eyes its effects are clearer still. Slave labour and slave-discontent,
'latifundia,' decrease of population, depreciation of the land,
received a fresh impetus, and the triumphant optimates pushed the
State step by step further down the road to ruin. For the end for
which they struggled was not the good of Italy, much less of the
world, but the supremacy of Rome in Italy, and of themselves in Rome.
Wealth and office were shared by an ever narrowing circle. Ten years
after the passing of the Baebian law, it was said that among all the
citizens there were only 2,000 wealthy families. And between the
years 123 and 109 B.C. four sons and probably two nephews of Quintus
Metellus gained the consulship, five of the six gained triumphs, and
one was censor, while he himself had filled all the highest offices
of the State. Thus, as Sallust says, the nobles passed on the chief
dignities from hand to hand.

There must have been many of the Gracchan party, now left without a
head, who burned for deliverance from such despicable masters. But
they were for the time disorganized and cowed. [Sidenote: Caius
Marius.] There was one man whom Scipio Aemilianus was said to have
pointed out in the Numantine war as capable, if he himself died, of
taking his place; and the rough soldier had already come forward as a
politician, on the one hand checking the optimates by protecting the
secrecy and efficiency of the ballot, and on the other defying the mob
by opposing a distribution of corn; but for the present no one could
tell how far he would or could go, and though he had already been made
praetor, the Metelli could as yet afford to despise him. The death of
Caius prolonged the Senate's misrule for twenty years. Twenty years
of shame at home and abroad--the turpitude of the Jugurthine war--a
second and more stubborn slave revolt in Sicily--the apparition of
the Northern hordes inflicting disaster after disaster upon the Roman