(ABOUT 133 B.C.)
Born about 168 B.C., died in 133; eldest son of Cornelia, the daughter of Scipio Africanus Major; accompanied Scipio Africanus Minor to Carthage; Questor in 137; served in the Numantine War; Tribune of the people in 133; secured the revival of the Licinian Agrarian Law of 367 B.C., in 133; killed with many of his followers in an electoral disturbance in Rome.
The wild beasts of Italy[2] have their caves to retire to, but the brave men who spill their blood in her cause have nothing left but air and light. Without houses, without settled habitations, they wander from place to place with their wives and children; and their generals do but mock them when, at the head of their armies, they exhort their men to fight for their sepulchers and the gods of their hearths, for among such numbers perhaps there is not one Roman who has an altar that has belonged to his ancestors or a sepulcher in which their ashes rest. The private soldiers
- ↑ Of the speeches of the Gracchi only a few fragments have come down to us, and these mainly through Plutarch. Doubtless many fine passages existed in those lost books of Livy, over which generations of scholars have shed lamentations.
- ↑ Plutarch says this speech by Tiberius Gracchus "filled the people with enthusiastic fury, and none of his adversaries durst pretend to answer him." Smith, in his "Dictionary," refers to it as "a noble specimen of the deeply felt and impressive eloquence with which Gracchus addressed the people in those days."
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