She provided for her children the most erudite of Greek masters, and spared no efforts in training their minds in the love of all that was graceful and cultured. In the justly renowned eloquence of her sons, there was recognized a gift which they inherited from their mother, as was testified by Cicero, who had seen her letters. She possessed the ability and also the courage to incite them to noble deeds for their country. It was probably not so much ambition for herself as for them which caused her to reproach her sons with the fact that she was still known as the widow of Scipio and not as the Mother of the Gracchi. But they lost no time in earning for her, both on account of their deeds on the battlefield and by their devotion to the civil affairs of the State, the distinction of this latter title. The Roman Republic had so far degenerated as to submit to be governed by an oligarchy consisting of a few proud and wealthy families--the worst of all forms of government. The Senators were flagrantly using their power to accumulate enormous riches and to monopolize the land by seizing upon the public domain. Middle-class independence was rapidly diminishing, and the growing masses of the people were oppressed by a poverty from which they had no means of freeing themselves. The Gracchi sought to relieve these evils by passing laws limiting the amount of land which might be held by one person, and offsetting the power of the nobility by securing the economic independence of the people. The Gracchi were reformers; and they each in turn attained to dictatorial power. But though they secured the enactment of their measures, they could not put them into effect; and in the end,--as is frequently the case with reformers,--because they were far-sighted enough to see evil in that which the majority of the rulers considered good, there was nothing for them but martyrdom. This they suffered in turn: Caius taking up the work where Tiberius was compelled, by assassination, to relinquish it. The parting of Caius from his wife on the morning of his own death is a scene from a heroic tragedy. He could not be persuaded to arm himself, with the exception of a small dagger underneath his toga. As he was going out, Licinia stopped him at the threshold, holding him by one hand and their little son by the other. She pleaded that he would not expose himself to the murderers of his brother. "Had your brother," she urged, "fallen before Numantia, the enemy would have given back what then had remained of Tiberius; but such is my hard fate, that I probably must be a suppliant to the floods or the waves, that they would somewhere restore to me your relics. For since Tiberius was not spared, what trust can we place either in the laws or in the gods?" But Caius, gently withdrawing himself from her embraces, departed; and Licinia, falling in a faint, was carried as though dead into the house of her brother Crassus.