Tib. had already won some reputation in Spain, and was returning home, when he saw the Etrurian estates of the wealthy being cultivated by foreign slaves in chains, whose bonds not only bore the seal of degradation for themselves, but were the means of fettering native industry. These slaves were housed and huddled together in places called Ergastula, which were literally workhouses, but practically, prisons. They are said to have been built under-ground in the shape of vaults; but, in giving this account of their construction, there has perhaps been some misconstruction on the part of Columella, who is the chief authority for the statement. We must now return to Tib. Gracchus, who had, by this time, returned to Rome, and had formed the noble resolution of remedying abuses, though he knew that loud abuse of himself would be the inevitable consequence. He had seen that the aristocracy had got possession of nearly all the land, allowing the plebeians to have no share in it, except the ploughshare, and even this was often denied them by the employment of slaves instead of the free agricultural labourer. Tib. was learned in the law, and recollected the existence in the books of the old statute of Licinius, which had fallen into disuse, and the renewal of which he thought might put new life into the plebeian body. By this law, no one was allowed to occupy more than 500 jugera--about 330 English acres--of the land of the state; but the state of the land exhibited a very different distribution of the public property. The poorer occupants of the soil had been compelled by their necessities to sell to the richer, and Tiberius made the popular but scarcely honest proposal, that those who had bought should give back to those who had sold--a suggestion which was hailed by the masses as the happy inspiration of a patriot. The idea was simple enough, and if simplicity is an element of grandeur, the notion was so far a great one; though, as it is based on the principle, that when a man has sold everything he possesses, the purchaser or the possessor should hand the property back to the original vendor, the project is not well adapted to business purposes. The suggestion was, however, one which enabled a patriot to go to the country with a "cry," and though the end proposed was laudable enough, the means, which involved an interference with the means of the wealthy, could not command the general approval. It is true that much of the property had been unfairly obtained, and that much more was held in illegal quantities; but some had been the subject of regular sale, and the general confiscation proposed was but a Procrustean measure of justice.