in consequence most of the peasants had migrated to the city, selling their farms to the great landowners, who turned their fields into pasture and raised cattle instead of crops. A single slave could look after a herd of cattle; and the land which had once given employment to the members of several families now provided work for but a man or two. Cato the Elder, being once questioned as to what was the most profitable use to which an estate could be put, replied “Successful cattle-raising”. “And, next to that, what?” he was asked. “Moderately successful cattle-raising”, he replied. “And after that?” said the questioner. “Unsuccessful cattle-raising”, he answered.

Ruined farmers and unemployed farm-laborers streamed into Rome, where they earned a precarious livelihood or lived on doles officially or privately supplied, while the countryside was almost depopulated. Here in the city, too, there was industrial depression, for foreign goods of all kinds were being dumped in Rome; and in many industries only the wealthy, who could employ slave-labor, were able to compete at home with the manufacturers abroad. The peasant and the urban working-man were both impoverished; and amongst the lower classes the feeling prevailed that, somehow or other, they were the victims of the rich, and that the Senate was merely the instrument of a heartless capitalist tyranny. It is true that the Plebs, the People, had the right of appointing certain representatives of Plebeian race, known as Tribunes to protect their interests, and that these men, who were elected every year, and whose persons were sacrosanct during their term of office, could put their veto upon oppressive measures; but of late they had degenerated into agents of the Senate, and the disgruntled working classes had little hope of redress.

Then, in the year 134 BC, Tiberius Gracchus, a man of some thirty years of age, of Plebeian family but of illustrious blood, came forward with a scheme for the relief of the agricultural depression. In view of the fact that the land in question had anciently been the Roman Republic's property, and that its later ownership by private individuals had never been really absolute, he proposed that no single landowner should be allowed to retain more than 500 acres, and that all the rest of the great Roman estates should be surrendered, and should be divided up into small holdings. By ousting the rich landlords, and sending the free peasantry back to the fields under government protection, he hoped to enable the latter to sell their produce profitably in the city at a price less than that asked by the foreign traders.

Popular support for this revolutionary programme was immediately forthcoming, and Tiberius was enthusiastically elected as one of the Tribunes of the people for the year 133 BC. He was a quiet, usually restrained, and somewhat pedantic young man, very emotional when excited, always transparently honest, but not richly endowed with brains, his deficiency in that respect, however, being concealed by his eloquence and the earnest, appealing tone of ins voice. From his childhood he had been brought up to believe that he ought to render some great service to his country, for not only had his father been a Consul who had conducted two very successful wars, but his mother, Cornelia, was the daughter of Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Hannibal, and was one of those ambitious widows whose ceaseless dream it is to be the mother of mighty men. In her efforts to rear a brood of heroes she had lost nine of her twelve children; and her two surviving sons, Tiberius and Caius, were constantly being upbraided by her for not doing anything spectacular. “How long”, she kept exclaiming angrily to them, “am I to be called the daughter of Africanus and not the mother of the Gracchi?” It could hardly have been her wish, however, that they should make their contribution to history on the side of the People as the leaders of the struggle against the aristocracy, for not only was she herself an aristocrat by birth but she had married her one remaining daughter, Sempronia, to Scipio Africanus the younger, the adopted son of her brother, and this man was an ardent supporter of the nobility and a bitter enemy of the aspirations of the Proletariat.

The speech with which Tiberius made his dramatic entrance into political life has been lost except for a few sentences; but these reveal its dangerous nature. The wild animals, he said, had their lairs and their dens, but the common people very often had no more from their country than its open air and its sunlight. Yet these were the men who were conscribed for the army, and had to risk their lives for the safety of the fatherland, though they themselves had no homes and no possessions to defend. Military commanders, he declared, were taking nonsense when they made speeches to the soldiers exhorting them to fight for hearth and home, for the men had neither hearths nor homes to call their own. They fought and were killed simply to maintain the capitalists in luxury. The People were termed the masters of the State, he said, but actually there was not a foot of ground of which they could claim possession: all the land belonged to the idle rich.

The Comitia was almost unanimous in its clamorous vote for the measures which Tiberius proposed, but one of the other Tribunes of the People, a certain Marcus Octavius, was persuaded by the landowners to impose his veto, an action which, according to Roman law, could hold up the passage of any bill. Octavius, like his colleague and former friend, Tiberius, was an honest man, and during the following days he argued with passionate sincerity against the proposal; but when Tiberius coldly accused him of desiring to obstruct the bill because he himself was a landowner, his attitude stiffened into one of sullen and inflexible opposition.

Tiberius responded by redrafting the proposed law in a severer form, and this again having been vetoed, he begged Octavius to resign his office, quietly saying that if he did not do so, steps would be taken to depose him, since a Tribune of the People who opposed the will of the People, was an anomaly which could not be tolerated. Octavius, however, interpreted his duties as those of a referee maintaining fair play between the political parties; and he refused either to remove his veto or to resign.

Very well, said Tiberius, suddenly excited: if Octavius could use his veto, so could he; and he proceeded to do so with preposterous indiscrimination. He vetoed all the decisions of the Senate; he vetoed the judgments in the Law Courts; he vetoed the payment of salaries to Government officials; he vetoed the actions of the magistrates; he vetoed the entire business of the exchequer. Constitutionally he was entitled to do this, and the fact that a Tribune's person was sacred enabled him to go about his work without inconvenience, although he professed to be in fear of his life. Many of the landlords, on the other hand, pretending to believe that they were about to be reduced to starvation refused, as a token of grief, to wash themselves or to shave, and appeared in the streets in the dress of mourners, smiting their heads and bemoaning their impending fate.

On the day when, in defiance of the veto of Octavius, the final voting on the redrafted bill was to take place in the Comitia, two men of consular rank pushed their way through the throng to the place where Tiberius was standing, and, grasping his hands, implored him with tears in their eyes to abandon his reckless project. The more hot-headed of the landowners, however, did not stoop to plead with him: they and their servants charged down on the polling-booth, seized the ballot-boxes, and made off with them, leaving a scene of wild rioting behind them.

When order had been restored, Tiberius mounted the rostra, or platform, on which Octavius was standing, and in the sight of all men, put his arm around him and begged him to resign like a good fellow; but his colleague was adamant, and the meeting was adjourned until the next day, when the same scene was repeated. This time, however, Tiberius flung his arms around Octavius and kissed him, whereupon the distracted man burst into tears, and might, indeed, have consented to resign had he not suddenly observed a group of landowners winking and shaking their heads at him as though urging him not to weaken. He therefore told Tiberius that he was sorry, but that he must decline to oblige him; and at this his deposition was put to the vote and carried.

Instantly the mob rushed the platform, but Octavius clung with both hands to the balustrade, and it was only after a violent struggle that he was dislodged and pitched into the arms of the crowd, where he would have been torn to pieces had he not been rescued by the above-mentioned band of sympathizers who fought their way to him and somehow effected his escape, though not before his personal servant had been so battered that he was permanently blinded. The confiscation of the great estates was then successfully put to the vote; and Tiberius placed himself at the head of the Land Commission which was to make the necessary survey of the properties to be seized. It was a triumph of the People; and even the most aristocratic Senators, bound by the Constitution, were obliged to recognize the measure as legal.

At about this time, the eccentric Attalus the Third, King of Pergamus in Asia Minor, died suddenly, leaving his vast fortune to the Roman People, an action inspired, it would seem, by hatred of his family and indifference to his subjects. Tiberius, who was now the unquestioned leader of the popular party, at once appropriated this windfall, and used the money for the purchase of agricultural implements, the erection of farm buildings, the stocking of the farms, and all the business incidental to the reinstatement of the peasants upon the land. The party of the landowners in the Senate was not strong enough to stop him; for, though the fact is generally overlooked, there can be no doubt that the nation as a whole was interested in this movement to rehabilitate the small farmers and to put an end to the dangerous discontent of the laboring classes.

During the next few weeks the Land Commission proceeded vigorously with its work, and Tiberius came to be the mob's hero, credited with far more revolutionary aims than actually were in his mind. But as one by one the landowners were evicted, and their public and pitiable lamentations caused disturbance upon disturbance in the streets, the opposition began to consolidate itself, and Tiberius was accused of attempting to establish a “tyranny”, that is to say a personal and absolute rule, the story being spread, even, that he had taken possession of the regalia of Attalus, so that one day he might deck himself out as a king.

His enemies then announced that they were going, to bring against him the capital charge of sacrilege as soon as his year of office as Tribune of the People was over, on the grounds that by his behavior to Octavius he had violated the sanctity of the Tribuneship; and, in reply to this, Tiberius declared that he would obtain another year’s immunity by having himself elected for a second term, although this had been generally regarded as illegal. He made it known, moreover, that in the following year, if he were elected, he would bring forward a great many more popular measures, such as the restriction of military service, the right of appeal from the law-courts to the Comitia, and so forth.

As time passed, and the abuse to which he was subjected became more violent, he began to feel considerable alarm. Indeed, when the election-day drew near he appeared in the streets dressed in mourning, leading his little son by the hand, and sobbing quietly to himself as he walked along; and presently, addressing the crowds, he told them in broken tones that if his sacrosanctity were not renewed by re-election he would assuredly be tried for his life, or assassinated. At this his supporters, greatly moved, formed an armed bodyguard around him, thereafter never leaving him by day, and camping around his house by night. On the eve of the polls he called a secret meeting of his partisans, at which it was arranged that they should by force prevent his opponents from coming near the ballot-boxes, and that if he had reason to think his life in danger, he would make a sign to them by raising his hand and pointing to his head, at which they were to attack the opposition and drive them from the Comitia.

Next morning, to his great dismay, he found that the omens were shockingly unfavorable. For a long time he had been troubled by the memory of a certain dark portent which had manifested itself one day in his house : two snakes had been found to have made their nest and to have brought forth their young in his old military helmet which had been stored away in an out-house. The sinister occurrence worried him, because it seemed to indicate that secret dangers were lurking in the very thing which was intended to protect him from his enemies; and now, just as he was coming out of his room on this great day of his life, he tripped up, and struck his toe so violently against a stone step that blood was drawn. Hobbling painfully down to the chicken-house to see whether his hens would give him the recognized and almost invariably forthcoming sign of good by freely eating the grain thrown to them, he was disappointed to find them unwilling to leave their coop. One hen at last ventured out, but its behavior was most suspicious, for it fluttered its left, or unlucky, wing, stretched out its left leg, and then went back into the coop. Just then, over his left shoulder, he observed two ravens fighting upon a roof, and a stone dislodged by them fell at his foot.

At this, brave man though he was, he was so dismayed that he very nearly decided to remain at home; but his friends at length persuaded him to attend the polls, and, in deep depression, he limped forth. He was received with a tremendous outburst of cheering by his followers, but when he began to address them his voice was drowned by the uproar around the outskirts of the crowd, where the partisans of the landlords had gathered in force and were endeavoring to break in on the assembly. Presently a certain senator, named Fulvius Flaccus, who was one of his supporters, burst his way through the throng, and excitedly told Tiberius that the landowners themselves were coming down with an army of slaves and paid agents to attack the meeting. At this Tiberius at once raised his hand and pointed sensationally to his head, thus giving the battle-sign to his followers, who immediately tucked up their gowns and prepared to use the sticks and bludgeons which they had brought with them or were now improvising out of broken benches and the like.

Some of the members of the opposition on the fringe of the crowd, seeing the strange gesture which Tiberius was making, rushed off to the Senate with the news that he was evidently asking the People to crown him King; and thereupon the horrified Senators, united by this danger to the Republic, rose almost as one man and, likewise tucking up their gowns, charged down upon the meeting, followed by their attendants armed with the legs and rungs of the senatorial chairs.

A most desperate fight ensued, in which no less than three hundred persons lost their lives, clubbed to death by these wooden weapons, or felled by brickbats, not a single sword or dagger being used. Tiberius himself took to his heels when his followers broke and fled. Somebody seized him by the gown, but he slipped out of it, and ran on in his shirt. A few moments later, however, he fell flat on his face, and, as he was picking himself up, his brains were knocked out by one of his fellow Tribunes, who, seeing how the fight was going, had allied himself with the victors and had armed himself with a broken wooden stool.

Caius Gracchus, the younger brother of Tiberius, came upon the scene after the battle was over, and, in the name of his mother, Cornelia, daughter of the national hero, Africanus, begged the senatorial authorities to allow him to bury the body; but this was refused by the angry aristocrats, and the corpses of Tiberius and his unfortunate followers were dragged through the streets and flung pell-mell into the river. Several of his chief supporters, who had escaped, were hounded down and murdered at the instigation of a magistrate named Opimius, one man being thrown headlong into a large, disused wine-cask which was crawling with poisonous snakes.

The senators justified themselves by declaring that their action had not been directed against the People, but that they had tried to save the Republic from a madman who would have made himself King. In their anxiety they expressed no hostility to his projects in regard to the land, and, much to the disappointment of the landowners, allowed the Commission to continue its work of expropriation. The battle, however, went down to history as the first occasion on which extensive bloodshed resulting from political differences had occurred in Rome since the abolition of the monarchy four centuries earlier; and it ushered in the new age of internal strife which was raging at the time when Antony was born.

For a few years the work of restoring the peasants to the land progressed, one of the Commissioners being Caius Gracchus, whose industry was notorious; but in 126 BC he was persuaded to accept a high official position in Sardinia, where he remained until 124 BC. His character was very different from that of his murdered brother, Tiberius, whose junior he had been by nine years. He was a headstrong, aggressive, loud-voiced young man, clever, ambitious, and eager to avenge his brother's death. When he was speaking in public he used to become so excited that he would pace up and down the platform, wave his arms about, pull his gown off, and thump the balustrade or smack his leg. In the vehemence of his oratory, his voice was wont to rise to an unpleasant falsetto; and, being aware of this fault, he used to employ a man to stand near him, whose business it was to sound a sustained and dispassionate note upon a pitch-pipe to recall his tones to their normal range.

On his return to Rome he was elected Tribune of the People for the year 123 BC, and he began at once to introduce a series of popular measures which soon made him the idol of the crowd and the terror of the aristocracy. Since his brother’s death the Comitia had managed to pass a law making it legal for a Tribune to hold office for as many successive years as his supporters chose to grant him by annual re-election; and Caius now made it known that it was his aim so to serve his party that they would keep him in office perpetually. With the optimism of youth he felt, indeed, that there was no reason why he should not be the life-long leader of the People, enabled by the sacrosanctity of the Tribunate and by its right of veto, to control the actions of the Senate and to establish the Comitia, under his guidance, as the supreme power in the State. In speaking from the rostra the Tribunes had formerly turned towards that part of the assembly-ground which by ancient custom was allotted to the Senators and patricians; but Caius, ignoring this section of his audience, addressed himself always to the People, an innovation which, as Plutarch points out, was tantamount to a definite recognition that the government was shifted from the aristocracy to the democracy.

The first new law which Caius formulated was put forward from motives no higher than those of sweet revenge. He proposed that any magistrate who had banished or put to death a Roman citizen without trial should be called to account before the Comitia; and its immediate effect was the flight of Opimius and those directly concerned in the murder of Tiberius and the subsequent punishment of his supporters. He then proposed a law that any person who had been removed from office might not put himself forward for re-election, his object in this case being to check the attempt of the deposed Octavius to regain a Tribuneship so that he might veto the acts of Caius as he had vetoed those of Tiberius. This bill, however, was dropped by its author on the advice of his mother, Cornelia, who saw, perhaps, that Caius himself might one day be deposed.

He then successfully passed a law placing a tax on all imported objects of luxury, for he believed that without some sort of protection many of the home industries would go into bankruptcy. He lightened the conditions of military service, and attempted to put an end to the death-penalty in the army: at least, he proposed that a condemned soldier should have the right of appeal to the civil authorities. To relieve unemployment he inaugurated a vast scheme of road-making; and for the same purpose he established Roman colonies on the site of the destroyed Carthage and elsewhere, and encouraged emigration thereto. He also speeded up the eviction of the great landowners, and the creation of small-holdings; but he appears to have discouraged the growing of corn for the Roman market, the farmers being recommended, it would seem, to seek new markets in the other cities of Italy where prices were better because cheap foreign grain did not penetrate to them. At the same time he delighted the populace in Rome by lowering by one half the price of the government corn received as tribute from the subject nations, and issuing it in quantities sufficient for one month to every citizen who came himself to pay for it and take it away—this stipulation being intended, I suppose, to prevent its reaching the markets outside Rome supplied by the rehabilitated farmers.

By these and similar laws, and in various other ways, he endeavored to serve the People and to increase his popularity, the result being that he was elected for a second year of office. He then gave up his house on the Palatine Hill, and went to live in the slums. Once, when a gladiatorial show was to be given in the market-place, and seats for the well-to-do had been erected around the arena, he ordered them to be pulled down so that the common people might have free access to the ring-side; and on this order being disobeyed, he and his men broke up and removed the structures during the night before the contest, with the result that the ticket-holders arriving next day found that they had paid their money for nothing, and that an impenetrable crowd of poor townspeople and peasants occupied all the available space. The mob applauded his action; but his fellow-tribunes were furious at it, and thereafter worked against him to such purpose that his popularity began to be seriously affected.

One of his new bills also told against him. At this time Rome, in spite of its foreign conquests, was still a city-state; and while a great part of Italy was incorporated in the Latin League, of which Rome was the head, there were other parts of the peninsula which were inhabited by peoples who were not yet regarded as compatriots. Caius proposed that the franchise should be conferred on all the Latins, which meant that the jealously guarded privileges of Roman citizenship, including the right to vote in the Comitia, would be enjoyed by the inhabitants of all the little towns and villages throughout Latin Italy. By allowing such a bill to pass, his opponents said, the Romans would soon find themselves outvoted in the Comitia by their country-cousins, crowded out of the theatres, baths, and public places of resort, forced to share the money from time to time distributed amongst the poor, and so forth.

But what most injured his reputation was the failure of his African emigration-scheme. He had gone over to Carthage personally to inaugurate the new colony there; but the omens were disastrously unfavorable. A sudden storm of wind flung the Roman standard to the ground with its pole broken, and blew the sacrifices clean off the altars; while the boundary-marks of the new city were scratched up in the night by jackals, owing, I suppose, to the customary burial of sacrificial-meat beneath them. It was pointed out, too, that the site had been formally cursed at the time of the destruction of Carthage by the Romans in 146 BC, and that therefore nothing could prosper in the new colony, the result being that few people could be persuaded to go there.

Towards the close of his second year of office Caius suffered a further diminution of his popularity owing to the fact that one of his fellow-Tribunes, Marcus Livius Drusus, put forward various democratic measures calculated to please the People even more than those proposed by Caius. At the same time, however, this Drusus definitely opposed the two unpopular schemes of his rival—the extension of the franchise, and the encouragement of emigration; and he greatly strengthened his position by carrying the Senate with him in all that he did, thereby relieving of the masses, who had always felt, in following Caius, that they were perilously close to open warfare with their political opponents. Drusus showed them that the Comitia and the Senate were not necessarily opposed, and that the People could obtain all that Caius was trying to get for them, and more, without any risk to their lives. It is usually supposed that Drusus was merely the tool of the Senate, cunningly stealing Caius's thunder for the Conservatives' sinister ends; but it may well be that he was a genuine tactician, bent on preventing civil war.

The upshot was that Caius, to his amazement, failed to be elected for a third term, and no sooner was he out of office—in 121 BC—than Drusus in the Comitia and Opimius, who was now Consul, in the Senate began to rescind the laws he had passed. But when Caius heard that the disestablishment of the colony at Carthage was going to be put to the vote his exasperation was so great that he made up his mind to oppose the passage of the bill by force. Although no longer a Tribune he still had a great following, and when the time came for the vote to be taken he arrived at the meeting at the head of an aimed body of supporters. Everybody expected a clash and was prepared for it; but when a servant of the Consul insolently ordered some of the supporters of Caius out of his way, and was instantly stabbed to death by one of the latter; both sides were too startled to do anything. They all stared excitedly at the dead man but a sudden torrent of rain sent everybody flying for shelter. Both sides were spoiling for a fight, but few were willing to be drenched to the skin.

Next day the Senate invested Opimius with special powers “to protect the state” against Caius and his supporters, and all senators loyal to the Republic were asked to come with armed attendants to a great meeting on the following morning. The People, on hearing this, for the most part abandoned the pacific counsels of Drusus and threw in their lot with their former leader, Caius, likewise arming themselves for the morrow’s fray: they had no sympathy with the colonization-scheme, but they were not going to allow the rights of the Proletariat to be trampled upon by the upper classes. No, indeed!—the Gracchi brothers had taught them to realize their power, and “the sovereign will of the People” was a phrase which had recently come to have real meaning. They had much for which to be grateful to Caius; and when somebody said that he had been seen that day standing in front of his father’s statue in the Forum, gazing up at it while the tears ran down his cheeks, a great many declared that they would not allow the poor fellow’s cherished projects thus to be quashed. In the evening many of them went to his residence and stood guard over it during the night; but Caius could not sleep, and, indeed, spent many hours in bitter tears.

Early next morning he set out from his house in deep melancholy, but just as he stepped into the street his wife, Licinia, ran after him, seized his hand, and cried out hysterically that he was going to his death and that she would not even have the satisfaction of burying his body, since it would doubtless be flung into the river as that of Tiberius had been. Caius tore himself away from her depressing embraces with difficulty, whereupon she fell full length upon the ground, and lay there in a dead faint until the servants carried her away.

He had arranged a rendezvous with his followers on the Aventine Hill, whence he intended to lead his men across the valley to the Capitoline, where the opposing party was gathered; but when he arrived at his headquarters he found his friends cowed by the reports of the strength of their opponents, and anxious to negotiate a settlement of the trouble. Fulvius Flaccus, one of his chief lieutenants, in fact, had been drunk all night, and now, in his befuddled condition, could suggest nothing but that his son, a boy still in his teens, should be sent over to the enemy to open negotiations with them, for it was not likely that the good-looking and obviously innocent youth would come to any harm at their hands. Accordingly, he was despatched under the equivalent of the white flag to Opimius, who, however, sent him back with orders not to return unless he were to bring an offer of unconditional surrender; but, in spite of this, Fulvius sent him over a second time to plead the People’s cause, whereupon Opimius very cruelly ordered him to be executed. As the wretched boy, trembling and weeping, was being taken into the prison, a certain astrologer who had accompanied him on his mission, and now expected death for himself also, suddenly turned to him, and saying “why don’t you do what I am going to do?” dashed his head against the stone doorpost and fell, unconscious, with a fractured skull from which he shortly died.

Opimius then brought a body of archers across the valley, and ordered them to shoot down the so-called rebels. The first volley wrought havoc amongst the democrats, most of whom fled, and Caius, cursing their cowardice and seeing that all was lost, rushed into the temple of Diana, where, in a passion of despair, he prayed the goddess that the Roman People, who had thus deserted him, should forever remain the slaves of the aristocracy. He then drew his dagger to kill himself, but he was restrained by two friends, Pomponius and Laetorius, who persuaded him to try to escape by way of the old Sublician Bridge which crossed the Tiber at the western side of the Aventine.

He was running down towards the river when he stumbled and twisted his ankle; and before he was able to continue his way some soldiers under the orders of the Consul appeared in hot pursuit. Thereupon Pomponius very gallantly stayed behind to bar the way, and though it was not long before he was overwhelmed and killed, his action enabled Caius to reach the bridge. Here Laetorius performed a similar deed of devotion, holding the pursuers at bay until he, too, was cut down. By this time, however, Caius had reached the opposite bank of the river; and as he dashed along, accompanied by a single slave, the people in the streets excitedly cheered him on and called after him to run his hardest, as though the affair were a sporting event. Not one offered to help him, however, nor responded to his incessant and agonized shouts for a horse.

At last he reached the slopes of the Janiculum and, too exhausted to go further, ran into a garden which enclosed a certain sacred shrine; but somebody told the pursuing soldiers where he was, and they were quickly upon the scene. They found him lying on the ground, clasped in the arms of his slave. An officer ran the man through the back with his sword, and pulling the body away, discovered that Caius had a moment before been stabbed to the heart by this faithful servant who had buried the weapon in his own breast at the instant when he was struck from behind. Caius’s head was then cut off and taken to Opimius, and the decapitated body was afterwards thrown into the river. Meanwhile, his followers, flying from the Aventine, were pursued in all directions; and it is said that no less than three thousand persons lost their lives on that day, Fulvius and another son of his being amongst the slain.

Caius, of course, came to be venerated at length as a popular hero and martyr, as also did his brother, Tiberius. To the impotent disgust of the aristocratic party, their statues were set up, and the places where they were killed were consecrated, offerings to their spirits being regularly made there. They were the founders, indeed, of the Democratic Party whose fight with the conservatives or republicans “is the thunder off” which accompanies the whole drama of Antony's life. Their mother, Cornelia, who long outlived them, became the recipient of the deepest veneration; and her house at Misenum, near Naples, was visited by the greatest men in the land, to whom she used to talk freely about her sons, showing no emotion whatsoever, but telling tales of their exploits and their misfortunes as though they had been legendary heroes of old. In fact, so devoid of natural feelings did she appear to be, that people were obliged to find excuses for her, saying that age, or the greatness of her sorrows, had deprived her of her sensibilities. She used to relate long stories, too, about her revered father, Africanus; but when she was told that the Roman People had erected a bronze statue of her, and had inscribed it with the words “The Mother of the Gracchi”, the light of proud satisfaction in her eyes disclosed the fact that the undying ambition of her heart had been fulfilled.