Cicero, nevertheless, pointed out clearly the political bearing of the project, although censuring it, when he said; “The new law enriches those who occupied the domain lands, and withdraws them from public indignation. How many men are embarrassed by their vast possessions, and cannot support the odium attached to the largesses of Sylla! How many would sell them, and find no buyers! How many seek means, of whatever kind, to dispossess themselves of them!... And you, Romans, you are going to sell those revenues which your ancestors have acquired at the cost of so much sweat and blood, to augment the fortune and assure the tranquillity of the possessors of the goods confiscated by Sylla!”[940]
We see thus that Cicero seems to deny the necessity of allaying the inquietudes of the new and numerous acquirers of this kind of national property; and yet, when a short time afterwards another tribune proposed to relieve from civic degradation the sons of proscripts, he opposed him, not because this reparation appeared to him unjust, but for fear the rehabilitation in political rights should carry with it the reintegration into the properties, a measure, according to his views, subversive of all interests.[941] Thus, with a strange inconsistency, Cicero combated these two laws of conciliation; the one because it re-assured, the other because it disquieted the holders of the effects of the proscribed. Why must it be that, amongst men of superiority, but without convictions, talent only too often serves to sustain with the like facility the most opposite causes? The opinion of Cicero triumphed, nevertheless, thanks to his eloquence; and the project, despite the lively adhesion of the people, encountered in the Senate such a resistance, that it was abandoned without being referred to the comitia.
Cæsar advocated the agrarian law, because it raised the value of the soil, put an end to the disfavour attached to the national property, augmented the resources of the treasury, prevented the extravagance of the generals, delivered Rome from a turbulent and dangerous populace by wresting it from degradation and misery. He supported the rehabilitation of the children of proscripts, because that measure, profoundly reparative, put an end to one of the great iniquities of the past regime.