Tiberius and Caius Gracchus

In Africa, moreover, in connection with the planting of a colony on the site of Carthage, to which colony Caius gave the name Junonia (that is to say, in Greek, Heraea), there are said to have been many prohibitory signs from the gods. For the leading standard was caught by a gust of wind, and though the bearer clung to it with all his might, it was broken into pieces; the sacrificial victims lying on the altars were scattered by a hurricane and dispersed beyond the boundary-marks in the plan of the city, and the boundary-marks themselves were set upon by wolves, who tore them up and carried them a long way off.

Notwithstanding this, Caius settled and arranged everything in seventy days all told, and then returned to Rome, because he learned that Fulvius was being hard pressed by Drusus, and because matters there required his presence. For Lucius Opimius, a man of oligarchical principles and influential in the senate, who had previously failed in a candidacy for the consulship (when Caius had brought forward Fannius and supported his canvas for the office),[*](See chapter viii. 2. ) now had the aid and assistance of many,

and it was expected that he would be consul, and that as consul he would try to put down Caius, whose influence was already somewhat on the wane, and with whose peculiar measures the people had become sated, because the leaders who courted their favour were many and the senate readily yielded to them.