treaty was repudiated, but it was decreed that the general alone should be surrendered.[320] A breach in an ancient rule of religious law had been made in favour of Tiberius. But, in spite of this mark of popular favour, the experience had been disheartening and its effect was disturbing. Although it is impossible to subscribe to the opinion of later writers, who, looking at the matter from a conservative and therefore unfavourable aspect, saw in this early check the key to Tiberius's future action,[321] yet anger and fear leave their trace even on the best regulated minds. The senate had torn up his treaty and placed him for the moment in personal peril. It was to the people that he owed his salvation. If circumstances were to develop an opposition party in Rome, he was being pushed more and more into its ranks. And a coolness seems to have sprung up at this time between him and the man who had been his great _exemplar_. Tiberius took no counsel of Scipio before embarking on his great enterprise; support and advice were sought elsewhere. He may have already tested Scipio's lack of sympathy with an active propaganda; shame might have kept back the hint of a plan that might seem to imply a claim to leadership. But it is possible that there was some feeling of resentment against the warrior now before Numantia, who had done nothing to save the last Numantine treaty and the honour of the name of Gracchus. His reticence could scarcely have been due to ignorance of his own designs; for his brother Caius left it on record that it was while journeying northward from Rome on his way to Numantia that Tiberius's eyes were first fully opened to the magnitude of the malady that cried aloud for cure.[322] It was in Etruria, the paradise of the capitalist, that he saw everywhere the imported slave and the barbarian who had replaced the freeman. It was this sight that first suggested something like a definite scheme. A further stimulus was soon to be found in scraps of anonymous writing which appeared on porches, walls and monuments, praying for his succour and entreating that the public land should be recovered for the poor.[323] The voiceless Roman people was seeking its only mode of utterance, a tribune who should be what the tribune had been of old, the servant of the many not the creature of the few. To Gracchus's mother his plans could hardly have been veiled. She is even said to have stimulated a vague craving for action by the playful remark that she was still known as the mother-in-law of Scipio, not as the mother of the Gracchi.[324]