Popular tumults arose, and the usual remedy, an agrarian law,
was proposed. There was a new secession of the people to the Janiculum,
followed by the enactment of the Hortensian laws, celebrated in the
history of jurisprudence because they deprived the senate of its veto
and declared that the voice of the people assembled in their tribes was
supreme law. Debts were abolished or greatly reduced, and seven jugera
of land were allotted to every citizen. We see from this that the
commotions of our own days, made by socialists, communists, and
nihilists, as they are called, are only repetitions of such agitations
as those which took place so many centuries ago.
In the midst of a storm in the especially boisterous winter season of
the year 280, the waves of the Mediterranean washed upon the shores of
Southern Italy a brave man more dead than alive, who was to take the
lead in the last struggle against the supremacy of Rome among its
neighbors. The winds and the waves had no respect for his crown. They
knew not that he ruled over a strong people whose extensive mountainous
land was known as the "continent," and that he had left it with
thousands of archers and slingers and footmen and knights; and that he
had also huge elephants trained to war, beasts then unknown in Italian
warfare, which he expected would strike horror into the cavalry of the
country he had been cast upon.
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