AGRARIAN LAWS

(Lat. ager, field.) Under this term are comprehended the enactments which were carried or attempted to be carried at Rome by the plebeians and their partisans,in opposition to the patricians, touching the distribution made of the public lands accruing to the state by conquest. These were leased out to the patricians by the state at a moderate or nominal rent, while the plebeians gained nothing by them. The object of the agrarian laws, which did not interfere with private freehold property, was to obtain for the plebeians a share in these lands, to restrict the quantity occupied Jay individuals, and to cause a real rent to be paid from them for the support of the army. The most celebrated movers of these laws were, Sp. Ca ius, Licinius, and the two Gracchi, whose reputation has suffered with posterity, from being intrusted to the hands of writers who favoured the party whose unjust encroachments were sought to be moderated by these laws. For a more impartial investigation of them than can be found in ancient writers, (for Cicero, from his aristocratic partisanship, has much misrepresented the^objects of these reformers, and the character of the laws they sought to introduce,) see Niebuhr's Roman History. In consequence of the misrepresentations here alluded to, an " Agrarian law " now generally serves to denote a law for the spoliation of individuals, by reducing landed property in private hands to a fixed amount. The law of partibility of real estates, as it obtained in the Roman jurisprudence, and still more in countries where it cannot be controlled by testamentary disposition, has, in some measure, the effect of an Agrarian law, although free from its injustice. [s. 35]