the advantage over him by engaging in measures which were attended with hazard, but promised great results. But his brother Caius in a certain book has recorded, that as Tiberius was passing through Tyrrhenia (Tuscany), on his road to Numantia, he observed the deserted state of the country, and that the cultivators and shepherds were foreign slaves and barbarians; and that he then for the first time conceived those political measures which to them were the beginning of infinite calamities. But the energy and ambition of Tiberius were mainly excited by the people, who urged him by writing on the porticoes, the walls, and on the tombs, to recover the public land for the poor. IX. He did not, however, draw up the law without assistance, but took the advice of the citizens most eminent for character and reputation, among whom were Crassus[50] the pontifex maximus, Mucius Scævola,[51] the jurist, who was then consul, and Claudius Appius, his father-in-law. Never was a measure directed against such wrong and aggression conceived in more moderate and gentle terms; for though the rich well deserved to be punished for their violation of law and to be compelled to surrender under penalties the land which they had been illegally enjoying, the law merely declared that they should give up their unjust acquisitions upon being paid the value of them, and should allow the lands to be occupied by the citizens who were in want of this relief. Though the reform of this abuse was so moderate and reasonable, the people were satisfied to take no notice of the past and to secure themselves against wrong for the future. But the rich and those who had possessions detested the proposed law because of their greediness, and the proposer of it was the object of their indignation and jealousy; and accordingly they attempted to divert the people from the measure, by insinuating that Tiberius was proposing a division of land merely to disturb the state and to bring about a revolution. But they failed altogether; for Tiberius, supporting a measure in itself honourable and just, with an eloquence[52] calculated to set off even a meaner subject, showed his power and his superiority over his opponents, whenever the people were crowded round the rostra and he addressed them about the poor. "The wild beasts of Italy," he would say, "had their dens and holes and hiding-places, while the men who fought and died in defence of Italy enjoyed, indeed, the air and the light, but nothing else: houseless and without a spot of ground to rest upon, they wander about with their wives and children, while their commanders, with a lie in their mouth, exhort the soldiers in battle to defend their tombs and temples against the enemy, for out of so many Romans not one has a family altar or ancestral tomb, but they fight to maintain the luxury and wealth of others, and they die with the title of lords of the earth,[53] without possessing a single clod to call their own."