Titus Sempronius Gracchus, the plebeian tribune, having proposed an Agrarian law, (contrary to the sense of the senate, and the equestrian order,) to the effect that no person should hold more than five hundred acres of the public lands, wrought himself up to such a degree of passion that he deprived his colleague, Marcus Octavius, of his authority by a law which he made, and appointed himself, together with his brother Caius, and his father-in-law Appius Claudius, commissioners for dividing the lands. He also proposed another Agrarian law, by which the land was still more at his disposal, that the same commissioners should be authorized to determine which was public and which private land. When afterwards it appeared that there was not land sufficient to be divided so as to satisfy the people, whose hopes he had raised to cupidity by the expectations held out to them, he declared that he would propose a law, that all those, who by the law of Sempronius were entitled to such grant, should be paid in money out of the bequest of king Attalus. But Attalus, king of Pergamus, son of Eumenes, had made the Romans his heirs. The senate was roused to indignation at such repeated ill-treatment; and chiefly Publius Mucius, the consul, who, having delivered a severe invective against Gracchus in the senate, was seized by him, dragged before the people, and accused; nevertheless he continued to inveigh against him from the rostrum. Gracchus, endeavouring to procure his re-election as tribune, was slain in the Capitol, by the chief nobles, by the advice of Publius Cornelius Nasica, after having been beaten first with the fragments of the seats, and was thrown, without the rites of sepulture, into the river, together with some others who fell in the tumult. Various engagements, with various success, against the slaves in Sicily are recorded.