by Will Durant
In the midst of the war its chief instigators had died in the fullness of victory—Cato in 149, Masinissa in 148. The old censor had left a deep mark upon Roman history. Men would look back to him for many centuries as the typical Roman of the Republic: Cicero would idealize him in De Senectute; his great-great-grandson would reincarnate his philosophy without his humor; Marcus Aurelius would mold himself upon his example; Fronto would call upon Latin literature to return to the simplicity and directness of his style. Nevertheless, the destruction of Carthage was his only success. His war against Hellenism completely failed; every department of Roman letters, philosophy, oratory, science, art, religion, morals, manners, and dress surrendered to Greek influence. He hated Greek philosophers; his famous descendant would surround himself with them. The religious faith that he had lost continued to decline despite his efforts to reanimate it. Above all, the political corruption that he had fought in his youth grew wider and deeper as the stakes of office rose with the Empire’s spread; every new conquest made Rome richer, more rotten, more merciless. She had won every war but the class war; and the destruction of Carthage removed the last check to civil division and strife. Now through a hundred bitter years of revolution Rome would pay the penalty of gaining the world.
* * *
I It was on leaving for this campaign that Paulus paid his classic compliments to amateur strategists: “In all public places, and in private parties, there are men who know where the armies should be put in Macedonia, what strategical positions ought to be occupied. . . . They not only lay down what should be done, but when anything is decided contrary to their judgment they arraign the consul as though he were being impeached. . . . This seriously interferes with the successful prosecution of a war. . . . [If anyone] feels confident that he can give me good advice, let him go with me to Macedonia. . . . If he thinks this is too much trouble, let him not try to act as a pilot while he is on land.”3
II The basilica (sc. stoa—i.e., royal portico) was a Hellenistic application of the arch to the Persian palace and the Egyptian hypostyle hall; Delos and Syracuse had raised such structures in the third century B.C.
III Said Horace, in a now-trite line: Graecia capta ferum victor em cepit: “Conquered Greece took captive her barbarous conqueror.”24a
BOOK II
THE REVOLUTION
145-30 B.C.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
B.C.
139:
First Servile War in Sicily
133:
Tribunate and assassination of Tiberius Gracchus
132:
FL. Lucilius; Panaetius in Rome
124-123:
Caius Gracchus tribune
122:
C. Gracchus introduces state distribution of corn
121:
Suicide of C. Gracchus
119:
Marius tribune; 116: praetor
113-101:
Wars against Cimbri and Teutones
112-105:
The Jugurthine War
107, 104-100, 87:
Marius consul
106:
Birth of Cicero and Pompey
105:
Cimbri defeat Romans near Arausio
103-99:
Second Servile War in Sicily
103-100:
Saturninus tribune
102:
Marius defeats Cimbri at Aquae Sextiae
100:
Marius suppresses Saturninus; birth of Julius Caesar
91:
Reforms and assassination of M. Livius Drusus
91-89:
The Social War in Italy
88:
Sulla consul; flight of Marius
88-84:
First Mithridatic War
87:
Rebellion of Cinna and Marius; radical reign of terror
86:
Sulla takes Athens and defeats Archelaus at Chaeronea
86:
Marius and Cinna depose Sulla; death of Marius
85-84:
Third and fourth consulates, and death of Cinna
83-81:
Second Mithridatic War
83:
Sulla lands at Brundisium
82:
Sulla takes Rome; reactionary reign of terror
81:
Leges Corneliae of Sulla
80-72:
Revolt of Sertorius in Spain
79:
Resignation and, 78: death, of Sulla
76:
FL. Varro
75-63:
Third Mithridatic War; victories of Lucullus and Pompey
75:
Cicero quaestor in Sicily
73-71:
Third Servile War; Spartacus
70:
First consulate of Crassus and Pompey; trial of Verres; Virgil b.
69:
Titus Pomponius Atticus
68:
Caesar quaestor in Spain
67:
Pompey subdues the pirates
66:
Cicero Pro lege Manilia
63:
Cicero exposes Catiline; Octavius b.
63-12:
M. V. Agrippa, engineer
62:
Caesar praetor; misconduct of Clodius
B.C.
61:
Caesar gov. of Further Spain; return and triumph of Pompey
60:
First Triumvirate: Caesar, Crassus, Pompey
60-54:
Poems of Catullus; Cornelius Nepos
59:
Caesar consul; Lucretius’ De rerum natura
58:
Clodius, tribune, exiles Cicero; Caesar defeats Helvetii and Ariovistus in Gaul
57:
Return of Cicero; Caesar defeats Belgae
56:
Meeting of triumvirs at Luca
55:
Pompey and Crassus consuls; theater of Pompey; Caesar in Germany and Britain
54:
Caesar’s second invasion of Britain
53:
Violence of Clodius and Milo in Rome; defeat of Crassus at Carrhae
52:
Murder of Clodius; trial of Milo; Pompey sole consul; revolt of Vercingetorix
51:
Cicero governor of Cilicia; Cicero’s De re publica; Caesar’s De bello Gallico
49:
Caesar crosses Rubicon and takes Rome
48:
Battles of Dyrrachium and Pharsalus
48-47:
Caesar in Egypt and Syria; Vitruvius, architect; Columella, botanist
47:
Caesar’s victories at Zela and Thapsus; suicide of Cato the Younger
46:
Caesar appointed dictator for ten years; revision of calendar; Sallust, historian; Cicero Pro Marcello
45:
Caesar defeats the Pompeians in Spain; Cicero’s Academica and De finibus
44:
Assassination of Caesar; Cicero’s Disputationes Tusculanae, De natura deorum, De officiis
43:
Second Triumvirate: Antony, Octavian, Lepidus; murder of Cicero
42:
Brutus and Cassius die at Philippi
41:
Antony and Cleopatra at Tarsus
40:
Reconciliation of Antony and Octavian at Brundisium; Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue
36:
Antony invades Parthia
32:
Antony marries Cleopatra
31:
Octavian defeats Antony at Actium
30:
Suicide of Antony and Cleopatra; Egypt annexed to the Empire; Octavian sole ruler of Rome
CHAPTER VI
The Agrarian Revolt
145-78 B.C.
I. THE BACKGROUND OF REVOLUTION
THE causes of revolution were many, the results were endless, the personalities thrown up by the crisis, from the Gracchi to Augustus, were among the most powerful in history. Ne
ver before, and never again till our own time, were such stakes fought for, never was the world drama more intense. The first cause was the influx of slave-grown corn from Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and Africa, which ruined many Italian farmers by reducing the price of domestic grains below the cost of production and marketing. Second, was the influx of slaves, displacing peasants in the countryside and free workers in the towns. Third, was the growth of large farms. A law of 220 forbade senators to take contracts or invest in commerce; flush with the spoils of war, they bought up extensive tracts of agricultural land. Conquered soil was sometimes sold in small plots to colonists, and eased urban strife; more of it was given to capitalists in part payment of their war loans to the state; most of it was bought or leased by senators or businessmen on terms fixed by the Senate. To compete with these latifundia the little man had to borrow money at rates that insured his inability to pay; slowly he sank into poverty or bankruptcy, tenancy or the slums. Finally, the peasant himself, after he had seen and looted the world as a soldier, had no taste or patience for the lonely labor and unadventurous chores of the farm; he preferred to join the turbulent proletariat of the city, watch without cost the exciting games of the amphitheater, receive cheap corn from the government, sell his vote to the highest bidder or promiser, and lose himself in the impoverished and indiscriminate mass.
Roman society, once a community of free farmers, now rested more and more upon external plunder and internal slavery. In the city all domestic service, many handicrafts, most trade, much banking, nearly all factory labor, and labor on public works, were performed by slaves, reducing the wages of free workers to a point where it was almost as profitable to be idle as to toil. On the latifundia slaves were preferred because they were not subject to military service, and their number could be maintained, generation after generation, as a by-product of their only pleasure or their master’s vice. All the Mediterranean region was raided to produce living machines for these industrialized farms; to the war prisoners led in after every victorious campaign were added the victims of pirates who captured slaves or freemen on or near the coasts of Asia, or of Roman officials whose organized man hunts impressed into bondage any provincial whom the local authorities did not dare protect.1 Every week slave dealers brought their human prey from Africa, Spain, Gaul, Germany, the Danube, Russia, Asia, and Greece to the ports of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It was not unusual for 10,000 slaves to be auctioned off at Delos in a single day. In 177, 40,000 Sardinians, in 167, 150,000 Epirotes, were captured by Roman armies and sold as slaves, in the latter case at approximately a dollar a head.2 In the city the lot of the slave was mitigated by humanizing contacts with his master and by hope of emancipation; but on the large farms no human relation interfered with exploitation. There the slave was no longer a member of the household, as in Greece or early Rome; he seldom saw his owner; and the rewards of the overseer depended upon squeezing every possible profit from the chattels entrusted to his lash. The wages of the slave on the great estates were as much food and clothing as would enable him to toil from sunrise to sunset every day—barring occasional holidays—until senility. If he complained or disobeyed, he worked with chains about his ankles and spent the night in an ergastulum—a subterranean dungeon that formed a part of nearly every latifundium. It was a wasteful as well as a brutal system, for it supported hardly a twentieth of the families that once had lived on the same acreage as freemen.
If we remember that at least half these slaves had once been free (for slaves seldom fought in the wars), we can surmise the bitterness of these broken lives, and must marvel at the rarity of their revolts. In 196 the rural slaves and free workers of Etruria rebelled; they were beaten down by Roman legions and, Livy tells us, “many were killed or taken prisoners; others were scourged and crucified.”3 In 185 a like uprising occurred in Apulia; 7000 slaves were captured and condemned to mines.4 In the mines of New Carthage alone 4000 Spaniards worked as slaves. In 139 the “First Servile War” broke out in Sicily. Four hundred slaves accepted the call of Eunus and massacred the free population in the town of Enna; slaves poured from the farms and private dungeons of Sicily and swelled the number of the rebels to 70,000. They occupied Agrigentum, defeated the forces of the Roman praetor, and held nearly all the island till 131, when a consular army penned them into Enna and starved them into surrender. Eunus was taken to Rome, dropped into an underground cell, and allowed to die of hunger and lice.5 In 133 lesser uprisings resulted in the execution of 150 slaves in Rome, 450 in Minturnae, 4000 in Sinuessa. In that year Tiberius Gracchus passed the agrarian law that opened the Roman Revolution.
II. TIBERIUS GRACCHUS
He was the son of the Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus who had earned the gratitude of Spain by his generous administration, had served twice as consul and once as censor, and had saved the brother and married the daughter of Scipio Africanus. Cornelia gave him twelve children, all but three of whom died in adolescence; and his own death left upon her the burden of rearing Tiberius and Caius and a daughter—also named Cornelia—who became the wife of Scipio Aemilianus. Both parents shared in the Hellenistic culture and sympathies of the Scipionic circle. Cornelia gathered about her a literary salon, and wrote letters of so pure and elegant a style that they were reckoned as a distinguished contribution to Latin literature. An Egyptian king, says Plutarch, offered her his hand and throne in her widowhood, but she refused; she preferred to remain the daughter of one Scipio, the mother-in-law of another, and the mother of the Gracchi.
Brought up in the atmosphere of statesmanship and philosophy, Tiberius and Caius Gracchus knew both the problems of Roman government and the speculations of Greek thought. They were particularly influenced by Blossius, a Greek philosopher from Cumae, who helped to inspire in them a passionate liberalism that underestimated the power of the conservatives in Rome. The brothers were almost equally ambitious, proud, sincere, eloquent beyond reason, and brave without stint. Caius tells how Tiberius had the agrarian tragedy borne in upon him when, passing through Etruria, he “noted the dearth of inhabitants, and observed that those who tilled the soil and tended the flocks were foreign slaves.”6 Knowing that at that time only property holders could serve in the army, Tiberius asked himself how Rome could preserve its leadership or independence if the sturdy peasants that had once filled its legions were displaced by desolate and alien bondsmen. How could Roman life and democracy ever be healthy with a city proletariat festering in poverty, instead of a proud yeomanry owning and tilling the land? A distribution of land among the poorer citizens seemed the obvious and necessary solution of three problems: rural slavery, urban congestion and corruption, and military decay.
Early in 133 Tiberius Gracchus, elected a tribune of the people, announced his intention to submit to the Tribal Assembly three proposals: (1) that no citizen should be permitted to hold more than 333—or, if he had two sons, 667—acres of land bought or rented from the state; (2) that all other public lands that had been sold or leased to private individuals should be returned to the state for the purchase or rental price plus an allowance for improvements made; and (3) that the returned lands should be divided into twenty-acre lots among poor citizens, on condition that they agree never to sell their allotment, and to pay an annual tax on it to the Treasury. It was not a Utopian scheme; it was merely an attempt to implement the Licinian laws passed in 367 B.C., which had never been repealed and never enforced. “The beasts of the field and the birds of the air,” said Tiberius to the poorer plebeians in one of the epochal orations in Roman history,
have their holes and their hiding places; but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy only the light and the air. Our generals urge their soldiers to fight for the graves and shrines of their ancestors. The appeal is idle and false. You cannot point to a paternal altar. You have no ancestral tomb. You fight and die to give wealth and luxury to others. You are called the masters of the world, but there is not a foot of ground that you can call your own.7
The Senate
denounced the proposals as confiscatory, charged Tiberius with seeking a dictatorship, and persuaded Octavius, another tribune, to prevent by his veto the submission of the bills to the Assembly. Gracchus thereupon moved that any tribune who acted contrary to the wishes of his constituents should be immediately deposed. The Assembly passed the measure, and Octavius was forcibly removed from the tribune’s bench by the lictors of Tiberius. The original proposals were then voted into law; and the Assembly, fearing for Gracchus’ safety, escorted him home.8
