The agrarian law of Tiberius Gracchus was in its main features merely a revival of the Licinian agrarian law of 367 B.C. By the original law (which for more than two centuries had been so flagrantly violated) it had been provided that no head of a family should hold more than five hundred jugera (a jugera being a little more than three fifths of an acre) of the public land. Tiberius proposed to reënact this law, but with the concession added that adult sons might hold each an additional two hundred and fifty jugera; but not more than one thousand jugera, in all, were to be held by any single family. Whoever was unlawfully in possession of the public land was required to return the same, above the permitted maximum, to the state; fair compensation, however, was to be allowed for improvements made by the holder of the land while it was in his possession. The law further provided that all public lands were to be placed under the control of three commissioners. This commission was to allot the public land, in small parcels, to such poor citizens as might apply for it. These new occupiers of the land were to hold it in perpetuity as tenants of the state, paying a small annual rental. These estates were to descend to the children of the holders, but were not to be alienated, thus preventing the possibility of the land being once again gathered together into large estates. No valid objection could be made to the proposals of Tiberius Gracchus, which were merely the righting of one of the worst of the existing scandals of the Roman administration; a reform, moreover, which was to be carried out in such a manner as to give to the wrongdoers far greater consideration than that to which they were entitled. The law, however, dealt a heavy blow against the richest and most powerful class in Rome. The greater Roman capitalists had so long held possession, in utter defiance of the law, of the great bulk of the public lands of the state that their wrongful possessions had, in their eyes, ripened into a rightfully vested interest. An indirect method of attack has always been used by the opponents of Gracchus, both by the opponents of his own day and by those historians who have attempted to assail his memory. A recent historian, unfriendly both to Gracchus and to his democratic reforms (Ferrero), refers to this bill as follows: "The bill was very favorably received by the peasants and the small proprietors. It appears also to have given great satisfaction to the clients, freemen, and artisans, who made up the proletariat of the metropolis; they fell into the not unnatural mistake--often made by the poor before and since--of regarding the greed of the rich, and the indifference of the government, as a sufficient explanation of their own distress." The ancient historian Plutarch thus refers to this contest: