Monarchical Government Substituted for That of the Senate
With his weapons - the proletariate and the mercantile class - thus prepared, Gracchus set about his main work, the overthrow of the ruling aristocracy. The overthrow of the senate meant, on the one hand, the depriving it of its essential functions by legislative alterations; and on the other hand, the ruining of the existing aristocracy by measures of a more personal and transient kind. Gracchus did both. The function of administration, in particular, had hitherto belonged exclusively to the senate; Gracchus took it away, partly by settling the most important administrative questions by means of comitial laws or, in other words, practically through tribunician dictation, partly by restricting the senate as much as possible in current affairs, partly by taking business after the most comprehensive fashion into his own hands. The measures of the former kind have been mentioned already: the new master of the state without consulting the senate dealt with the state-chest, by imposing a permanent and oppressive burden on the public finances in the distribution of corn; dealt with the domains, by sending out colonies not as hitherto by decree of the senate and people, but by decree of the people alone; and dealt with the provincial administration, by overturning through a law of the people the financial constitution given by the senate to the province of Asia and substituting for it one altogether different. One of the most important of the current duties of the senate - that of fixing at its pleasure the functions for the time being of the two consuls - was not withdrawn from it; but the indirect pressure hitherto exercised in this way over the supreme magistrates was limited by directing the senate to fix these functions before the consuls concerned were elected. With unrivalled activity, lastly, Gaius concentrated the most varied and most complicated functions of government in his own person. He himself watched over the distribution of grain, selected the jurymen, founded the colonies in person notwithstanding that his magistracy legally chained him to the city, regulated the highways and concluded building-contracts, led the discussions of the senate, settled the consular elections - in short, he accustomed the people to the fact that one man was foremost in all things, and threw the lax and lame administration of the senatorial college into the shade by the vigour and versatility of his personal rule. Gracchus interfered with the judicial omnipotence, still more energetically than with the administration, of the senate. We have already mentioned that he set aside the senators as jurymen; the same course was taken with the jurisdiction which the senate as the supreme administrative board allowed to itself in exceptional cases. Under severe penalties he prohibited - apparently in his renewal of the law de provocatione[24] - the appointment of extraordinary commissions of high treason by decree of the senate, such as that which after his brother's murder had sat in judgment on his adherents. The aggregate effect of these measures was, that the senate wholly lost the power of control, and retained only so much of administration as the head of the state thought fit to leave to it. But these constitutive measures were not enough; the governing aristocracy for the time being was also directly assailed. It was a mere act of revenge, which assigned retrospective effect to the last-mentioned law and thereby compelled Publius Popillius - the aristocrat who after the death of Nasica, which had occurred in the interval, was chiefly obnoxious to the democrats - to go into exile.
It is remarkable that this proposal was only carried by 18 to 17 votes in the assembly of the tribes - a sign how much the influence of the aristocracy still availed with the multitude, at least in questions of a personal interest. A similar but far less justifiable decree - the proposal, directed against Marcus Octavius, that whoever had been deprived of his office by decree of the people should be for ever incapable of filling a public post - was recalled by Gaius at the request of his mother; and he was thus spared the disgrace of openly mocking justice by legalizing a notorious violation of the constitution, and of taking base vengeance on a man of honour, who had not spoken an angry word against Tiberius and had only acted constitutionally and in accordance with what he conceived to be his duty. But of very different importance from these measures was the scheme of Gaius - which, it is true, was hardly carried into effect - to strengthen the senate by 300 new members, that is, by just about as many as it hitherto had contained, and to have them elected from the equestrian order by the comitia - a creation of peers after the most comprehensive style, which would have reduced the senate into the most complete dependence on the chief of the state.
Character of the Constitution of Gaius Gracchus
This was the political constitution which Gaius Gracchus projected and, in its most essential points, carried out during the two years of his tribunate (631, 632), without, so far as we can see, encountering any resistance worthy of mention, and without requiring to apply force for the attainment of his ends. The order of sequence in which these measures were carried can no longer be recognized in the confused accounts handed down to us, and various questions that suggest themselves have to remain unanswered. But it does not seem as if, in what is missing, many elements of material importance have escaped us; for as to the principal matters we have quite trustworthy information, and Gaius was by no means, like his brother, urged on further and further by the current of events, but evidently had a well-considered and comprehensive plan, the substance of which he fully embodied in a series of special laws. Now the Sempronian constitution itself shows very clearly to every one who is able and willing to see, that Gaius Gracchus did not at all, as many good-natured people in ancient and modern times have supposed, wish to place the Roman republic on new democratic bases, but that on the contrary he wished to abolish it and to introduce in its stead a tyrannis - that is, in modern language, a monarchy not of the feudal or of the theocratic, but of the Napoleonic absolute, type - in the form of a magistracy continued for life by regular re-election and rendered absolute by an unconditional control over the formally sovereign comitia, an unlimited tribuneship of the people for life. In fact if Gracchus, as his words and still more his works plainly testify, aimed at the overthrow of the government of the senate, what other political organization but the tyrannis remained possible, after overthrowing the aristocratic government, in a commonwealth which had outgrown primary assemblies and for which parliamentary government did not exist? Dreamers such as was his predecessor, and knaves such as after-times produced, might call this in question; but Gaius Gracchus was a statesman, and though the formal shape, which that great man had inwardly projected for his great work, has not been handed down to us and may be conceived of very variously, yet he was beyond doubt aware of what he was doing. Little as the intention of usurping monarchical power can be mistaken, as little will those who survey the whole circumstances on this account blame Gracchus.
An absolute monarchy is a great misfortune for a nation, but it is a less misfortune than an absolute oligarchy; and history cannot censure one who imposes on a nation the lesser suffering instead of the greater, least of all in the case of a nature so vehemently earnest and so far aloof from all that is vulgar as was that of Gaius Gracchus. Nevertheless it may not conceal the fact that his whole legislation was pervaded in a most pernicious way by conflicting aims; for on the one hand it aimed at the public good, while on the other hand it ministered to the personal objects and in fact the personal vengeance of the ruler. Gracchus earnestly laboured to find a remedy for social evils, and to check the spread of pauperism; yet he at the same time intentionally reared up a street proletariate of the worst kind in the capital by his distributions of corn, which were designed to be, and became, a premium to all the lazy and hungry civic rabble. Gracchus censured in the bitterest terms the venality of the senate, and in particular laid bare with unsparing and just severity the scandalous traffic which Manius Aquillius had driven with the provinces of Asia Minor[25]; yet it was through the efforts of the same man that the sovereign populace of the capital got itself alimented, in return for its cares of government, by the body of its subjects. Gracchus warmly disapproved the dis
graceful spoliation of the provinces, and not only instituted proceedings of wholesome severity in particular cases, but also procured the abolition of the thoroughly insufficient senatorial courts, before which even Scipio Aemilianus had vainly staked his whole influence to bring the most decided criminals to punishment. Yet he at the same time, by the introduction of courts composed of merchants, surrendered the provincials with their hands fettered to the party of material interests, and thereby to a despotism still more unscrupulous than that of the aristocracy had been; and he introduced into Asia a taxation, compared with which even the form of taxation current after the Carthaginian model in Sicily might be called mild and humane - just because on the one hand he needed the party of moneyed men, and on the other hand required new and comprehensive resources to meet his distributions of grain and the other burdens newly imposed on the finances. Gracchus beyond doubt desired a firm administration and a well-regulated dispensing of justice, as numerous thoroughly judicious ordinances testify; yet his new system of administration rested on a continuous series of individual usurpations only formally legalized, and he intentionally drew the judicial system - which every well-ordered state will endeavour as far as possible to place, if not above political parties, at any rate aloof from them - into the midst of the whirlpool of revolution. Certainly the blame of these conflicting tendencies in Gaius Gracchus is chargeable to a very great extent on his position rather than on himself personally. On the very threshold of the tyrannis he was confronted by the fatal dilemma, moral and political, that the same man had at one and the same time to maintain his ground, we may say, as a robber-chieftain and to lead the state as its first citizen - a dilemma to which Pericles, Caesar, and Napoleon had also to make dangerous sacrifices.
But the conduct of Gaius Gracchus cannot be wholly explained from this necessity; along with it there worked in him the consuming passion, the glowing revenge, which foreseeing its own destruction hurls the firebrand into the house of the foe. He has himself expressed what he thought of his ordinance as to the jurymen and similar measures intended to divide the aristocracy; he called them daggers which he had thrown into the Forum that the burgesses - the men of rank, obviously - might lacerate each other with them. He was a political incendiary. Not only was the hundred years' revolution which dates from him, so far as it was one man's work, the work of Gaius Gracchus, but he was above all the true founder of that terrible urban proletariate flattered and paid by the classes above it, which through its aggregation in the capital - the natural consequence of the largesses of corn - became at once utterly demoralized and aware of its power, and which - with its demands, sometimes stupid, sometimes knavish, and its talk of the sovereignty of the people - lay like an incubus for five hundred years upon the Roman commonwealth and only perished along with it And yet - this greatest of political transgressors was in turn the regenerator of his country. There is scarce a structural idea in Roman monarchy, which is not traceable to Gaius Gracchus. From him proceeded the maxim - founded doubtless in a certain sense in the nature of the old traditional laws of war, but yet, in the extension and practical application now given to it, foreign to the older state-law - that all the land of the subject communities was to be regarded as the private property of the state; a maxim, which was primarily employed to vindicate the right of the state to tax that land at pleasure, as was the case in Asia, or to apply it for the institution of colonies, as was done in Africa, and which became afterwards a fundamental principle of law under the empire. From him proceeded the tactics, whereby demagogues and tyrants, leaning for support on material interests, break down the governing Aristocracy, but subsequently legitimize the change of constitution by substituting a strict and efficient administration for the previous misgovernment. To him, in particular, are traceable the first steps towards such a reconciliation between Rome and the provinces as the establishment of monarchy could not but bring in its train; the attempt to rebuild Carthage destroyed by Italian rivalry and generally to open the way for Italian emigration towards the provinces, formed the first link in the long chain of that momentous and beneficial course of action. Right and wrong, fortune and misfortune were so inextricably blended in this singular man and in this marvellous political constellation, that it may well beseem history in this case - though it beseems her but seldom - to reserve her judgment.
The Question As to the Allies
When Gracchus had substantially completed the new constitution projected by him for the state, he applied himself to a second and more difficult work. The question as to the Italian allies was still undecided. What were the views of the democratic leaders regarding it, had been rendered sufficiently apparent[26]. They naturally desired the utmost possible extension of the Roman franchise, not merely that they might bring in the domains occupied by the Latins for distribution, but above all that they might strengthen their body of adherents by the enormous mass of the new burgesses, might bring the comitial machine still more fully under their power by widening the body of privileged electors, and generally might abolish a distinction which had now with the fall of the republican constitution lost all serious importance. But here they encountered resistance from their own party, and especially from that band which otherwise readily gave its sovereign assent to all which it did or did not understand.
For the simple reason that Roman citizenship seemed to these people, so to speak, like a partnership which gave them a claim to share in sundry very tangible profits, direct and indirect, they were not at all disposed to enlarge the number of the partners. The rejection of the Fulvian law in 629, and the insurrection of the Fregellans arising out of it, were significant indications both of the obstinate perseverance of the fraction of the burgesses that ruled the comitia, and of the impatient urgency of the allies. Towards the end of his second tribunate (632) Gracchus, probably urged by obligations which he had undertaken towards the allies, ventured on a second attempt. In concert with Marcus Flaccus - who, although a consular, had again taken the tribuneship of the people, in order now to carry the law which he had formerly proposed without success - he made a proposal to grant to the Latins the full franchise, and to the other Italian allies the former rights of the Latins. But the proposal encountered the united opposition of the senate and the mob of the capital.
The nature of this coalition and its mode of conflict are clearly and distinctly seen from an accidentally preserved fragment of the speech which the consul Gaius Fannius made to the burgesses in opposition to the proposal. "Do you then think", said the Optimate, "that, if you confer the franchise on the Latins, you will be able to find a place in future - just as you are now standing there in front of me - in the burgess-assembly, or at the games and popular amusements? Do you not believe, on the contrary, that those people will occupy every spot?" Among the burgesses of the fifth century, who on one day conferred the franchise on all the Sabines, such an orator might perhaps have been hissed; those of the seventh found his reasoning uncommonly clear and the price of the assignation of the Latin domains, which was offered to it by Gracchus, far too low. The very circumstance, that the senate carried a permission to eject from the city all non-burgesses before the day for the decisive vote, showed the fate in store for the proposal. And when before the voting Livius Drusus, a colleague of Gracchus, interposed his veto against the law, the people received the veto in such a way that Gracchus could not venture to proceed further or even to prepare for Drusus the fate of Marcus Octavius.
Overthrow of Gracchus
It was, apparently, this success which emboldened the senate to attempt the overthrow of the victorious demagogue. The weapons of attack were substantially the same with which Gracchus himself had formerly operated. The power of Gracchus rested on the mercantile class and the proletariate; primarily on the latter, which in this conflict, wherein neither side had any military reserve, acted as it were the part of an army. It was clear that the senate was not powerful enough to wrest either from the merchants or from the proletariate their new
privileges; any attempt to assail the corn-laws or the new jury-arrangement would have led, under a somewhat grosser or somewhat more civilized form, to a street-riot in presence of which the senate was utterly defenceless. But it was no less clear, that Gracchus himself and these merchants and proletarians were only kept together by mutual advantage, and that the men of material interests were ready to accept their posts, and the populace strictly so called its bread, quite as well from any other as from Gaius Gracchus.
The institutions of Gracchus stood, for the moment at least, immoveably firm with the exception of a single one - his own supremacy. The weakness of the latter lay in the fact, that in the constitution of Gracchus there was no relation of allegiance subsisting at all between the chief and the army; and, while the new constitution possessed all other elements of vitality, it lacked one - the moral tie between ruler and ruled, without which every state rests on a pedestal of clay. In the rejection of the proposal to admit the Latins to the franchise it had been demonstrated with decisive clearness that the multitude in fact never voted for Gracchus, but always simply for itself. The aristocracy conceived the plan of offering battle to the author of the corn-largesses and land-assignations on his own ground.
The history of Rome. Book IV Page 15
