It is not exactly true that the agrarian law of Cassius was the earliest that was so called: every law by which the commonwealth disposed of its public land bore that name; as for instance that by which the domain of the kings was parcelled out among the commonalty, and those by which colonies were planted. Even in the narrower sense, of a law whereby the state exercised its ownership in removing the old possessors from a part of its domain, and making over its right of property therein, such a law existed among those of Servius Tullius.

In the room of these significations very general currency has been given to the term agrarian law, in the sense of an enactment relating to the landed property of all the citizens, setting a limit to it, and assigning all beyond that limit to the destitute. The regulation of Cleomenes, the equal partition of land demanded by the frantic levellers in the French revolution, are termed agrarian laws: while in cases to which the word might suitably be applied, where the strict right of property has been unfeelingly enforced against tenants at will who cultivate a piece of ground transmitted to them from their forefathers, the word is never thought of; and the rapacious landlord, who turns a village into a solitude, regarding its fields as property which he may dispose of in whatever way he can make the most of it, if he has ever heard the name of the Gracchi, will condemn their agrarian law as an atrocity.