change in the order of voting.] He is further supposed, though on
slender evidence, to have changed the order of voting in the Comitia
Centuriata. Formerly the first class voted first. Now the order of
voting first was to be settled by lot, and so the influence of the
rich would be diminished.

[Sidenote: General criticism of his schemes.] Such, in outline, was
the grand scheme of Caius Gracchus. If he was less single-minded in
his aims than his brother, he could hardly help being so; and, having
to reconcile so many conflicting interests, he may have swerved from
what would have been his own ideal. But that his main purpose was to
break down a rotten system, and establish a sound one on its ruins,
and that no petty motive of expediency guided him, but only the one
principle, 'salus populi suprema lex,' is incontrovertible. When we
think of him so eloquent, resolute, and energetic, conceiving such
great projects and executing them in person, making the regeneration
of his country his lodestar in spite of his ever-present belief that
he would, in the end, fall by the same fate as his brother, we think
of him as one of the noblest figures in history--a purer and less
selfish Julius Caesar.

[Sidenote: Machinations of the nobles.] As the petty acts of the
nobles had brought out into relief the large policy of Tiberius, so
it was now. They resorted to even lower tricks than accusations of
tyranny, and found in the fatuity or dishonesty of Drusus a tool even
more effective than Nasica's brutality. The plantation of a colony at
Carthage was looked at askance by many Romans. It was the first
colony planted out of Italy, and the superstitious were filled with
forebodings which the Senate eagerly exaggerated. Such colonies had
repeatedly out-grown and overtopped the parent state. The ground had