Annals of Cæsar; a critical biography with a survey of the sources, for more advanced students of ancient history and particularly for the use and service of instructors in Cæsar

Front matter

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Preface

The origin or source of this book as a book was in the lecture-room of my graduate students. These earnestly urged that my lectures on the " Life and Letters of Julius Caesar " be published, in order that they might have and use them for their better equipment as instructors. To this I finally consented. The first two chapters have been entirely recast and rewritten, but the rest of the work, apart from mere verbal changes, is here presented substantially in the form and sequence of the lectures. The added phrase in the subtitle, "a critical hiography^^'' is neither unmeaning nor boastful. In a certain Avay these lectures were reared upon or constructed out of the ancient sources as their only material, being elaborated with an exclusive regard for the same, discarding the popular mode of an artificial modernization of figures and atmosphere.

It thus became necessary to write an important segment of ancient history — the confluence of all its tributaries into the bed of one broad and deep stream — to write, I say, with faithful observation of that care and caution which constitutes the essence of classic philology. The relative weight, dependence or coloring, animus or thraldom, of all these writers, Cicero, Sallust, Livy, Velleius, Nicolaus of Damascus, Lucan, Plutarch, Suetonius, Appian, Cassius Dio, as well as of Caesar himself, together with Hirtius and the military relations of the supplementary accounts, had been studied and sifted by themselves. But the resultant observations and clews have been put into smaller print. Thus these annals themselves, in their vi PREFACE

larger movement, are easily distinguished from the ancient tradition itself with its nebulosities or luminosities,^ the problems of direct and indirect relation, the evidences of copying, of confusion, of partisanship, the personal elements, and other pertinent outcome of close vision and rigorous examination. Thus, then, I entertain some hopes that directors and students in classical and historical seminars may find the book useful.

Coming now to the larger aspects of these lectures, I hope to interest a wider public also. I have never allowed myself to assume any fixed emotional attitude towards the central figure of these studies. I have kept my mind free from any preconceived or predetermined conception of Caesar and the larger figures of his generation. Better to let acts and action, utterance and judgments of the actors, — better to permit events, results, and issues by their own sequence, and by an intrinsic force of their own, comparable to a kind of induction, to do their own work and gradually draw their own lineaments, and beget in the reader a certain definite and substantial body of political, moral, psychological insight and information, where the relating historian himself keeps in the background as much as the rhapsode who chanted an epic created before.

A valuation of Mommsen and of Froude, from whom the author differs toto coelo^ has been placed in an appendix.

Two things, I believe, constitute the substance of historiography. Of these, one is more necessary than the other, but often difficult and generally unwelcome to many readers ; viz. the exact determination of what happened, what we know and do not know. Here too belongs the approach, often necessary, to the gray atmosphere of conjecture and mere probability or possibility. The other one of these two things is valuation, estimation,

1 These largely furnished by Cicero's letters.

PREFACE Vii

and characterization. It is this latter element which the general public chiefly if not exclusively regards, which it quotes and praises, in which it delights, by which often it is enthralled ; the most personal side in the historian's self-revelation. But I am much impressed with a normative aphorism of Rankes : " Naked truth without any adornment. Thorough investigation of detail: leave the rest to God. By all means let us have no inventing, not even in the smallest matters, by all means let us have no mere figment of the brain" ("nur kein Hirngespinnst"). " The historian's quest in history must not be for beauty only and striking lineaments, but exact truth."

No lengthy bibliographical list, no heavy drafts upon Bursian's " Jahresbericht," are here to be appended. The collections of Peter, the introductions to the authors of classic historiography by Sehaefer and Wachsmuth, are familiar. Ever must the earnest student return to that splendid repertory, Fischer's " Zeittafeln," Altona, 1846. I said repertory/ : after all, that is the irreducible minimum of value even in the most eminent antiquarian books, such as Mommsen's ultra-systematic treatises on the Roman government. Mommsen, Kiepert, Droysen, Ludwig Lange, — I heard and saw them all in my vernal time, when one admires but does not judge as yet.

Repertories : hence Madvig's deliberate self-limitation to the definite state of actual tradition impresses me as admirable.

Of recent books the heavy volume of T. Mice Holmes of London (" Caesar's Conquest of Gaul," 1899) and Botsford's " Roman Assemblies " (1910) are very noteworthy productions, and the latter is not unworthy of a place near Ludwig Lange.

My work could hardly have been accomplished at all without Terrell's monumental arrangement of Cicero's viii PREFx^CE

letters. — Many references to books and treatises will be found in the notes or index. — As for the author of the present volume, a large part of his professional life has been devoted to first-hand study of classical history and civilization, as in the Essays of his " Testimonium Animse," 1908: in ch. 14, "Roman Spirit and Roman Character"; ch. 15, "Ritual and Worship among Roman Institutions"; ch. 16, " Cicero of Arpinum, Cato of Utica."

But even more specifically (in the wider range of this entire domain) I may be permitted to refer to some of my former things, such as " Character and Career of Tiberius" (1880), "The Tradition of Cesar's Gallic Wars from Cicero to Orosius " (1887), " Studies in Csesar " (1890), "A Concordance of Caesar's Seven Books" (out of print, 1891), " Census Lists in Livy " (1891), " A Study of Velleius" (1894), "St. Paul and the Roman Law" (1894), the Introduction to my edition of " Cicero's Second Philippic " (1901, now published by D. C. Heath & Co.), and "Augustus Princeps " (1902).

In conclusion may I not express a hope (not oversanguine, it is true) that our British and Continental fellowclassicists may begin at least to realize that first-hand classical study on this side of the Atlantic has reached a point of earnestness, a stage of exact and sustained effort which may deserve some attention from them, too, and some return for the European pupilage which among us is rapidly coming to an end.

E. G. SIHLER.

New York University, University Heights, October 28, 1910.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Ancestry, Childhood, Early Youth ... 2 II. Political Retrospect : from the Gracchi to Sulla. The First Great Test of Young

C^SAR 8

Chapter I Ancestry, Childhood, Early Youth

The biography by Suetonius is now truncated at the beginning. If this initial portion were not lost Ave would have a complete survey of the Julian family, its pedigree, its political and military honors, its curule and other offices, and the like. Alban, nay Trojan, ancestry was the pride of that house. The lulii were transferred to Rome from the venerable acropolis of the Latin name by the third king of Rome, as were the Servilii, Creganii^ Metilii, Curiatii, Quinctilii, and Cloelii. Varro, the greatest antiquarian of Rome, and the greatest authority in the generation of Csesar and Cicero, wrote a monograph dealing with the " Trojan Families " of Rome.

Julius is a derivative of lullus ^ or lulus. Of course the legends of -^neas and his son Ascanius-Iulus flourished long before Vergil wrote his epic, in which the Venus G-enetrix of the Julian legends rules and shelters the first fates of the imperial commonwealth, as in "^neid," 1, 288.

In the first generations of the Republic the family occupied a prominent rank. In 489, when Coriolanus was in exile. Gains lulius lulus was consul (Dionys., "Antiqq. Rom.," 8, 1). Again we meet the name of lulius lulus in the consular Fasti of 482, 473, 447, 435. But later on, in the consolidation of the Latin communities and the slow conquest of the peninsula, they seem to disappear from among the dominant families of the commonwealth.

For more than a hundred years the Julian house seems to have lived in a kind of political obscurity, and when

1 Mommsen, " Hermes," 1889, p. 355 sq. It does not seem necessary to assume with Mommsen that Vergil deliberately transformed lulius to lulus. Dionys., "Antiqq. Rom.," 8, 1, writes 'loOXos.

ANCESTRY, CHILDHOOD, EARLY YOUTH 3

they resumed political prominence the surname (cognomen) of Coesar had been adopted by the entire family, with no further subdivision of distinguished branches, which subdivision was the case, e.g.^ with the Claudii^ JEmilii^ Cornelii^ Liciyiii^ and other houses of the Roman nobility. In the latter part of the Hannibalian war (208 B.C., Liv., 27, 22) Sextius lulius Caesar governed Sicily as his praetorian province. The meaning of the name Ccesar is quite uncertain : 1) Elephant, a Punic war association, 2) cut from his mother's womb, 3) blue-eyed, 4) born with a shock of hair. The latter is in full accord with the general drift of Roman nomenclature. Also it is vouched for by the distinguished antiquarian and domestic tutor of the grandsons of Csesar Augustus himself, viz. by Verrius Flaccus.i With the exception of Sex. lulius Csesar, consul of 157 B.C., the further Caesars down to the dictator did not achieve anything higher than praetorian honors. So, too, his own father. Gains lulius Csesar. Csesar was born on the twelfth day of the month Quinctilis, 100 B.C., at Csesar's death named July. The most prominent figure in public life at that time was Gaius Marius, the great captain and plebeian leader, who in middle life had married luliii, Csesar's aunt; thus this aristocratic house had allied itself, quite deliberately, we may say, with the politics of the plebs, for all marriages of the aristocracy were, as a rule, arranged by the heads of houses. At Csesar's birth both Pompey and Cicero were six years old ; Varro, the scholar and writer, and later a lieutenant of Pompey, Varro, who survived them all, was sixteen ; Hortensius, fourteen. Through his mother Aurelia, young Csesar was connected with a distinguished family whose principal members in public life sided with the conservatives, but maintained clear vision in dealing with necessary reforms.

1 ' Coesar, quod est cognomen luliorum, a ccesarie dictus est, qui scilicet cum csesarie natus est.'

As to the body and substance of young Caesar's instruction, it was, primarily, Greek. And the preponderance of Greek had really been well understood from the beginnings — late beginnings — of literary culture in a community whose earliest literary men were either of Greek birth, or at least of Greek culture. Likewise the earliest teachers. The}^ taught literature, and by ultimate reproduction of Greek literary forms and species in Latin, they maintained Greek, as we clearly see, as the prototype for every form of cultured or finished expression.

And the finished faculty of a certain mastery did not lose itself in vague dictations of sesthetical or psychological analyses which are often inflicted on young people in our modern ways, but in imitation and reproduction : essentially the manner revived in the renaissance of the Italian Humanists. All of it, however, had a preparatory relation to the study of rhetoric. And this was, if possible, even more distinctly a Greek professional thing.

When young Csesar was eight years of age, in 92, the censors then in office, of whom L. Licinius Crassus, foremost orator of his day, was one, closed the Latin rhetoricians' schools ^ : which merely benefited the Greek professional teachers. Therefore, whereas the practical and ultimate fruition of this Grseco-Roman culture was Latin oratory on the forum, or before juries, or by and by in the senate,^ Greek made that deep impression on the mind which so perfect a literature, acquired hand in hand with the faculty of easy Greek speech, was bound to make on a gifted boy between eight and fifteen or so. Cicero's PhilhellenismS is familiar to the world, and as for Caesar (when Athens herself surrendered in 48, not long after Pharsa-

1 Suet., "de Ehetoribus," 1.

2 Sententiain dicere.

' It had, by the bye, a continuous practical side ; e.g., " Cicero ad prseturam usque etiam Greece declamavit," Sueton., " Rhet.," 1. Cicero had the power of addressing the city council of Syracuse in Greek. Cf. also "Orator," 12.

ANCESTRY, CHILDHOOD, EARLY YOUTH 5

los, to his lieutenant, Fufius Calenus), he spared the people of Athens absolutely (^fJLrjSh /nvrja-t/cafcrjaa^ a6(pov<; cKJ^ijKe, Dio Cass., 42, 14), merely adding that, while they had committed great misdemeanors, " the^ were saved hy their dead.''' Here is a worthy manifestation of classicist regard. We know through Suetonius (" De Grammaticis," 7) the name of one at least of young Caesar's literary teachers, viz. Antonius Gnipho ; he " is said to have been of great native ability, of an extraordinary faculty of memory, and not less learned in Greek than in Latin. ..." The literary valuation of Terence, the translator of Menander,! I ^^^ inclined to assign to young Caesar, not to his matnrer years : versification on standard themes, possibly produced and recited under the auspices of Gnipho or some other grammatieus in the collegium poetarum, the only place in Rome at that time where technical faculty of versification could be exhibited on stated occasions before experts. ^

Of Caesar's father we know one thing only, but that a matter of vast importance. Young Caesar was in his sixteenth year : the elder Caesar was at Pisae, on the Tuscan coast : probably a Marian, he had not accompanied Sulla in the latter's eastern campaigns. One morning, as he was engaged in putting on his shoes (the tying of a gentleman's shoes was an elaborate affair), he died (Plin., "N. H.," 7, 181), in middle life, probably from the bursting of some blood-vessel in the brain. Here, too, was a physical diathesis due to heredity, for his own father had died in exactly the same way, at about the same stage of life.

Now young Caesar had completed his fifteenth year at the time of this domestic catastrophe. Under the civil law the completion of the fourteenth year made a male

1 In the " Vita," by Suetonius.

2 See my paper on " The Collegium Poetarum at Rome," Amer. Journal of Philology^ 1905.

ward free from guardiansMp. Under tutela, therefore, young Caesar never passed. When his father suddenly expired, the youth became at one stroke civilly independent, sui iuris. Moreover, in the first days of 86 his uncle Marius and the latter's colleague, the popular leader Cinna, had appointed the lad priest of Jupiter (^flamen dialis)^ that is, nominated him, as it seems, for the next vacancy ^ ; this during his father's lifetime, and of course with the latter's approval. It was an early identification of the lad with the popular party.

When did Caesar receive the toga virilis? This act, which concerned not only the family, but the roster of citizenship as well, was often, though not necessarily, celebrated on March 15, the Liheralia.^ We must be content, in young Csesar's case, with assuming that this important first step towards maturity and manhood was gone through with before his sixteenth year, possibly in March, 84. Even before this time, the youth, who had no brother, had been (Suet., " Cses.," 1) betrothed to Cossutia, destined to be a great heiress, though of a family merely equestrian, not senatorial. But, sometime after January, 84, perhaps after January 1, 83, young Csesar married Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, four times consul : whether before or after the death of that leader of the democratic or popular party, so called, we cannot determine. At all events it was his own act, and a curious and puzzling act : it is not likely that Sulla had yet landed at Brundisium : many things were yet coming and therefore indefinite. We are startled by an almost uncanny faculty in the mere youth to determine for himself, and to determine with a view to politics. To a sober reflection that marriage might have seemed both extremely unwise, hazardous, and unprofitable. If ever there was a political union, this seems to have been such a one.

ANCESTRY, CHILDHOOD, EARLY YOUTH 7

Was it that the budding youth wished to identify himself in some striking way with the (late ?) head of the popular party, who, however, had ruled the peninsula and the western part of the empire entirely as an autocrat ? Did young Caesar make this match with the approval or against the advice of his mother Aurelia? Her brother or brothers were then in Sulla's headquarters beyond seas. Clearly, here was no cautious timeserver nor character who would put his ear to the ground to measure the weight and impact of the tread of coming events. The politics of Rome, however great and broadening the empire, were still the politics of a single city, and the trend of latter events had more and more assumed a character of decisive persons and personalities. But the names of Marius, Cinna, and Sulla urge upon me and my readers the necessity of gaining a fair basis for following the earliest acts of young Caesar's public life. The entire political life of the imperial city was then a movement on an inclined plane and breeding a series of crises. Let us make our second chapter a political retrospect.

Chapter II

POLITICAL RETROSPECT : FROM THE GRACCHI TO SULLA. THE FIRST GREAT TEST OF YOUNG C^SAR

Rome never was a republic in our American sense ; we may truly say, as I have said elsewliere,^ that " the battles of Rome were won, her administration determined, her children begotten, and her blood shed, for the interests of a small number of great families." But for a long time the sense of economic suffering and injustice had not assumed a political or decisive importance. Soon, however, after Rome seemed to have no more foreign foe worthy of her concern, this new movement of domestic unrest pressed to the front.

The Romans, in the course of their peninsular conquests, had from the beginning appropriated much land. This state domain, or ager publicus^ was let thus (Appian, " B. C," 1, 7) : the tenants were to pay the state one tithe of crops (to3v aireipofxevaiv^^ one fifth of fruit (roiV cfyvrevofiivoav)^ and a certain quota of flocks. And whereas they did this with a view to the growth of the Italian (so Appian, better say Latin') population, preeminently hardy as it was, the very opposite resulted. The rich in time got hold of this undivided land or domain, extending their own tenure by purchase, by wheedling, and by violence, thus creating enormous grazing districts instead of farms,^

1 "Testimonium Animse," 1908, p. 329.

2 While I am writing, the movement for conservation, as opposed to exploitation, stands in the forefront of our common concerns. The parallels of Rome afford at least a few points of analogy. Grave are the much-quoted words of the elder Pliny : " And to tell the truth, the Broad Estates (latifundia) have ruined Italy, now indeed even the provinces also." C"N. H.," 18, 35.) The presentation of Appian, which I have slaves of course being more profitable as laborers and herdsmen. Further, the interest of these great landlords was that the slaves should multiply as much as possible, because the wars did not decimate them at all. Thus the free yeomen were crowded out, the slaves abounding : Italy was overtaken by a positive stoppage in the increase of population as well as by a deterioration of her men, physically and socially, being ground under poverty and taxes (after 168 B.C.?) and military service.

Thus Rome as a political power was grievously injured in this stunting of the very personnel of her *' allies." Still people shrank from reviewing tenure and title ; the right of long possession seemed a bar also. The laws of Licinius and Sextius (367 B.C.) had limited tenure of the public domain to 500 iugera^ grazing being confined to 100 head of cattle or 500 sheep or swine. For stewards and surveyors they were to employ free persons.

No genuine betterment, however, followed : the interests caused transfer of lands by sham civil process to persons who stood close to them.

Most of the great landholders treated the ancient statute with contempt until Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in 133 B.C. renewed (aveKaivi^e^ Appian, " B. C," 1, 9) and for the first time enforced the ancient Licinian laws. An actual commission of three surveyed the land and took practical steps towards expropriation. It was this commission which prevented the landlords from treating this law with contempt, as the old law of 367 had been treated.

Also the sale of land allotments was forbidden by a provision of the Sempronian statute.

Now the landlords assumed the tone of injured benefactors : they also pointed to ancestral tombs which even

made my own, may be deduced from a political speech of Tiberius Gracchus himself. Plutarch, "Tib. Gracchus," c. 15, cites definitely certain points (iTTLxeLp-nfjiaTa) from a concrete political speech of the latter. 1 A iugerum is almost f of an acre.

under the civil law were loci sacri: others pleaded that they had invested their wives' dowries in this way, or made settlements upon their daughters. Others had mortgaged such lands : the money lenders foresaw great trouble in the task of coming to their own, and "altogether (Appian, 1, 10) the lamenting and expression of indignation was unseemly."

I have no space here even to trace the further political troubles of Tiberius, nor the far more trenchant and radical legislation of his remarkable younger brother Gains through the mechanism of tribunician power stretched to the utmost. Nor must I dwell upon the death of Cornelia's great sons in riotous procedures for which the landlord party was directly and conspicuously responsible.

It will be clear later on that in a measure the politician Csesar entered into the inheritance of these wonderful brothers, and in his agrarian law (or laws) gained the good will of the many. Further, we shall see how he was able (leaving out of consideration his sword and treasure) to rely upon and to consider as his personal clients numberless Romans, Latins, Italians, who with some reason looked upon him as a champion and benefactor of the poor and of the many<as over against the special interests represented in the perpetual executive council of the empire, the senate.

Now it cannot be denied that the authors of agrarian laws were held up, in the older and simpler days of the republic, as traitors who strove and schemed for autocratic power, and under guise of benefactions, or even of personal sacrifices, plotted to overthrow the common freedom and the rights of all. Thus had perished Maelius and Manlius in the olden time.

As for Tiberius and Gains, the landlords of course, who had by a quasi-governmental authority slain the brothers, attempted to justify these acts as beneficial to the commonwealth at large, as wholesome removals of firebrands, disturbers of vested rights, prospective autocrats or tyrants.

The earliest historical record here quotable was written by Asellio,^ a contemporary of the elder Gracchus. He served under Scipio ^milianus in Spain, a man who strove to quicken the moral and political sense of his readers, not a mere annalist and chronicler. Unfortunately, but few shreds are preserved for us, the chief ones by Gellius. Still, they are the pencillings of a witness : " For whenever Gracchus (the elder) set out from his house, a body of never less than three or four thousand persons was wont to follow him." The most impressive condemnation, however, of the elder Gracchus was pronounced by his own brother-in-law, the foremost man of his time, Scipio JEmilianus himself ; the Homeric verse rose to his lips :

" Thus perish e'en another who would such things perform I '*

Now the Pontifex Nasica, the chief slayer of Tiberius, was by no means reputed a saviour of the state by the people at large, but hooted on the streets. The Senate, indeed, sent this champion to the East under guise of some political mission, and he died in quasi-exile at Pergamum.

The splendid achievements and the lofty character of Scipio ^milianus himself did not spare him the necessity of giving utterance in public to his opinion of the martyr of the people's cause. And it was not merely the desire of the popular politicians to embarrass him before the people, but they knew that the pulse-beat of the plebs of Rome impatiently demanded to know what the eminent gentleman thought of that death. The political assassination of Scipio (129 B.C.) was shrouded in mystery at that time — he had indeed defied the surging masses on the forum as a mob "to whom Italy was but a stepmother." (Veil., 2, 41.)

1 Peter, "Hist. Rom. Fragmenta," p. 108.

As for Opimius the consul (121), slayer, or, if you prefer, executioner of Gaius Gracchus, he too failed to be prosperous later on. Opimius, mind you, had been in a way sheltered by the declaration of martial law, the noted Senatus consultum ultimum : " Let the consuls see to it that the state suffer no impairment " !

Later on we shall see that the adroit politician Csesar (in 63, case of Rabirius) with fair success attempted to demolish that ancient bulwark of the powers that were.

For a long time, indeed, the Roman senate had been in truth the repository of delegated power wielded for the state at large. But this beneficial and representative character it had lost.

The second great matter in this retrospect is the vast change, nay, metamorphosis, in the position of the trihuni plehis. Gaius, in an incisive manner, had both weakened and isolated the senatorial class by removing from them, nay, by setting over against them, the influential body of the equestrian citizens. The power to absolve and to condemn, the privilege of jury service, was taken from the senate and given to the knights ; it remained law for some forty years.

During the Jugurthine war some of the chief corruptionists in the senate (whose palms were tainted with Jugurtha's gold) were found guilty by a jury whose bias Cicero readily charges to the fact that they were " Grracchian jurors.''''

Thus the cleavage in the very structure of Rome's political household went on apace, for the maintenance of a conservative wrong is no less a disintegrating force than the assertion of bold innovation by reckless radicals.

This disintegration was mightily accelerated by the domestic history of the poor peasant's son of Arpinum, Gaius Marius. One of the five or six great captains of

Rome, he rose to eminence in despite and in defiance of the intrenched aristocracy. He bore the consciousness of his specific worth in a peculiar way. Clearly there was a chronic soreness at the aristocracy in the hearts and lives of the common people, and the evil times had come when it was easy to increase that soreness, and when men rose to power through that process. Sallust himself, who gained distinction and great wealth from his membership in the popular party and his loyalty to the leader thereof, — that keen-visaged historian himself ("Jug.," 85 sqq.), presents Marius in the latter's first brief canvass for consular honors as anything but humble, indeed as defiant, insolent, ostentatious in his contempt for the aristocracy. Here was a man of humble birth, without achievements of ancestors, without clientships, who boasted of it that he could not speak Greek. And on the morrow the tremendous emergency of the Cimbrian and Teuton invasion of Gaul and Spain and Italy proved that the governing aristocracy were absolutely in need of this passionate and defiant plebeian.

And here the necessities of empire, nay, of self-preservation, broke through and broke down all previous tradition, the very limitations ^ of the republican government and supremacy.

The first six consulates, then, of Marius occurred in these years : the first in 107 ; the next five were continuous, in 104, 103, 102, 101, and 100 B.C., when Caesar was born.

But we must not overlook the incessant efforts of the privileged class to undo the work of the Gracchi. Not long (Appian, "B. C," 1, 27) after the death of Gaius a statute was passed,^ a plebiscitum, put forward, too, not

1 For details of the Lex Villia Annalis of 180 b.c, v. Mommsen, "Staatsrecht," 3d ed., I, p. 523 sqq.

2 Botsford, "The Roman Assemblies." Mommsen, " C. I. Lat.," Vol. I, pp. 75 sqq.

by a consul, but by a tribune of the people, Spurius Thorius, probably in 111 B.C., entirely in the interes't of the occupiers (possessors) as over against the state. Thus holdings were confirmed and (according to Appian, I.e.} certain rent charges were established, and thus a fund was to be made which was to be distributed, pauperizing the poorer folk in town still more. These rent moneys, however, were abolished after a short time by " another tribunus plebis," and thus, as Appian observes, the plebs was utterly deprived of all betterment.

Many tribunes of the people were descended from the office-holding aristocracy, and merely passed through this " honor " in their political ascent, compelled often to play a double role. An honest effort was made by a young nobleman as tribunus plebis in 104, L. Marcius Philippus, to help the plebs. In 104 or thereabouts he proposed a new plebiscitum for agrarian reform ; but he soon allowed the matter to lapse, because the pressure of his own class was stronger than the brief flash of a political enthusiasm. In his temporary advocacy of his own bill he made the remark which startled his generation profoundly, viz., that there were not two thousand^ persons in the commonwealth who possessed property, viz., the overwhelming mass was essentially proletarian.