measure had never been proposed from then to the time in which he was
writing, under Augustus, without exciting the greatest disturbance.[6]
Cassius might well suppose that his personal distinction and the equity
and wisdom of the measure would carry it through, even amidst the storm of
opposition to which it was subjected. Like many other reformers equally
well meaning, he was mistaken.

The citizens who occupied this land had grown rich by reason of its
possessions. Some of them received it as an inheritance, and doubtless
looked upon it as their property as much as the _Ager Romanus_. These to a
man opposed the bill. The patricians arose en masse. The rich plebeians,
the aristocracy of wealth, took part with them. Even the commons were
dissatisfied because Spurius Cassius proposed in accordance with federal
rights and equity to bestow a portion of the land upon the Latini and
Hernici, their confederates and allies.[7] The bill proposed by Cassius,
together with such provisions as were necessary, became a law, according to
Niebuhr,[8] because the tribunes had no power to bring forward a law of any
kind before the plebeian tribes obtained a voice in the legislature by the
enactment of the Publilian law in 472 B.C.; so that when they afterwards
made use of the agrarian law to excite the public passions it must have
been one previously enacted but dishonestly set aside and, in Dionysius'
account, this is the form which the commotion occasioned by it takes.[9]
Though this is doubtless true, yet the law, by reason of the combined
opposition, became a dead letter and the people who would have been most
benefited by its enforcement joined with Cassius' enemies at the expiration
of his term of office to condemn him to death. In this way does ignorance
commonly reward its benefactors. This agitation aroused by Cassius, stirred
the Roman Commonwealth, now more than twenty years old, to its very
foundations, but it had no immediate effect upon the _ager publicus_. The
rich patrician together with the few plebeians who had wealth enough to