apparently the only way of explaining what at first sight seems the
inconsistency of the country class is to conclude, that the men who
supported Tiberius were the poor of the Italian towns and the small
farmers of the country, while the men who called on Scipio to save
them from the commissioners were the capitalists of the towns and the
richer farmers--some of them voters, some of them non-voters--with
their forces swollen, it may be, by not a few who, having clamoured
for more land, found now that the title to what they already had was
called in question. Though this cannot be stated as a certainty, it at
least accounts for what historians, after many pages on the subject,
have left absolutely unexplained, and it presents the conduct of
Scipio Aemilianus in quite a different light from the one in which it
has commonly been regarded. He is usually extolled as a patriot who
would not stir to humour a Roman rabble, but who, when downtrodden
honest farmers, his comrades in the wars, appealed to him, at once
stepped into the arena as their champion. [Sidenote: Attitude of
Scipio Aemilianus.] In reality he was a reactionist who, when the
inevitable results of those liberal ideas which had been broached in
his own circle stared him in the face, seized the first available
means of stifling them. The world had moved too fast for him. As
censor, instead of beseeching the gods to increase the glory of the
State, he begged them to preserve it. And no doubt he would have
greatly preferred that the gods should act without his intervention.
Brave as a man, he was a pusillanimous statesman; and when confronted
by the revolutionary spirit which he and his friends had helped to
evoke, he determined at all costs to prop up the senatorial power.
[Sidenote: His unpopularity with the Senate.] But the Senate hated
him, partly as a trimmer, and partly because by his personal character
he rebuked their baseness. He had just impeached Aurelius Cotta, a
senator, and the judices, from spite against him, had refused to