source of envy and discontent among the poor.

[Sidenote: Why complaints about the Public Land became louder at the
close of the second century B.C.] As long as fresh assignations of
land and the plantations of colonies went on, this discontent could
be kept within bounds. But for a quarter of a century preceding our
period scarcely any fresh acquisitions of land had been made in Italy,
and, with no hope of new allotments from the territory of their
neighbours, the people began to clamour for the restitution of their
own. [Sidenote: Previous agrarian legislation. Spurius Cassius.] The
first attempt to wrest public land from possessors had been made long
before this by Spurius Cassius; and he had paid for his daring with
his life. [Sidenote: The Licinian Law.] More than a century later the
Licinian law forbade anyone to hold above 500 'jugera' of public land,
for which, moreover, a tenth of the arable and a fifth of the grazing
produce was to be paid to the State. The framers of the law are said
to have hoped that possessors of more than this amount would shrink
from making on oath a false return of the land which they occupied,
and that, as they would be liable to penalties for exceeding the
prescribed maximum, all land beyond the maximum would be sold at a
nominal price (if this interpretation of the [Greek: kat' oligon] of
Appian may be hazarded) to the poor. It is probable that they did not
quite know what they were aiming at, and certain that they did not
foresee the effects of their measure. In a confused way the law
may have been meant to comprise sumptuary, political, and agrarian
objects. It forbade anyone to keep more than a hundred large or five
hundred small beasts on the common pasture-land, and stipulated for
the employment of a certain proportion of free labour. The free
labourers were to give information of the crops produced, so that
the fifths and tenths might be duly paid; and it may have been