e end, as great
heartbroken Hannibal, defeated, ruined and exiled, drinks up the poison
and rests at last, some forty years after he led his first army to
victory. But he had been dead nearly forty years, when another Scipio at
last tore down the walls of Carthage, and utterly destroyed the city to
the foundations, for ever. And a dozen years later than that, Rome had
conquered all the civilized world round about the Mediterranean sea,
from Spain to Asia.

[Illustration: TOMBS ON THE APPIAN WAY]

II

There was a mother in Rome, not rich, but of great race, for she was
daughter to Scipio of Africa; and she called her sons her jewels when
other women showed their golden ornaments and their precious stones and
boasted of their husbands' wealth. Cornelia's two sons, Tiberius and
Caius, lost their lives successively in a struggle against the avarice
of the rich men who ruled Rome, Italy and the world; against that
grasping avarice which far surpassed the greed of any other race before
the Romans, or after them, and which had suddenly taken new growth as
the spoils of the East and South and West poured into the city. Yet the
vast booty men could see was but an earnest of the wide lands which had
fallen to Rome, called 'Public Lands' almost as if in derision, while
they fell into the power of the few and strong, by the hundred thousand
acres at a time.

Three hundred and fifty years before the Gracchi, when little conquests
still seemed great, Spurius Cassius had died in defence of his Agrarian
Law, at the hands of the savage rich who accused him of conspiring for a
crown. Tiberius Gracchus set up the rights of the people to the public
land, and perished.

He fell within a stone's throw of the spot on which the great tribune,
Nicholas Rienzi, died. The strong, small band of nobles, armed with
staves and clubs, and with that supremacy of contemptuous bearing that
cows the simple, plough their way through the rioting throng,
murderously clubbing to right and left. Tiberius, retreating, stumbles
against a corpse and his enemies are upon him; a stave swung high in
air, a dull blow, and all is finished for that day, save to throw the
body into the Tiber lest the people should make a revolution of its
funeral.

Next came Caius, a boy of six and twenty, fighting the same fight for a
few years. On his head the nobles set a price--its weight in gold. He
hides on the Aventine, and the Aventine is stormed. He escapes by t