though they had fought the battles by which the land had been made
secure. The sight of so much distress in a fertile country lying waste
affected Tiberius very deeply, and when he returned to Rome, he
bethought himself that it was in opposition to law that the rich
controlled such vast estates. He remembered that the Licinian Rogation,
which became a law more than two hundred years before this time,
forbade any man having such large tracts in his possession, and thought
that so beneficent a law should continue to be respected. He told the
people of Rome that the wild beasts had their dens and caves, while the
men who had fought and exposed their lives for Italy enjoyed in it
nothing more than light and air, and were obliged to wander about with
their wives and little ones, their commanders mocking them by calling
upon them to fight "for their tombs and the temples of their gods,"--
things that they never possessed nor could hope to have any interest
in. "Not one among many, many Romans," said he, "has a family altar or
an ancestral tomb. They have fought to maintain the luxury of the
great, and they are called in bitter irony the 'masters of the world'
while they do not possess a clod of earth that they may call their
own!"

It was a noble patriotism that filled the heart of Tiberius, but it was
not easy to carry out a reform like the one he contemplated. It may not
have appeared difficult to re-enact the old law, but we must remember
that, during two centuries of its neglect, generations of men had
peaceably possessed the great estates, of which its enforcement would
deprive them all at once. Was it to be supposed that they would quietly
permit this to be done? Was it just to deprive men of possessions that
they had received from their parents and grandparents without protest
on the part of the nation? Cornelia urged Tiberius to do some great
work for the state, telling him that she was called the "daughter of