Then came the Gracchan proposals which shook the staid government to its foundations. For a dozen years the keenest minds of Rome were pitted against each other, and victory lay not in arms but in the power of persuasion. There was much discussion in the senate, but Tiberius Gracchus carried the battle directly to the popular assembly, and that is where it was fought to the end. For the words of Tiberius we have to rely chiefly upon the paraphrases of Plutarch, which are too general to permit of accurate estimate. From the speeches of Gaius Gracchus, however, we fortunately have some exact quotations.[18] Gaius Gracchus did as much as any one man to increase the range of Latin forensic prose. Reared in the center of the dominant aristocracy where he imbibed the purest and most copious diction, trained by a mother whose urbane language delighted even Cicero, he nevertheless espoused the cause of democracy, and in the defense of this principle he acquired a lucid directness that Cicero never tires of praising. Gracchus had Greek teachers, who taught him to read and to speak Greek as well as not a little about Greek political ethics, and doubtless also the textbook rules of Greek style. Such stylistic rules, however, were not of much worth in addressing Roman voters, and they are seldom in evidence in the fragments which have survived. Cicero’s one criticism of Gracchus’ style is that he did not know how to modulate his prose so as to secure rhythmical effects. Gracchus would not have attempted to secure them had he known how. He was too concerned with the issues at stake, too fired with zeal for the cause for which he was to suffer death, to worry about the adornments of style. He published his speeches, and he doubtless prepared them beforehand, because in the revolutionary reforms that he proposed, errors of phrasing must be avoided, and the record must be kept for the sake of impressing his arguments. He certainly did not issue his speeches with a view to providing models of style.