metres, but he ended by preferring the hexameter. He boldly
lashed the vices follies and affectations of private life, and referred
to persons by name with a freedom envied by his literary successors.
He was wealthy, and himself apparently a very free liver. While
keenly alive to the defects of the world around him, he seems to
have distrusted change. At least in public affairs he wrote as a
warm partisan, and his leader Scipio was opposed to the Gracchan
movement. It is a pity that we have nothing but fragments of
his satires, for it is certain that they presented a lively picture of
Roman life in the middle of the second century B.C., drawn from
the inside. He wrote as a Roman of Romans, and it is interesting
to note that he, like some others of the day, was concerned to
maintain the purity of the Latin tongue.

310. We have now passed in review the influences, political
social intellectual moral and economic, that were working in the
Roman state and empire, changing the character of the govern-
ment and people. Outwardly and nominally all things remained
the same as before 200 B.C. Inwardly and vitally the Rome of
133 B.C. was a new Rome, and the relation of the central power
to Allies and subjects was so changed as to be full of difficult
problems. Men of the time, in Rome as in other states and other
ages, were not prophets. Yet there were some who saw that all
was not well, though they could not guess what a long and terrible
period of revolution was coming. Thorough reform was urgently
needed, but to succeed in reformation a power was needed, not
only irresistible but continuous. And the constitution in its
present working was in this respect weaker than it had been two
centuries before, during the struggle for the Licinian laws. The
power needed could not be got peaceably. So we must not
wonder that Laelius in 151 dropped his project of land-reform,
the thorniest question of all. Men feared to attempt reforms,
and the majority, for their own present comfort, were only too
ready to let things drift from bad to worse. How strong the
constitution of the Republic still was, had now to be proved by
the length of time that it took to overthrow it.

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