# CHAPTER 37 — What Discord Arose in Rome From the Agrarian Laws; and How Absolutely Outrageous It Is for a Republic to Pass a Retroactive Law Which Is Contrary to an Ancient Custom of the City

It is a saying of ancient writers * that men usually inflict evil upon themselves and become bored with the good, and that both of these attitudes give rise to the same effects, because whenever the necessity for fighting is taken away from them, they fight for the sake of ambition, which is so powerful a passion in the human breast that, no matter the rank to which a man may rise, he never abandons it. The reason is that nature has created men in such a way that they can desire everything but are unable to obtain everything, so that their desire is always greater than their power of acquisition, and discontent with what they possess and lack of satisfaction are the result. This situation gives rise to variations in fortune, for since some men desire to possess more and others fear to lose what they have acquired, enmities and wars are the result, from which comes the ruin of one province and the exaltation of another. * I have written this discourse because it was not enough for the Roman plebeians, who were driven to this desire by necessity, to secure themselves against the nobles by creating the tribunes; immediately after having obtained the creation of the tribunes, they began to quarrel with the nobles out of ambition and the desire to share with them honours and possessions, as the things most prized by men. From this conflict arose the disease that gave birth to the struggle over the agrarian law, which was finally the cause of the destruction of the republic. Since well-organized republics have to keep the public treasury rich but their citizens poor, some defect must have existed in this law in the city of Rome: it was either not created at the beginning in such a way that it did not require daily amendments, or its creation was so long deferred that it became outrageous applied retroactively; or it was well instituted at the beginning but was then corrupted in its application, so that, whichever way it may have been, this law was never discussed in Rome without the city being thrown into turmoil.

This law had two principal provisions. * The one provided that no citizen could possess more than so many jugers of land; the other provided that lands taken from the enemy were to be divided among the Roman people. It harmed the nobility, however, in two respects: those who possessed more land than the law allowed (and the greatest number of these were nobles) had to be deprived of this surplus, and dividing lands taken from the enemy among the plebeians deprived the nobles of the means of enriching themselves. Thus, as these laws came to offend powerful men who considered opposing them to be defending the public interest, whenever this issue was brought up the entire city, as was mentioned, was thrown into turmoil, and the nobles with patience and skill delayed action on it, either by calling out an army or by putting the tribune who proposed the law in opposition to another tribune, or sometimes by yielding in part, or even by sending a colony to the place where the lands were to be distributed, as occurred with the region around Antium, where, once this controversy about the law arose, they sent a colony drawn from Rome to which this region was assigned. In this regard, Livy makes a noteworthy remark, declaring that it was difficult to find anyone in Rome willing to give his name to go to that colony, so much more ready were the plebeians to insist on property in Rome than to go and take possession of it in Antium. *. Dissatisfaction with this law thus went on causing trouble for a long time until the Romans began to send their armies to the far corners of Italy or outside of Italy, after which it seemed to die down. This happened because the lands possessed by Rome’s enemies, which were far from the eyes of the plebeians and in places where cultivation was not easy, came to be less desirable than other lands; in like manner the Romans were also less harsh in punishing their enemies, and even when they plundered some of their lands, they sent colonies there. Hence, for these reasons this law remained dormant up to the time of the Gracchi, and once revived, it completely destroyed Roman liberty, because the power of the opponents was twice as great, and in this way the law ignited such hatred between the plebeians and the senate that it led to armed conflict and bloodshed beyond every civil usage and practice. Since the public magistrates were unable to find a remedy for this and none of the factions had any more faith in them, they therefore had recourse to private remedies, and each of the factions began to look for a leader who would defend it. Anticipating this disgrace and disorder, the plebeians turned their favour to Marius, and they did so in such a manner that they made him consul four times, and his consulate lasted with few intervals for such a length of time that he was able to have himself named consul on three other occasions. * Having no remedy against this plague, the nobility turned to favour Sulla, * and once he had been made leader of their faction, the civil wars broke out, and after much bloodshed and many changes of fortune, the nobility retained the upper hand. Later these animosities again arose in the time of Caesar and Pompey, for after Caesar had become leader of Marius’ party and Pompey head of Sulla’s, they came to blows and Caesar came out the winner: * he was the first tyrant of Rome, after which the city was never again free.

Such was the beginning and the end of the agrarian law. Although we have elsewhere demonstrated how enmities between the senate and the plebeians kept Rome free, since they gave rise to laws in favour of liberty, and the result of this agrarian law may therefore seem to contradict this conclusion, I must say that I shall not persist in this opinion on the matter, because the ambition of the prominent is so great that if it is not resisted in various ways and by various means in a city, it will soon reduce that city to ruin. Thus, if the controversy over the agrarian law caused conflict for 300 years before enslaving Rome, the city would certainly have been much more quickly reduced to servitude if the plebeians had not constantly checked the ambition of the nobility with this law and other expressions of its desires. It is also clear from this that men value their property more than honours, for the Roman nobility always gave way to the plebeians without extraordinary strife in matters concerning honours, but when it came to property, their stubbornness in defending it was so great that in order to satisfy their own desires, the plebeians had recourse to those extraordinary methods that have been discussed above. The Gracchi, whose intentions were more praiseworthy than their prudence, were the chief instigators of these disorders, because to seek an end to a disorder that has arisen in a republic and to do so by passing a law to be applied retroactively is a badly conceived policy, and as we explained at length above, this does nothing other than accelerate the evil to which that disorder has brought you, but by putting it off, the evil will either occur later, or, with the passage of time, extinguish itself on its own before reaching its end.