Now, I do not know that there is any need to trouble you with all the smaller happenings which led to Rome's asserting herself more and more strongly in the East. Probably she would have done better if she had established her power more strongly in Syria rather earlier than she did. In the end she took it and turned it into one of her provinces as well as the other lands that she conquered; but by the time she did so a certain king called Mithridates, of a certain kingdom called Pontus, on the Black Sea, to the north of Syria, had made himself very strong, and gave the Romans a terrible deal of trouble about the year 88 B.C. and onward. But long before that, and even while she was claiming to impose her "Pax Romana," the Roman peace, on all the world, she had very little peace within her own borders. It is all an outgrowth of the old trouble that we saw beginning as far back as the time when the Romans drove out those Etruscan kings and formed themselves into a Republic. All through their story we have seen the Senate, which was for the most part the high-born, the rich party, on the one side, and the Comitia, or assembly of the plebeians, on the other. And the last was perpetually struggling to get power and to take power away from the first. That struggle still went on until it ended in neither of them having any power at all. And that happened in this way. {194} As Rome grew rich, by the plunder and taxation of the provinces that she conquered and annexed, an immense number of slaves were brought into Italy. They cultivated the land for their masters a great deal more cheaply than the native small farmers could cultivate it, and at the same time a great deal of corn and other things that these farmers used to grow was brought in from the provinces at a cheap price. The small farmers, what we might call peasants, could not grow corn in Italy as cheaply as this, so the fields fell out of cultivation and the peasants flocked into the towns where they could get their share of the cheap corn. Great discontent grew out of this. Two brothers, who were leading men of the people, Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, got laws passed to give the people a chance of cultivating their land on better terms, but the selfishness of the rich party, who were opposed to them, made these laws of no use. [Sidenote: The power of the generals]