Call him a prig and a doctrinaire, if you will, for not being content with that prospect. In passing through, on his way to Spain, he had seen the pleasant lands of Tuscany lying forlorn and desolate, chained gangs of foreign slaves working in the fields or tending the flocks of absentee Roman landlords, while the sturdy peasants who should have been in their place were loafing in the streets of Rome. The public land, conquered in war, had sometimes been simply embezzled by Roman politicians; sometimes granted to veteran soldiers only to fall into the hands of speculators. The old Licinian land-law, which had limited the amount of land which might be held in one hand, was openly flouted, and leases were treated as freeholds. Seeing these things, the young man was filled with a passion for reform, and deliberately devoted his life to that task. The modern historians who call him prig and demagogue do not deny the awful mischief which he set himself to repair. It is hard to know what he should have done to please them. The senate, by now an entrenched stronghold of property dishonestly acquired and privilege dishonestly maintained, could obviously never be converted. Filled with Greek ideas, Tiberius determined to appeal to the _demos_. That of course was a mistake. There was no such thing as a _demos_ at Rome, and there never had been. The relation between Senate and Comitia was not in the least the same as that between Council and Assembly in Greece. At Rome the Senate deliberated and the Comitia ratified; at Athens the Council prepared business for the Assembly to discuss and decide. It is not that the letter of the constitution really matters--when people are hungry it does not--but that there was lacking at Rome the very elements of democracy, an articulate commons, an organised will of the people. Failing that, any attempt to pose as champion of the people must be a fraud, conscious or unconscious. But it is grossly unfair to Gracchus to suppose that it was conscious. He thought that he was living in a democracy, he thought that a tribune of the plebs might fairly claim to be champion of the people, unaware that the plebs was now an anachronism, and the tribunate merely a clumsy brake on the wheels of the state. In 133 B.C. Tiberius had himself elected as one of the ten tribunes, and immediately prepared to introduce the millennium by legislative process.