them, when, at the head of their armies, they exhort their soldiers to fight for their sepulchres and altars. For, among such numbers, there is not one Roman who has an altar which belonged to his ancestors, or a tomb in which their ashes repose. The private soldiers fight and die to increase the wealth and luxury of the great; and they are styled sovereigns of the world, while they have not a foot of ground they can call their own(233).” By such speeches as these, the people were exasperated to fury, and the Senate was obliged to have recourse to Octavius, who, as one of the tribunes, was the colleague of Gracchus, to counteract the effects of his animated eloquence. Irritated by this opposition, Gracchus abandoned the first plan of his law, which was to give indemnification from the public treasury to those who should be deprived of their estates, and proposed a new bill, by which they were enjoined forthwith to quit those lands which they held contrary to previous enactments. On this subject there were daily disputes between him and Octavius on the rostrum. Finding that his plans could not otherwise be accomplished he resolved on the expedient of deposing his colleague; and thenceforth, to the period of his death, his speeches (one of which is preserved by Plutarch) were chiefly delivered in persuasion or justification of that violent measure. Caius Gracchus was endued with higher talents than Tiberius, but the resentment he felt on account of his brother’s death, and eager desire for vengeance, led him into measures which have darkened his character with the shades of the demagogue. At the time of his brother’s death he had only reached the age of twenty. In early youth, he distinguished himself by the defence of one of his friends named Vettius, and charmed the people by the eloquence which he exerted. He appears soon afterwards to have been impelled, as it were, by a sort of destiny, to the same political course which had proved fatal to his brother, and which terminated in his own destruction. His speeches were all addressed to the people, and were delivered in proposing laws, calculated to increase their authority, and lessen that of the Senate,—as those for colonizing the public lands, and dividing them among the poor; for regulating the markets, so as to diminish the price of bread, and for vesting the judicial power in the knights. A fragment of his speech, _De Legibus Promulgatis_, is said to have been recently discovered, with other classical remains, in the Ambrosian Library. Aulus Gellius also quotes from this harangue, a passage, in which the orator complained that some respectable citizens of a municipal town in Italy had been scourged with rods by a Roman magistrate. Gellius praises the conciseness, neatness, and graceful ease of the narrative, resembling dramatic dialogue, in which this incident was related. Similar, but only similar qualities, appear in his accusation of