It is remarkable, that the ruling party did not again abolish the new office of triumvirs, M. Fulvius Flaccus, the friend of Tiberius, being chosen in his room; but the efficiency of these was hampered, and they were able to do nothing, as those who were called upon to show their titles to their estates, did not come forward, or else made no declaration. But when the first burst of their rage was over, they saw that they were playing a dangerous game; and they left the laws of Gracchus untouched, and, for appearance’s sake, appointed the consul Tuditanus to pass judgment on the disputed points: instead of doing this, he took the field, and thus the matter was put off. Whether anything was done at all, cannot be made out. When Ap. Claudius also died, he was succeeded by C. Papirius Carbo, an unworthy disciple of Gracchus, who did the same things as his master had done before him, but from bad motives. It is the curse of revolutions, that the onward march of events hurries along with it even good men who have once plunged into them; the power of freeing oneself from the influence of what is passing around us, belongs only to that iron will which neither heeds nor shrinks from anything. A distinguished man, who had gone through all the horrors of the revolution, but had kept his hands unsullied, once said to me, “It is a terrible remembrance to have lived to see a revolution, and to have had a share in it; one goes to the attack along with the noble-minded, and one remains before the breach with the knaves.” This one should have before one’s eyes as a warning; but perhaps we may not have to dread a revolution for centuries to come. The period in Roman history which we have now reached, is one in which the explanation of forms is no longer sufficient; we must take men psychologically, and make a study of the personal characters of those who tore from each other’s grasp the spoils of the state when its life had fled from it. Carbo was a man of much talent; but he was possessed by evil spirits: he might perhaps, in peaceful times, have belonged to the number of fine souls; but in that age, he sank down into the lowest depths of guilt and meanness. His character was such, that the charge of his having murdered Scipio, is not at all impossible in itself: yet, as in the south it is so very common for it, to be reported that a man has been poisoned, if his death has exhibited any symptoms like it (as, for instance, in putrid fevers), we ought not to place unqualified belief in that suspicion.