but to legal possession he could
make no claim. The position he held was that of tenant at will to the
state, and he could be legally ejected at any moment. But it was not
from poor occupants of the public domain, whose number was necessarily
small, that opposition was experienced. It came from the rich, who had
all but monopolized the use of that domain; and, in the time of Spurius
Cassius, it was complicated with that quarrel of _caste_ which we
denominate the contest between the Patricians and the Plebeians.
Property and political power were both involved in the dispute. The
Patricians knew that the success of Cassius would make against them in
two ways:--it would strengthen the Plebeians, by lifting them out of the
degradation consequent on poverty, and so render them more dangerous
antagonists in political warfare; and it would render the Patricians
less able to contend with aspiring foes, by taking from them one of the
sources of their wealth. Cassius failed, and was executed, having been
tried and condemned by the Patricians, who then alone constituted the
Roman people.

More than a century after the failure of Cassius, the Agrarian question
was again brought before the Roman nation, on a large scale. This was
the time when the famous Licinian rogations, by the adoption of which
a civil revolution was effected in Rome, were brought forward. They
provided for the passage of an Agrarian law, for an equitable settlement
of debts, and that thereafter one of the two Consuls should always be
a Plebeian. It is something to be especially noted, that C. Licinius
Stolo, the man from whom these laws take their name, was not a needy
political adventurer, but a very wealthy man, his possessions being
mainly in land; and that he belonged to a _gens_ (the Licinii) who were
noted in after days for their immense wealth, among them being that
Crassus whose avarice became proverbial, and whose surname was _Dives_,
or _the Rich_. The Licinian Agrarian law provided, that no one should
_possess_ more than five hundred jugers of the public land, (_ager
publicus_,) that the state should resume lands that had been illegally
seized by individuals, that a rent should be paid by the occupants of
the public domain, that only freemen should be employed on that domain,
and that every Plebeian should receive seven jugers of the public land
in absolute property, to be taken from those lands which the state was
to resume from Patricians who _poss