Tiberius and Caius Gracchus

This Fulvius was a friend of Caius, and had been chosen a commissioner with him for the distribution of the public land; but he was a turbulent fellow, and was hated outright by the senators. Other men also suspected him of stirring up trouble with the allies and of secretly inciting the Italians to revolt. These things were said against him without proof or investigation, but Fulvius himself brought them into greater credence by a policy which was unsound and revolutionary.

This more than anything else was the undoing of Caius, who came in for a share of the hatred against Fulvius. And when Scipio Africanus died without any apparent cause, and certain marks of violence and blows were thought to be in evidence all over his dead body, as I have written in his Life,[*](See the Tiberius Gracchus, ad fin., and cf. the Romulus, xxvii. 4. f. ) most of the consequent calumny fell upon Fulvius, who was Scipio’s enemy, and had abused him that day from the rostra, but suspicion attached itself also to Caius.

And a deed so monstrous, and perpetrated upon a man who was the foremost and greatest Roman, went unpunished, nay, was not even so much as probed; for the multitude were opposed to any judicial enquiry and thwarted it, because they feared that Caius might be implicated in the charge if the murder were investigated. However, this had happened at an earlier time.[*](In 129 B.C., six years before Caius became tribune.)

In Africa, moreover, in connection with the planting of a colony on the site of Carthage, to which colony Caius gave the name Junonia (that is to say, in Greek, Heraea), there are said to have been many prohibitory signs from the gods. For the leading standard was caught by a gust of wind, and though the bearer clung to it with all his might, it was broken into pieces; the sacrificial victims lying on the altars were scattered by a hurricane and dispersed beyond the boundary-marks in the plan of the city, and the boundary-marks themselves were set upon by wolves, who tore them up and carried them a long way off.