and yet it is difficult to see when Domitius would have had time for this work, unless he stayed in Gallia after the battle on the Isère. Nor do we know in what part of the Provincia this road was made. There is no authority for the statement that this Via Domitia was made along the coast between the Alpes Maritimae and the Rhone.

This year B.c. 121 was memorable for the death of C. Gracchus, the defeat of the Gauls on the Rhone, and a great eruption of Aetna. The lava flowed down to Catina. The flat roofs of the houses were crushed by the weight and consumed by the heat of the ashes which the mountain vomited out. In consideration of this misfortune the Senate relieved the people of Catina from the payment of taxes for ten years. This eruption is recorded by Orosius and also by Augustinus in terms so nearly alike that they may have followed one authority, or Orosius may have followed Augustinus.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE SETTLEMENT OF NARBO.

B.C. 120-112.

In the consulship of P. Manlius and C. Papirius Carbo, B.C. 120, the partizans of Caius Gracchus made an attempt to revenge his death. Opimius was now a private man and accountable for what he had done in his consulship. Q. Decius a tribune prosecuted Opimius before the people in their judicial capacity. The charge, as it is reported in the Epitome of Livy, was that Opimius had thrown citizens into prison without formal trial and condemnation; but he had done a good deal more than that. His offence came under the head of Perduellio, which among other things comprised abuse of power by a magistratus, and especially the execution of a citizen without allowing an appeal to the Roman people. Carbo, who had formerly been of the party of the Gracchi, now changed sides and defended Opimius. The interest of the Senate prevailed and Opimius was acquitted.

This was

Carbo gained nothing by defending such a case. the man who in his tribunate drew from Scipio the declaration that Tiberius Gracchus was justly put to death, and he did this to damage Scipio in public opinion. Carbo maintained in his defence of Opimius that the death of Caius Gracchus was justifiable, and necessary for the conservation of the state. He had changed his views to please the Senate and the nobility, and to serve his own interests, but his late conversion did not conciliate his old enemies. In the following year he was prosecuted by a youth of one-and-twenty, L. Licinius Crassus, who by this prosecution established his reputation as

an orator at an age when others were only learning their art. It is not said what the charge against Carbo was. We can only conjecture that it came under the comprehensive chapter of Perduellio. The charge was probably founded on something that Carbo had done in his consulship, but we know nothing of the events of that year. The anecdote-collector Valerius reports that a slave belonging to Carbo brought to Crassus a sealed scrinium or case which contained much evidence that would have convicted Carbo; but Crassus sent back to Carbo the scrinium just as it was and the slave with it in chains. We are not informed how it was known what was in the scrinium, for Crassus received it and returned it sealed. All this story is very imperfectly told; but Carbo was prosecuted in some form. Valerius says that he was condemned to exile. Cicero, who knew better, or might have done, says that he escaped the severity of the Judices by a voluntary death, which ought to mean that he was tried before some constituted court. Cicero says in another place that he poisoned himself. He has also preserved a few lines of the speech of Crassus which will explain Carbo's unpopularity: "If you defended Opimius, those friends of yours, Carbo, will not for that reason think that you are a good citizen. It is plain that this was done under some false show, and that you had some interested purpose in undertaking this defence, for you often deplored the death of Tiberius Gracchus in your harangues before the people, you were one of those who murdered P. Africanus, in your tribunate you proposed that law which every body remembers, and you have always stood aloof from the conservative party in the state." The law which is alluded to is the law which Carbo proposed about the re-election of tribunes. Crassus afterwards said that he never repented so much of any thing that he had done as of having brought Carbo to trial; and the reason was that by this early act of his life he felt his liberty restrained and all his conduct more exposed than he liked to the critical judgment of his fellow-citizens.

In this year there was one of the common examples of Roman superstition. It was the business of those who managed the people by their fears to discover some strange

Y

thing and to call in the ceremonial of religion to remove the alarm which the cunning impostors had raised. The search after monsters was an old fashion in Rome. There was discovered in the Roman territory some unlucky child eight years of age and deformed. It was named an androgynus, a compound of both sexes. The Haruspices had only one cure for such a case. The monster was pitched into the sea; but this was not enough. Seven-and-twenty young girls, or as the Romans expressed it with due regard to sacred numbers, thrice nine, made a solemn procession through the city dressed in long robes, preceded by victims for sacrifice and the statues of the gods, and followed by the Decemviri, the guardians of the Sibylline books, with crowns on their heads. The girls sang a solemn hymn appropriate to the occasion accompanied with a suitable movement of the feet, the victims were sacrificed, and this conclusion of the farce restored tranquillity to the ignorant populace and confirmed the dominion of the impostors who laughed in their sleeve. The superstitions of Rome, changed only in name, appear again in the religious processions of Roman Catholic Europe and her foreign settlements. Spain was and is still the chief seat of these antient forms disguised or hardly disguised under new names. But while a powerful clergy in modern times has made the ceremonial of religion a part of every public and private act, the more politic Roman put the authority of religion in the hands of statesmen and magistrates, who used it for their own purposes without allowing this great power to fall into the hands of the ignorant ministers of temples and sacrifices. Thus Roman religion, though it could sacrifice a human life sometimes, did not degenerate into the cruelty which has characterized modern paganism.

In the consulship of L. Caecilius Metellus and L. Aurelius Cotta (B.c. 119), Caius Marius was a tribune. Marius had distinguished himself before Numantia under Scipio, and his merit as a soldier was well known. During his tribunate he proposed a law on the mode of voting, which Plutarch by some strange blunder speaks of as a law "which apparently tended to deprive the nobles of their power in the Judicia." One object of the law of Marius was to secure the freedom of

voting. There may have been other things in it, but this is all that Cicero our only authority has told us about this Maria Lex. He proposed that the Pontes or passages by which the people passed into the voting-place should be made narrower, in order to prevent crowding or voters being solicited just at the moment of depositing their ballot, or finally to prevent one voter from seeing what another did. If the narrowing was effectual, it would allow only one man to pass at a time. After the voter passed the Pons, he received the tabellae or ballots from a man who was at the entrance of the " septa" or "ovile," as the building was named in which the voting took place, and then going on he deposited in the box (sitella) such tablet or tablets, as he chose. He did not return the way that he came, but he went on and came out on the other side. It is not said what he did with the tabellae which he did not use, but we may assume that there was a place for depositing these waste tabellae, for we cannot accept a German's supposition that the voter gave them up to any person or persons on going out of the Septa. That might have spoiled the secrecy of some votes.

As it was now a settled matter that men voted in secret, it is difficult to conceive that any opposition should have been made to a proposal, the purpose of which was to prevent confusion and secure the efficiency of the legal mode of voting. However, the consul Cotta persuaded the Senate to resist the proposed law. Here we have only Plutarch's authority, who also says that Marius was summoned to the Senate to account for his conduct in proposing the law; which is an absurd story. The contest was evidently whether the Senate should give their consent to this law being proposed or not. Marius threatened to put Cotta in prison, if he opposed this measure. Cotta appealed to his colleague Metellus, who supported Cotta, on which Marius ordered Metellus to be taken off to prison, and as none of the tribunes would interpose their authority, Metellus must have gone if the Senate had not yielded. Marius now came before the popular assembly and his law about the Pontes was formally enacted. On another occasion he resolutely opposed a measure which proposed to distribute corn among the citizens, and thus "he established