HKB
In fact, in a State where legal forms had been respected for four hundred years, it was necessary either to observe them faithfully, or to have an army at command.
Yet the work of the Gracchi did not die with them. Several of their laws continued long to subsist. The agrarian law was executed in part, inasmuch as, at a subsequent period, the nobles bought back the portions of lands which had been taken from them,[680] and its effects were only destroyed at the end of fifteen years. Implicated in the acts of corruption imputed to Jugurtha, of which we shall soon have to speak, the Consul Opimius had the same fate as Scipio Nasica, and a no less miserable end. It is curious to see two men, each vanquisher of a sedition, terminate their lives in a foreign land, exposed to the hatred and contempt of their fellow-citizens. Yet the reason is natural: they combated with arms ideas which arms could not destroy. When, in the midst of general prosperity, dangerous Utopias spring up, without root in the country, the slightest employment of force extinguishes them; but, on the contrary, when society, deeply tormented by real and imperious needs, requires reform, the success of the most violent repression is but momentaneous: the ideas repressed appear again incessantly, and, like the fabled hydra, for one head struck off a hundred others grow up in its place.
[Sidenote: War of Jugurtha (637).]
IV. An arrogant oligarchy had triumphed in Rome over the popular party: will it have at least the energy to raise again the honour of the Roman name abroad? Such will not be the case: events, of which Africa is on the point of becoming the theatre, will show the baseness of these men who sought to govern the world by repudiating the virtues of their ancestors.
Jugurtha, natural son of Mastanabal, king of Numidia, by a concubine, had distinguished himself in the Roman legions at the siege of Numantia. Reckoning on the favour he enjoyed at Rome, he had resolved to seize the inheritance of Micipsa, to the prejudice of the two legitimate children, Hiempsal and Adherbal. The first was murdered by his orders, and, in spite of this crime, Jugurtha had succeeded in corrupting the Roman commissioners charged with the task of dividing the kingdom between him and Adherbal, and in obtaining from them the larger part. But soon master of the whole country by force of arms, he put Adherbal to death also. The Senate sent against Jugurtha the consul Bestia Calpurnius, who, soon bribed as the commissioners had been, concluded a disgraceful peace. So many infamous deeds could not remain in the shade. The consul, on his return, was attacked by C. Memmius, who, in forcing Jugurtha to come to Rome to give an account of himself, seized the occasion of reminding his hearers of the grievances of the people and of the scandalous conduct of the nobles, in the following words:--