It is unnecessary to go into any details regarding the death of Caius Gracchus, who took up and continued the work of his brother. To the measures in favor of the poor which had been advocated by Tiberius, he added others,--for instance, regular distributions of corn among the poor at half price, the imposition of new taxes upon articles of luxury imported from foreign countries, and employment on public works for mechanics and laborers who could not find employment on private contract. It will be seen that these measures, as well as some other projects of minor importance which Caius Gracchus advocated and caused to be enacted as laws, form part of the platform of modern labor parties, and that the Gracchi can fitly be designated as the founders of these parties. They both fell victims to the attempt to carry out their theories. At first, it would seem, Caius Gracchus at the request of his mother, was inclined to abandon the projects of Tiberius; but one night, says Cicero in his book _De Divinatione_, he heard Tiberius saying to him: “Why hesitate, Caius? Thy destiny shall be the same as mine--to fight for the people, and to die for them.” It is said that this prophecy determined him in his course, and that his death was the consequence. In 121 B.C., during a public riot and conflict organized by his enemies for his destruction, he committed suicide, dying not by his own hand, but by commanding his slave to stab him,--an order which was promptly obeyed. The assassination of the one and the forced suicide of the other immortalized the two brothers.
Americans are not great students of history, especially ancient history. Very likely the assassination of Julius Cæsar, one of the most important events in the history of ancient Rome, would also be among the “things not generally known” among Americans, had not Shakespeare’s great tragedy made them familiar with it. It is true, the aims of the dramatist and of the historian are wide-apart. The dramatist places the hero in the centre of the plot, and causes every part of it to contribute to the catastrophe which overwhelms him under the decree of fate. He is the victim of his own guilt. The historian makes the great man but one of the principal factors in the evolution of events, and if a Cæsar or a Napoleon succumbs in the struggle, it is by force of external circumstances against which his genius is powerless to contend, although his ambition or his passion may have been the dominant cause of arraying those circumstances against him. By his matchless genius and incomparable art, Shakespeare has, to a certain degree, in his “Julius Cæsar,” solved the difficult problem of combining the task of the dramatic poet with that of the historian, and has placed before the spectator not only Cæsar himself with his world-wide and imperialistic ambition as the central figure of the play, but also Rome with its republican recollections and aspirations in antagonism to Cæsar’s ambition. The delineation of the character of the foremost man of the ancient world by the greatest dramatist of modern times, and his skilful grouping of the great republicans struggling for the maintenance of republican institutions, have been so indelibly engraved upon the minds of modern readers that the assassination of Julius Cæsar, which took place at Rome 44 B.C., is nearly as familiar to them as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And if we, in this series of Famous Assassinations in History, devote a chapter to it, it is simply for the reason that the series would be incomplete without it. Moreover, it may be both interesting and useful to call to the mind of the reader the circumstances and surroundings which led to the downfall of Cæsar. The conspiracy and assassination removed from the scene of action the master-mind of the age, without saving the republican institutions; and it is only by explaining the causes that we can do justice to the noble intentions of the conspirators, while lamenting the assassination of Cæsar as a public misfortune for Rome, inasmuch as it removed the strong hand that could have prevented the anarchy and civil war which broke out among his successors, immediately after his disappearance from the public stage.