anus had done, as Fabius had done, as Cato did,
and as Scipio Aemilianus, it seemed to them, was doing more and more,
that all good was to be found among the well-to-do and cultured few, and
that what happened to the many did not matter. It seemed to them that it
did matter if the many were poor, ignorant, stupid. It was not necessary
that they should be so. They were ignorant and stupid because they were
poor. If their lot were less hard they might be clever and good, or at
any rate better than at present.

So it seemed to Tiberius Gracchus and later to his younger brother
Caius, as they looked at what they saw in the light of what Cornelia had
taught them. They could not find life beautiful while so many people
were wretched, or feel that Rome was the city of their dreams, however
rich and powerful it might be, however many lands across the seas owned
its sway, so long as the ordinary men who served as soldiers in Rome's
armies, the ordinary women who kept their homes and brought up their
children, were miserable.

The great wars which brought glory to generals and wealth and pride to
Rome actually made the poor more miserable, for many reasons, and for
two in particular. One was the growing number of slaves in the city.
After every campaign thousands of prisoners were taken and these
prisoners were not given back at the end of the war; they became the
slaves of the conqueror. There were so many slaves in Rome after the
wars with Sicily, Carthage, Spain, Greece, Asia Minor, that it was by no
means easy for the ordinary Roman to get work. The other reason was the
difficulty of getting land. Once, before the long wars, Italy had been a
country of small farmers and peasants who lived on a little piece of
land, sometimes rented and sometimes their own, and cultivated it. There
were very few of these happy farmers now. The men had been called away
to the wars; many never came back. What happened was this. While the man
was away at the wars, his wife, with children to look after, and less
strong than he, could seldom cultivate the land fully. Even if she
managed to keep the children fed, she had no money or produce over with
which to pay the rent. Then the landlord would turn her out and take the
plot and add it to his own estate. This was happening all over Italy. If
the owner were not turned out, the land went to rack and ruin from
neglect. Thus many a soldier, when he did come back, found his home
gone. Others, weary, w