At the time many people put these things down to the Gracchi. They had stirred up the lower orders and the Italians to discontent and bitterness. They had set strife between classes in Rome: roused the middle class against the senators and the mob against both. This was not a just statement. Caius Gracchus had thought out a great plan of reform that, if carried through, might have saved Rome and Italy from revolution and civil war. He had to win people to his side. In order to do so he passed measures that were not good in themselves but only as means to his great end. Thus he made the knights, the new class of wealthy men, judges instead of the senators; and gave doles of bread to the Roman populace in the hope that he would then be able to persuade them to give votes to the Italians and so make Italy really one. The evil that men do lives after them: The good is oft interréd with their bones. It was so with Caius Gracchus. [Illustration: THE FISHERMAN] But the real cause of the civil war lay much deeper than the work of any single man or group of men. It was, in the main, the fact that while Rome had grown, and grown into a new world, the old system of government remained, and did not fit this new world. Rome was beginning to be a great trading empire. Yet wealth and power was jealously held by a small class in Rome in their own hands. The men of this class grew rich. They went out to the provinces, to Sicily, Greece, and Spain, as governors and made great fortunes. They came home with their riches and bought up the land that had once belonged to peasants and farmers, and worked this land with slaves. The condition of these slaves in the country was miserable, especially that of those who lived herded in camps. The greed of the agents of the tax-collecting companies made the Roman name hated in the provinces. In Italy, too, there was deep discontent. To keep the Roman poor quiet the ruling classes gave them games and bread-doles; they altered the laws so that no Roman citizen could be condemned to death for any offence. This kept the Romans quiet, but it made the Italians, who had no share in it, increasingly restive. [Illustration: THE RICH MATRON]