Just as Gaius was coming to office, a plague of locusts decimated crops in North Africa, causing food shortages back in Rome. Gaius introduced legislation directing the state to purchase and stockpile grain and then sell it to citizens for a fixed price. Cicero later denounced the project as an obvious handout to secure political support and said that better men at the time “resisted it because they thought that its effect would be to lead the common people away from industry to idleness.” But this was not the free-grain dole that would later become a hallmark of imperial municipal policy. It
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