Using elected office, Gracchus disregarded constitutional niceties in order to bypass the opposition. Amid riotous scenes he pushed through a law, which did indeed institute a process of land reform. Contrary to custom, he then tried to get himself re-elected right away to the same office, which would protect him from his enemies’ attempts to prosecute him for activity hostile to the state.
Just how divisive his politics were for his fellow aristocrats, landowners themselves, was revealed by what happened next. His own first cousin led a mob of like-minded senators and their retainers onto Rome’s streets in search of Gracchus. He ended up being massacred in his civilian clothes by blows from sticks and stones, along with more than three hundred others. By going against the political values of the senatorial mainstream, Gracchus had undermined a long-standing consensus among republican Rome’s ruling stratum. As the Greek writer Plutarch wrote around AD 100, ‘This is said to have been the first sedition at Rome, since the abolition of royal power, to end in bloodshed and the death of citizens.’
This Gracchus had an admiring brother, Gaius, nine years his junior, fired up with the same reformer’s zeal. Ten year later, in 123 BC, Gaius had himself elected to the same office of tribune of the people as a power base for continuing his brother’s agenda. Unlike his brother, Gaius was a formidable orator, well aware that speech-making was a form of theatre. He was the first Roman, we are told, to use that stock ploy of the lively university lecturer – moving about on the speaker’s platform, radiating energy and vigour. Later generations of Romans remembered sound bites from his speeches, including, ‘That which is necessary for keeping alive is not luxury . . .’ This may have been his defence of a new concept which disturbed conservative aristocrats. He set up a monthly dole of grain to adult citizens living in Rome at a subsidised price. Scorned by traditionalists, the move was popular with the landless city proletariat for obvious reasons; they were the most vulnerable to price hikes prompted by a crisis in supply.
Gaius was a serious politician who delivered on his commitments:
He busied himself most earnestly with the construction of roads, laying stress upon utility, as well as upon that which conduced to grace and beauty. For his roads were carried straight through the country without deviation, and had pavements of quarried stone, and substructures of tight-rammed masses of sand. Depressions were filled up, all intersecting torrents or ravines were bridged over, and both sides of the roads were of equal and corresponding height, so that the work had everywhere an even and beautiful appearance.
This investment in Italy’s infrastructure supported the programme of land redistribution to impoverished farmers which his brother had begun and Gaius continued. The Roman businessmen who bid for the road-building contracts also benefited. They belonged to the oligarchically inclined, but ostensibly non-political, stratum of the knights.
Gracchus also turned to this stratum when he sought to rein in senatorial magistrates who abused their power by laying avaricious hands on the property of Roman subjects. This was an increasing problem as Rome’s domination of the Mediterranean advanced, mainly because ancient societies did not view what we call corruption with anything like the same disapproval. The fair-minded Gracchus had other ideas. Gracchus now transferred from the senators to the knights the duty of serving as jurors in the court that heard provincial petitioners seeking redress for extortion by Roman magistrates.
Intentionally or not, this last reform handed the knights a potent weapon in conflicts with senatorial magistrates arising from the execution of public contracts. Gracchus himself fuelled this danger when he took the momentous step of giving knights the chance to bid for lucrative contracts to collect taxes from provincials. Rome at this time was still essentially a city-state with a rudimentary officialdom at best. Outsourcing saved the republic from having to set up its own bureaucracy for tax-collecting. Inadvertently or not, Gracchus had lit a fuse. In a matter of years, not decades, the knights emerged as a new force in Roman politics, sometimes allies, sometimes opponents of the conservative senators.
Gaius Gracchus is such an interesting figure because he really might have been acting on principle rather than from partisan politics (that is, acting merely to spite his brother’s murderers). Whatever the case, his laws, like his brother’s, divided the aristocrats into opposing camps. When a hostile consul started to have them annulled, Gaius gathered armed supporters. Licensed by an emergency decree of the Senate, the consul announced that he would pay in gold the weight of Gaius’s head. The story went that a friend of the consul brought it on the tip of a spear – but not before he had scooped out the brain and replaced it with molten lead.
The Gracchi brothers were not alone in letting political cats out of the bag. A generation after Tiberius Gracchus, one of the consuls of 107 BC tried another approach to Roman worries about army recruitment. Rather than relying on the annual levy of propertied conscripts, Gaius Marius enlisted volunteers from the poorest citizens. The ruling stratum traditionally saw the poor as unqualified for army service. To its way of thinking, men of property made the best defenders of the state, just as their politics were more ‘reliable’.
The poor Romans who now enlisted seem to have included many of the dispossessed country-dwellers, descendants of earlier peasant soldiers, whose plight the Gracchi had tried to remedy. For these people, this chance to volunteer for a military livelihood in an era of seemingly never-ending Roman expansion offered a solution to their economic distress. The Roman army now moved definitively towards becoming a force of professional soldiers fighting for material reward. In due course, after a long service, these men would look to their general for the final gift of a secure retirement.
The Italian town of Palestrina, an hour’s bus ride east of Rome, is located on a mountain spur and commands a sensational westward view of the country surrounding Rome. This is ancient Praeneste, a city of the Latini people. It sits on top of an ancient sanctuary, one so massive that the imprint of its ruins remains a striking feature of the modern town.
The unknown ancient architect obviously laid out this theatrical confection of seven levels of man-made terraces, ramps and colonnades to impress from afar. To anyone who has visited the Hellenistic shrine of Asclepius on the Greek island of Kos, likewise terraced into a hillside with monumental staircases and vast open courts, the visual effect is similar – as if the former were aware of the latter. In fact this is not unlikely. In the later second century BC, when this sanctuary of the goddess Fortuna was laid out, the distinctive names of leading families at Praeneste also turn up in the Greek world, among the Italian businessmen known from the inscriptions of Delos.
The cultural swerve eastwards of this Latin town in the second century BC is on show too in Palestrina’s archaeological museum. The star exhibit is a mosaic pavement of superb workmanship. It depicts an exotic scene from Egypt, the teeming life of the River Nile, set in the time of the later Ptolemies. Evidently the top families of Praeneste had grown rich as Italian middlemen linking up Mediterranean commerce to the new spending power of the Romans. When they spent their wealth on civic monuments back home, they looked to Hellenistic Greek styles to express a proud local identity no longer rooted in the traditions of central Italy alone.
This independent spirit among the towns of central Italy took an explosive turn in 91 BC:
One hundred and twenty years ago, in the consulship of Lucius Caesar and Publius Rutilius, all Italy took up arms against the Romans . . . The fortune of the Italians was as cruel as their cause was just; for they were seeking citizenship in the state whose power they were defending by their arms; every year and in every war they were furnishing a double number of men, both of cavalry and of infantry, and yet were not admitted to the rights of citizens in the state which, through their efforts, had reached so high a position that it could look down upon men of the same race and blood as foreigners and aliens. This war carried off more than three hundred thousand of the youth of Italy.
; These are the words of a later Roman history-writer, a descendant of a prominent Italian who remained conspicuously loyal to Rome in this struggle. As for the rebels, they set up their own mint and used the designs on coins to express their feelings about Rome. On a typical specimen in the British Museum, a powerful Italian bull tramples a helpless Roman wolf, its snout raised in a howl of pain.
This ancient figure for the casualties of the war may not be precise, but it preserves a later memory of massive conflict. The previously reluctant Romans belatedly defused the struggle by passing two laws in 90 and 89 BC which finally opened Roman citizenship to the Italians. Even if parts of the insurgency aspired to complete independence from Rome, one Italian stratum interested less in trampling the wolf than in running with it was represented precisely by the ancestor of this history-writer: ‘The Romans abundantly repaid his loyal zeal by a special grant of the citizenship to himself, and by making his sons praetors at a time when the number elected was still confined to six.’
If the upper classes of the Italian towns had been willing to go to war, it was because plenty of them chafed to play an active part in Roman political life as senators and magistrates, like these two praetors. As for the Romans, perhaps it is not so hard to understand why apprehension had got the better of them, despite their self-image as a society open to deserving newcomers. There is no exact figure for the number of eligible Italians, but it could have run into the hundreds of thousands.
Roman aristocrats worried about all these new citizens interfering with their long-standing manipulation of the popular vote. To quote the rhetoric of an early twenty-first-century British prime minister on the subject of migrants, a more primal fear of being ‘swamped’ was also there, to judge from the Roman politician who warned about the dangers of Romans losing their seats to new citizens at the games.
A professional soldiery motivated by rewards now gave a new twist to the traditional contest for military glory among the generals of the governing class. On campaign in Africa, the same Gaius Marius had claimed the credit for the surrender of an enemy leader captured by a junior officer at great personal risk. Marius went on to be one of Rome’s most successful generals. Years later, the junior officer, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, now a famed general himself, had just helped to put down the revolt of the Italian allies, winning himself a consulship (88 BC). The Senate awarded the consul a major military command against a new enemy in the east.
Then Sulla’s old rival Marius, despite advancing years, manoeuvred successfully to have it transferred to himself. The army awaiting its commander south of Rome was the same force that Sulla had lately led against the Italian rebels. He had already won their goodwill by promising them rewards. Reaching the camp first, he now had no difficulty persuading these six legions to march on Rome. His men fought their way into the city using indiscriminate violence. In their proximity, the senators sentenced Marius and his allies to death.
Sulla now disembarked with his army to confront yet another ambitious king in the Hellenistic mould. Mithradates was the scion of a royal lineage of Persian extraction based in modern-day northern Turkey. He aimed to enlarge his domain by appealing to Greeks and non-Greeks alike as their would-be leader in armed resistance to the mounting dominance of Rome. Sulla’s fight-back began in Greece.
In 1990 a group of American archaeologists made an unexpected discovery on a hilltop overlooking the plain of Chaeronea, where Philip had defeated the Greeks in 338 BC. In a pile of rubble they found an ancient block with this Greek inscription: ‘Homoloïchos and Anaxidamos the heroes.’ The Greek writer Plutarch, a local man, records these same two heroes as fellow citizens of Chaeronea who in 86 BC led Greek allies of Rome up the hill to dislodge a contingent of men from the forces of Mithradates. This done, Sulla and his men went on to win a resounding victory on the plain below. Plutarch records the victory trophy which Sulla erected on the hill, inscribed with exactly this inscription ‘in Greek letters’. In studied contrast to his rival Marius, Sulla was at pains to recognize and reward his military helpers.
After ejecting the forces of Mithradates from Greece, Sulla made peace with him. He then returned to Italy, where his political enemies controlled Rome. Sulla avoided disbanding his army, making him in effect an invader. Once again he marched on the capital, where he obtained from the senators, who included many of his supporters, the ancient post of dictator, a kind of emergency leadership used in the past for military crises.
Sulla was in favour of returning stability by shoring up the fragile dominance of conservative aristocrats like the noble clan into which he had married, the Metelli. These ‘best men’, as they called themselves, in effect were now counter-revolutionaries of varying shades. They wanted back the traditional system of city-state politics that had guaranteed the dominance of their class in the past.
Sulla sought to give them what they wanted by a reign of terror. Anticipating the political purges of more modern times, he had a list published of outlawed citizens, hundreds of whom became fair game for death-squads. While this was happening, he passed reactionary legislation targeting loopholes in the old constitution. The Gracchi had passed their reforms by using their powers as tribunes of the people. Sulla now sought to make the office unattractive to populist aristocrats by severely curtailing its powers.
Sulla did not forget his men. Wandering through the ruined streets of Pompeii the visitor soon notices the ancient graffiti. The author of one of them even joked about the habit: ‘I’m amazed, O wall, that you have not fallen in ruins, you who support the tediousness of so many writers.’ Their language is Latin. This is not such an obvious point as you might think. The original inhabitants of Pompeii were Italian allies of Rome who spoke and wrote their own Italic dialect, so-called Oscan. In 80 BC the ruthless Sulla punished the Pompeiians for their part in the allied rebellion by settling maybe two or three thousand of his army veterans here, with a plot of land for each in the fertile territory – a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The old inhabitants were downgraded in status and the new upper class of Latin-speaking Roman citizen-colonists made theirs the town’s official language. An ancient writer says that Sulla was faced with veterans from as many as twenty legions to settle on Italian farmland – approaching 100,000 men, if true. The sheer scale of the disruption to existing patterns of landholding in many parts of Italy can only be imagined.
After Sulla, Romans continued to live through troubled times. Roman wars outside Italy, and the political need to identify competent generals to win them, meant that Sulla’s methods remained available to members of the governing class with ambitions beyond the scope of the traditional politics which – paradoxically – Sulla had worked to restore. Only eight years after his death, the consuls themselves (70 BC) passed legislation restoring the full powers of the tribunes of the people. These powers, as the Gracchi had first shown, were a potent weapon for politicians who sought to appeal to the people over the heads of the conservative aristocrats.
One of these consuls, Gnaeus Pompeius, better known as Pompey, already a successful general, went on to obtain commands and win wars in the seventies and sixties which conferred on him exceptional personal prestige, or auctoritas (‘authority’) in Roman parlance. One of these commands tackled the unfinished business of Mithradates, still at large. Pompey forced the king to take refuge on the other side of the Black Sea, in the Crimea. Pompey then marched his devoted army into Syria, where he deposed the last Seleucid king and turned the remnant of this once great empire into a Roman province, Syria. People in this part of the Mediterranean world were put in mind of an earlier conqueror from the west, as was Pompey himself.
In Copenhagen’s superbly housed collection of antiquities, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, you can contemplate what must be one of the most peculiar products of Roman portraiture. By today’s standards this fine marble head of a jowly male in early middle age with thin lips and furrowed brow does not demand admiration for its subject’s good looks. The enviably full head of
hair is another matter, not least the artfully rendered quiff of lustrous locks.
The subject is Pompey, of whom his ancient biographer, Plutarch, wrote:
His hair was inclined to lift itself slightly from his forehead, and this, with a graceful contour of face about the eyes, produced a resemblance, more talked about than actually apparent, to the portrait statues of King Alexander. Wherefore, since many also applied the name to him in his earlier years, Pompey did not decline it.
Pompey liked the comparison. He was certainly a warlord, in the sense that his military successes had given him an individual autonomy within a weak state. But he did not want the kingly position to which warlords in history sometimes aspire. A rival warlord, however, had different ideas.
Gaius Julius Caesar, the elder of the two men, came from the hard-up lesser branch of an old patrician family. Like Pompey when it suited him, he used populist methods to obtain personal advancement. To this end, the two men for a while were political allies, sealing the deal by intermarriage, like a pair of Hellenistic kings. Conservative aristocrats sought to obstruct this alliance. The religious scrupulosity of Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, Caesar’s colleague in the consulship of 59 BC, comes in here.
Using a tribune of the people to push through the legislation, Caesar now got what he wanted, the opportunity for military glory in the west on a scale to match Pompey’s in the east.
All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in ours Gauls, the third. All these differ from each other in language, customs and laws.
These are the opening words of one of the set books when I sat the pre-university Latin exam at school in England. Exam setters like the plain style of the Latin, which pitches the difficulty at about the right level. The author is Caesar. Using the third person to depersonalize his writing, he gave here his version of his achievements during this Gallic command.
The Story of Greece and Rome Page 28
