from
what would have been his own ideal. But that his main purpose was to
break down a rotten system, and establish a sound one on its ruins,
and that no petty motive of expediency guided him, but only the one
principle, 'salus populi suprema lex,' is incontrovertible. When we
think of him so eloquent, resolute, and energetic, conceiving such
great projects and executing them in person, making the regeneration
of his country his lodestar in spite of his ever-present belief that
he would, in the end, fall by the same fate as his brother, we think
of him as one of the noblest figures in history--a purer and less
selfish Julius Caesar.

[Sidenote: Machinations of the nobles.] As the petty acts of the
nobles had brought out into relief the large policy of Tiberius, so
it was now. They resorted to even lower tricks than accusations of
tyranny, and found in the fatuity or dishonesty of Drusus a tool even
more effective than Nasica's brutality. The plantation of a colony at
Carthage was looked at askance by many Romans. It was the first
colony planted out of Italy, and the superstitious were filled with
forebodings which the Senate eagerly exaggerated. Such colonies had
repeatedly out-grown and overtopped the parent state. The ground had
been solemnly cursed, and the restoration of the town forbidden. When
the first standard was set up by the colonists a blast of wind, it is
said, blew it down, and scattered the flesh of the victims; and wolves
had torn up the stakes that marked out the site. Such malicious
stories met with readier credence, because, if it is true that Caius
had called for colonists from all Italy, and Junonia was to be a Roman
colony, he was evading the decree of the people against extending the
franchise; and he was thus admitting to it, by a side-wind, those to
whom it had just in the harshest manner been refused. For, when the
vote had been taken, every man not having a vote had been expelled
from the city, and forbidden to come within five miles of it till the
voting was over. Caius had come to live in the Forum instead of on the
Palatine when he returned to Rome, among his friends as he thought;
and still even in little matters he stood forward as the champion of
the poor against the rich. There was going to be a show of gladiators
in the Forum, and the magistrates had enclosed the arena with benches,
which they meant to hire out. Caius asked them to remove the benches,
and, on their refusal, went the n