As the nephew of Marius and the son-in-law of
Cinna, he was the natural chief of the party which had once governed Rome
and had been trampled under the hoof of Sylla. He had shown on many
occasions that he had inherited his uncle's principles, and could be
daring and skilful in asserting them. But he had held carefully within the
constitutional lines; he had kept himself clear of conspiracies; he had
never, like the Gracchi, put himself forward as a tribune or attempted the
part of a popular agitator. When he had exerted himself in the political
world of Rome, it had been to maintain the law against violence, to resist
and punish encroachments of arbitrary power, or to rescue the Empire from
being gambled away by incapable or profligate aristocrats. Thus he had
gathered for himself the animosity of the fashionable upper classes and
the confidence of the body of the people. But what he would do in power,
or what it was in him to do, was as yet merely conjectural.
[Sidenote: B.C. 50.]
At all events, after an interval of a generation there was again a popular
consul, and on every side there was a harvest of iniquities ready for the
sickle. Sixty years had passed since the death of the younger Gracchus;
revolution after revolution had swept over the Commonwealth, and Italy was
still as Tiberius Gracchus had found it.
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