convict. So he turned to the Italian land-owners, and became
the mouthpiece of their selfishness, for a selfish or at best a
narrow-minded end. The nobles must have, at heart, disliked his
allies; but they cheered him in the Senate, and he succeeded in
practically strangling the commission by procuring the transfer of its
jurisdiction to the consuls. The consul for the time being immediately
found a pretext for leaving Rome, and a short time afterwards Scipio
was found one morning dead in his bed. [Sidenote: His death.] He had
gone to his chamber the night before to think over what he should say
next day to the people about the position of the country class, and,
if he was murdered, it is almost as probable that he was murdered by
some rancorous foe in the Senate as by Carbo or any other Gracchan. It
was well for his reputation that he died just then. Without Sulla's
personal vices he might have played Sulla's part as a politician, and
his atrocities in Spain as well as his remark on the death of Tiberius
Gracchus--words breathing the very essence of a narrow swordsman's
nature--showed that from bloodshed at all events he would not have
shrunk. It is hard to respect such a man in spite of all his good
qualities. Fortune gave him the opportunity of playing a great part,
and he shrank from it. When the crop sprang up which he had himself
helped to sow, he blighted it. But because he was personally
respectable, and because he held a middle course between contemporary
parties, he has found favour with historians, who are too apt to
forget that there is in politics, as in other things, a right course
and a wrong, and that to attempt to walk along both at once proves a
man to be a weak statesman, and does not prove him to be a great or
good man.

[Sidenote: The early career of Caius Gracchus.] In B.C. 126 Caius
Gracchus, seven years after he had been made one of the commissioners