Tiberius Gracchus would be out of office. Other tribunes would be chosen
more amenable to influence, and his work could then be undone. He
evidently knew that those who would succeed him could not be relied on to
carry on his policy. He had taken one revolutionary step already; he was
driven on to another, and he offered himself illegally to the Comitia for
re-election. It was to invite them to abolish the constitution and to make
him virtual sovereign; and that a young man of thirty should have
contemplated such a position for himself as possible is of itself a proof
of his unfitness for it. The election-day came. The noble lords and
gentlemen appeared in the Campus Martius with their retinues of armed
servants and clients; hot-blooded aristocrats, full of disdain for
demagogues, and meaning to read a lesson to sedition which it would not
easily forget. Votes were given for Gracchus. Had the hustings been left
to decide the matter, he would have been chosen; but as it began to appear
how the polling would go, sticks were used and swords; a riot rose, the
unarmed citizens were driven off, Tiberius Gracchus himself and three
hundred of his friends were killed and their bodies were flung into the
Tiber.

Thus the first sparks of the coming revolution were trampled out. But
though quenched and to be again quenched with fiercer struggles, it was to
smoulder and smoke and burst out time after time, till its work was done.
Revolution could not restore the ancient character of the Roman nation,
but it could check the progress of decay by burning away the more
corrupted parts of it. It could destroy the aristocracy and the
constitution which they had depraved, and under other forms present for a
few more centuries the Roman dominion. Scipio Africanus, when he heard in
Spain of the end of his brother-in-law, exclaimed, "May all who act as he
did perish like him!" There were to be victims enough and to spare before
the bloody drama was played out. Quiet lasted for ten years, and then,