"To me too," his mother wrote to him, "nothing seems finer and more glorious than to retaliate on an enemy, so far as it can be done without the country's ruin.

But if this is not possible, then may our enemies continue and remain what they are, a thousand times rather than that our country should perish." Cornelia knew her son; his creed was just the reverse.

Vengeance he would wreak on the wretched government, vengeance at any price, though he himself and even the commonwealth were to be ruined by it--the presentiment, that fate would overtake him as certainly as his brother, drove him only to make haste like a man mortally wounded who throws himself on the foe.

The mother thought more nobly; but the son-- with his deeply provoked, passionately excited, thoroughly Italian nature--has been more lamented than blamed by posterity, and posterity has been right in its judgment.
Alterations on the Constituion by Gaius Gracchus Distribution of Grain Change in the Order of Voting Tiberius Gracchus had come before the burgesses with a single administrative reform.

What Gaius introduced in a series of separate proposals was nothing else than an entirely new constitution; the foundation-stone of which was furnished by the innovation previously carried through, that a tribune of the people should be at liberty to solicit re-election for the following year.( 8) While this step enabled the popular chief to acquire a permanent position and one which protected its holder, the next object was to secure for him material power or, in other words, to attach the multitude of the capital--for that no reliance was to be placed on the country people coming only from time to time to the city, had been sufficiently apparent--with its interests steadfastly to its leader.