The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  His illegal overruling of the tribunician veto, which the Assembly itself had long ago made absolute, gave his opponents a handle with which to frustrate him. They declared their purpose to impeach him at the end of his one-year term, as having violated the constitution and used force against a tribune. To protect himself he flouted the constitution further by seeking re-election to the tribunate for 132. As Aemilianus and Laelius and other senators who had defended his proposals now withdrew their support, he turned more completely to the plebs. He promised, if re-elected, to shorten the term of military service, to abolish the exclusive right of senators to act as jurors, and to admit the Italian allies to Roman citizenship. Meanwhile the Senate refused funds to the agrarian commission that had been appointed to execute Tiberius’ laws. When Attalus III of Pergamum bequeathed his kingdom to Rome (133), Gracchus proposed to the Assembly that the personal and movable property of Attalus should be sold and the proceeds distributed to the recipients of state lands to finance the equipment of their farms. The proposal infuriated the Senate, which saw its authority over the provinces and the public purse being transferred to an unmanageable and unrepresentative Assembly largely of servile origin and alien stock. When election day came, Gracchus appeared in the Forum with armed guards and in mourning costume, implying that his defeat would mean his impeachment and death. As the voting proceeded, violence broke out on both sides. Scipio Nasica, crying that Tiberius wished to make himself king, led the senators, armed with clubs, into the Forum. The supporters of Gracchus, awed by patrician robes, gave way; Tiberius was killed by a blow on the head, and several hundred of his followers perished with him. When his younger brother Caius asked permission to bury him he was refused, and the bodies of the dead rebels were thrown into the Tiber, while Cornelia mourned.

  The Senate sought to mollify the bitter plebs by consenting to the enforcement of the Gracchan laws. An increase of 76,000 in the register of citizens from 131 to 125 suggests that a large number of land allotments was actually made. But the agrarian commission found itself faced by many difficulties. Much of the land in question had been obtained from the state years or generations back and its present possessors claimed rights established and sanctified by time. Many parcels had been bought by new owners, for a substantial price, from those who had bought them cheaply from the government. The landowners in Italian allied states, whose squatter rights were imperiled by the laws, appealed to Scipio Aemilianus to defend them against the land board; and through his influence its operations were suspended. Public opinion flamed out against him; he was denounced as a traitor to the already sacred memory of Gracchus; and one morning in 129 he was discovered dead in his bed, apparently the victim of an assassin, who was never found.

  III. CAIUS GRACCHUS

  Ruthless gossip accused Cornelia of conspiring with her daughter, Scipio’s deformed and unloved wife, to murder him. In the face of these calamities she sought consolation by devoting herself to her surviving son, the last of her “jewels.” The murder of Tiberius aroused in Caius no mere spirit of vengeance, but a resolve to complete his brother’s work. He had served with intelligence and courage under Aemilianus at Numantia, and he had won the admiration of all groups by the integrity of his conduct and the simplicity of his life. His passionate temperament, all the more vehement on occasion because so long controlled, made him the greatest of Roman orators before Cicero, and opened almost any office to him in a society where eloquence served only next to bravery in the advancement of men. In the fall of 124 he was elected tribune.

  More realistic than Tiberius, Caius understood that no reform can endure which is opposed by the balance of economical or political power in the state. He aimed to bring four classes to his support: the peasantry, the army, the proletariat, and the businessmen. He won the first by renewing the agrarian legislation of his brother, extending its application to state-owned land in the provinces, restoring the land board, and personally attending to its operations. He fed the ambitions of the middle classes by establishing new colonies in Capua, Tarentum, Narbo, and Carthage, and by developing these as thriving centers of trade. He pleased the soldiers by passing a bill that they should be clothed at the public expense. He gained the gratitude of the urban masses by his lex frumentaria, or corn law, which committed the government to distribute wheat at six and one third asses per modius (thirty-nine cents a peck—half the market price) to all who asked for it. It was a measure shocking to old Roman ideas of self-reliance, and destined to play a vital role in Roman history. Caius believed that the grain dealers were charging the public twice the cost of production, and that his measure, through the economy of unified operation, would involve no loss to the state. In any case, the law turned the poor freemen of Rome from client supporters of the aristocracy into defenders of the Gracchi, as later of Marius and Caesar; it was the foundation stone of that democratic movement which would reach its peak in Clodius, and die at Actium.

  Caius’ fifth measure sought to assure the power of his party by ending the tradition whereby the richer classes in the Centurial Assembly voted first; hereafter the centuries were on each occasion to vote in an order determined by lot. He appeased the business class by giving them the exclusive right to serve as jurors in trials for provincial malfeasance, i.e., they were hereafter to be in large measure their own judges. He whetted their appetites by proposing a tax of one tenth, to be collected by them, on all the produce of Asia Minor. He enriched contractors, and reduced unemployment, by a program of road building in every part of Italy. Altogether these laws, despite the political trickery that colored some of them, formed the most constructive body of legislation offered to Rome before Caesar.

  Armed with such varied support, Caius was able to override custom and win election to a second and successive tribunate. Probably it was now that he sought to “pack” the Senate by adding to its 300 members 300 more to be chosen from the business class by the Assembly. He proposed also to extend the full franchise to all the freemen of Latium, and a partial franchise to the remaining freemen of Italy. This, his boldest move toward a broader democracy, was his first strategic error. The voters showed no enthusiasm for sharing their privileges, even with men of whom only a small minority could have attended their assemblies in Rome. The Senate acted on its opportunity. Almost ignored by Caius, and reduced to apparent impotence, it saw in the brilliant tribune only a demagogic tyrant extending his personal power through the reckless distribution of state property and funds. Suddenly finding an ally in the jealous proletariat of Rome, and taking advantage of Caius’ absence in establishing his colony at Carthage, the Senatorial party suggested to another tribune, Marcus Livius Drusus, that he should win over the new peasantry by a bill canceling the tax laid upon their lands in the Gracchan laws; and that he should at once please and weaken the proletariat by proposing the formation of twelve new colonies in Italy, each to take 3000 men from Rome. The Assembly readily passed the bills; and when Caius returned he found his leadership challenged at every step by the popular Drusus. He sought a third term as tribune but was defeated; his friends charged that he had been elected but that the ballots had been falsified. He counseled his followers against violence and retired to private life.

  In the following year the Senate proposed the abandonment of the colony at Carthage; all sides interpreted the measure, openly or privately, as the first move in a campaign to repeal the Gracchan laws. Some of Caius’ adherents attended the Assembly armed, and one of them cut down a conservative who threatened to lay hands upon Caius. On the morrow the senators appeared in full battle array, each with two armed slaves, and attacked the popular party entrenched on the Aventine. Caius did his best to quiet the tumult and avert further violence. Failing, he fled across the Tiber; overtaken, he ordered his servant to kill him; the slave obeyed and then killed himself. A friend cut off Caius’ head, filled it with molten lead, and brought it to the Senate, which had offered a reward of its weight in gold.9 Of Caius’ supporters 250 fell in the fight,
3000 more were put to death by Senatorial decree. The city mob that he had befriended made no protest when his corpse, and those of his followers, were flung into the river; it was busy plundering his house.10 The Senate forbade Cornelia to wear mourning for her son.

  IV. MARIUS

  The triumphant aristocracy devoted its subtlest intelligence to undoing the constructive, rather than the demagogic, elements in Caius’ legislation. It did not dare eject the business class from the juries, or the contractors and publicans from their happy hunting ground in Asia; and it allowed the corn dole to stand as insurance against revolution. Into an otherwise attractive measure it inserted a clause permitting the recipients of the new lands to sell them; soon thousands of holders sold to the great slaveowners, and the latifundia resumed their growth. In 118 the land board was abolished. The masses in the capital raised no objection; they had decided that to eat state corn in the city was better than to sweat on the land or toil in pioneer colonies. Sloth combined with superstition (for the soil of Carthage had been cursed) to frustrate till Caesar the attempt to mitigate urban poverty by emigration. Wealth mounted, but it did not spread; in 104 B.C.. a moderate democrat reckoned that only 2000 Roman citizens owned property.11 “The condition of the poor,” says Appian, “became even worse than before. . . . The plebeians lost everything. . . . The number of citizens and soldiers continued to decline.”12 More and more the legions had to be filled out with conscripts from the Italian states; but these men had no stomach for fighting or no love for Rome. Desertions multiplied, discipline deteriorated, and the defense of the Republic sank to its lowest ebb.

  Consequently it was soon attacked, almost at the same time, on north and south. In 113 two Germanic tribes, the Cimbri and the Teutones, as if to give Rome a foretaste of its final fate, rolled down through Germany in a frightening avalanche of covered wagons—300,000 fighting men, with their wives, children, and animals. Perhaps the word had gone up over the Alps that Rome was in love with wealth and weary of war. The newcomers were tall and strong and fearless, so blond that the Italians described the children as having the white hair of old men. They met a Roman army at Noreia (now Neumarkt, in Carinthia) and destroyed it. They crossed the Rhine and defeated another Roman army; they poured west into southern Gaul and overcame a third, fourth, and fifth Roman army; at Arausio (Orange) 80,000 legionnaires and 40,000 camp followers were left dead on the field.13 All Italy lay open to the invaders; and a terror rose in Rome such as it had not known since Hannibal.

  Almost at the same time war broke out in Numidia. When Jugurtha, grandson of Masinissa, tortured his brother to death, and tried to deprive his cousins of their share in the kingdom, the Senate declared war upon him (III), with a view to making Numidia a province and opening it to Roman commerce and capital. Jugurtha bought patricians to defend his cause and crimes before the Senate, and bribed the generals sent against him into harmless activities or a favorable peace. Summoned to Rome, he opened his royal purse more lavishly, and was able to return unhindered to his capital.14

  Only one officer emerged from these campaigns with credit. Gaius Marius, born like Cicero at Arpinum, son of a day laborer, had enlisted in the army at an early age, had won his scars at Numantia, had married an aunt of Caesar, and despite, or because of, his lack of education or manners, had been chosen a tribune of the plebs. In the fall of 108 he returned from his services as lieutenant to the incompetent Quintus Metellus in Africa, and ran for the consulate on a platform proposing that he should replace Metellus and bring the Jugurthine War to a successful end. He was elected, took command, and forced Jugurtha’s surrender (106). The people did not learn at this time that the chief agent of this victory was a reckless young aristocrat, Lucius Sulla; they would hear from him later. Marius enjoyed a splendid triumph, and was so loved that the Assembly, ignoring a dying constitution, elected him consul year after year (104-100). The business classes supported him partly because his victories opened new fields for their enterprises, partly because he was clearly the only man who could repel the Celtic hordes. Rome already recognized in Caesar’s uncle the uses of Caesarism; the dictatorship of a popular leader backed by a devoted army seemed to many weary Romans the only alternative to the oligarchic abuses of liberty.

  After their victory at Arausio, the Cimbri had reprieved Rome by crossing the Pyrenees and ravaging Spain. But in 102 they returned to Gaul, greater in number than before, and entered into an agreement with the Teutones for a simultaneous assault by separate routes upon the rich plains of northern Italy. To meet the peril Marius resorted to a new form of military enrollment, which revolutionized first the army and then the state. He invited the enlistment of any citizen, property owner or not; offered attractive pay, and promised to release volunteers, and give them lands, after a completed campaign. The army now formed was composed chiefly of the city proletariat; its sentiments were hostile to the patrician Republic; it fought not for its country, but for its general and for booty; in this way, probably without knowing it, Marius laid the military basis of the Caesarian revolution. He was a soldier, not a statesman; he had no time to weigh distant political consequences. He led his recruits over the Alps, hardened their bodies with marches and drills, and developed their courage with attacks upon objectives that could be easily won; until they were trained he could not risk an engagement. The Teutones marched unhindered by his camp, asking the Romans derisively if they had messages for their wives in Rome, with whom the invaders proposed soon to refresh themselves; the number of the Teutones could be judged from the six days they took to pass the Roman camp. When they had all filed by, Marius ordered his army to fall upon their rear. In the great battle that ensued at Aquae Sextiae (Aix in Provence), the new legions slew or captured 100,000 men (102). “They say,” Plutarch reports, “that the inhabitants of Marseilles made fences round their vineyards with the bones, and that the soil, after the bodies had rotted and the winter rains had fallen, was so fertilized with the putrefied matter which sank into it, that in the following season it yielded an unprecedented crop.”15 After resting his army for several months, Marius led it back into Italy, and met the Cimbri at Vercellae, near the Po (101), on the very field where Hannibal had won his first battle against Rome. The barbarians, to show their strength and courage, went naked in the snow, climbed over ice and through deep drifts to summits from which they tobogganed gaily along steep descents, using their shields as sleds.16 In the battle that followed they were nearly all slain.

  Marius was received in the rejoicing capital as a “second Camillus” who had turned back a Celtic invasion, and another Romulus who had refounded Rome. Part of the spoils he brought was bestowed upon him as a personal reward; thereby he became a rich man, with estates big “enough for a kingdom.” In 100 he was elected consul for the sixth time. The tribune was Lucius Saturninus, a fiery radical who was resolved to achieve the goals of the Gracchi by law if possible, otherwise by force. He pleased Marius with a bill that bestowed colonial lands upon the veterans of the recent campaign, and Marius raised no objection when he lowered the price of state-doled corn from six and one third asses (thirty-nine cents) to five sixths of an as (five cents) per modius, or peck. The Senate sought to protect the Treasury and itself by having a tribune forbid the submission of these measures to a vote, but Saturninus proceeded with the voting nevertheless. Violence flared up on both sides. When Saturninus’ bands killed Caius Memmius, one of the most respected of the aristocracy, the Senate took its final resort and, by a senatusconsultum de re publica defendenda, ordered Marius, as consul, to suppress the revolt.

  Marius faced the bitterest choice of his life. It seemed a miserable end to his long career of service to the common people of Rome that he should now attack their leaders and his former friends. And yet he too distrusted the appeal to violence, and saw in revolution more ills than it could cure. He led a force against the rebels, let Saturninus be stoned to death, and then fled to a gloomy retirement, despised alike by the people he had championed and
the aristocracy he had saved.

  V. THE REVOLT OF ITALY

  The revolution was now passing into civil war. When the Senate asked for help against the Cimbri from the eastern kings allied with Rome, Nicomedes of Bithynia replied that all men of military value in his kingdom had been sold into slavery to satisfy the extortions of the Roman tax collectors. Preferring an army for the moment, the Senate decreed that all males enslaved for unpaid taxes should be freed. Hearing of this order, hundreds of slaves in Sicily, many of them Greeks from the Hellenistic East, left their masters and, gathering before the palace of the Roman praetor, demanded their freedom. Their owners protested, and the praetor suspended the operation of the decree. The slaves organized themselves under a religious impostor, Salvius, and attacked the town of Morgantia. The citizens there secured the loyalty of most of their slaves by promising to liberate them if they repelled the attack; they repelled it, but were not freed; and many of them joined the revolt. About the same time (103), some 6000 slaves in the western end of the island rose under Athenion, a man of education and resolution. This force defeated army after army sent against it by the praetor, and moving eastward, merged with the rebels under Salvius. Together they mastered an army dispatched from Italy, but Salvius died in the moment of victory. Still other legions crossed the straits, under the consul Manius Aquilius (101); Athenion engaged him in single combat and was killed; the leaderless slaves were overwhelmed; thousands of them died in the field, thousands were returned to their masters, hundreds were shipped to Rome to fight wild beasts in the games that celebrated Aquilius’ triumph. Instead of fighting, the slaves plunged their knives into one another’s hearts until all lay dead.