Internal evidence makes it probable that this law was passed in the year 111 B.C.,[777] and consequently at the close of that period of comparative quiescence which was immediately followed by the political storm raised by the conduct of the war in Numidia. It may, therefore, be regarded as a product of senatorial enlightenment, although its provisions would be quite as consistent with the views of a tolerably sober democrat. The main scope of the enactment is to give the character of absolute private ownership, unburdened by any restrictions such as the payment of dues to the State, to nearly all the land which had been public at the time of the passing of the agrarian law of Tiberius Gracchus. The first provisions refer to lands which had not been dealt with by the agrarian commissioners. Any occupant of the public domain, who has been allowed to preserve his allotment intact, because it does not exceed the limit fixed by the earlier laws, and any one who has received public land from the State in exchange for a freehold which he has surrendered for the foundation of a colony, is henceforth to hold such portions of the public domain as his private property. The same provision holds for all land that has been assigned, whether by colonial or agrarian commissioners. The first class of assignments are those incidental to the one or two colonies of Caius Gracchus, and perhaps of Drusus, that were actually established in Italy. Even at the time of settlement such land must have been made the private property of its holders; and this law, therefore, but confirms the tenure, and implies the validity of the act of colonisation. Such land is mentioned as having been "given and assigned in accordance with a resolution of the people and the plebs," and all eases in which recent colonial laws had been repealed or dropped--cases which would include Caius Gracchus's threatened partition of the Campanian territory--are tacitly excluded. The second class of assignments refer to those made by the land-commissioners during the whole period of their chequered existence, and the land whose private character is thus confirmed, must have covered much the larger part of what had once been the State's domain in Italy.