e fish died, and he retorted by saying that it was more than
his accuser had done for his wife.

Their feasts were as luxurious as they could make them, in spite of laws
to keep them within bounds. Dishes of nightingales' tongues, of fatted
dormice, and even of snails, were among their food: and sometimes a
stream was made to flow along the table, containing the living companion
of the mullet which served as part of the meal.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE GRACCHI.

137-122.

Young Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, the eldest of Cornelia's jewels, was
sent in the year 137 to join the Roman army in Spain. As he went through
Etruria, which, as every one knew, had been a thickly peopled, fertile
country in old times, he was shocked to see its dreariness and
desolation. Instead of farms and vineyards, there were great bare spaces
of land, where sheep, kids, or goats were feeding. These vast tracts
belonged to Romans, who kept slaves to attend to the flocks; while all
the corn that was used in Rome came from Sicily or Africa, and the
poorer Romans lived in the city itself--idle men, chiefly trusting to
distributions of corn, and unable to work for themselves because they
had no ground to till; and as to trades and handicrafts, the rich men
had everything they wanted made in their own houses by their slaves.

[Illustration: CORNELIA AND HER SONS.]

No wonder the Romans were losing their old character. This was the very
thing that the Licinian law had been intended to prevent, by forbidding
any citizen to have more than a certain quantity of land, and giving the
state the power of resuming it. The law was still there, but it had
been disused and forgotten; estates had been gathered into the hands of
families and handed down, till now, though there were 400,000 citizens,
only 2,000 were men of property.

While Tiberius was serving in Spain, he decided on his plan. As his
family was plebeian, he could be a tribune of the people, and as soon as
he came home he stood and was elected. Then he proposed reviving the
Licinian law, that nobody should have more than 500 acres, and that the
rest should be divided among those who had nothing, leaving, however, a
larger portion to those who had many children.

There was, of course, a terrible uproar; the populace clamoring for
their rights, and the rich trying to stop the measure. They bribed one
of the other tribunes to forbid it; but there was a fight, in which
Tiberius prevailed, an