One cannot help doubting whether in all that is said of the agrarian law of Cassius there is a single point that comes from any other source than the desire of the later writers to give some account of so important a measure. Since the old chronicles were totally silent about the nine nobles who were condemned to death, they must at all events have been very brief on the fate of Cassius: and what should make them deem it necessary to do more than name his agrarian law? Its purport can have been nothing but a revival of that which I suppose to be the law of Servius. It must have directed that the portion of the populus in the public lands should be set apart, that the rest should be divided among the plebeians, that the tithe should again be levied, and applied to paying the army. Now this is just what Dionysius makes the senate ordain: only by a law meant in earnest, as will be noticed presently, the carrying the measure into effect would have been entrusted to very different hands from those selected in that ordinance of the senate. In trying by induction to restore the purport of the law of Cassius, the only other thing we have to add is that the lands divided between the orders were solely those which the state had acquired since the general assignment by king Servius, and which it still retained.