The Rise of Rome

by Anthony Everitt

  A meeting of the Senate was also held that day in the tiny Temple of Fides, Good Faith, at the edge of the assembly-place. It was dominated by Tiberius’s enemies, in particular a cousin of his who was another of Africanus’s grandsons. This was Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica (“big nose”). A senior politician who had held all the great offices of state and was now pontifex maximus, or high priest, he had a high opinion of himself: at a noisy public meeting, he once said, “Be quiet, please, citizens. I know more about the public interest than you do.”

  Nasica tried to persuade the consul to call a state of emergency, but the consul declined to use force or kill a citizen without trial. Meanwhile, a fight started outside between supporters of the different sides. Confusion reigned. The tribunes deserted their places, priests closed the Temple of Jupiter, and many people ran wildly about trying to escape. In the noise, Tiberius signaled that he was in personal danger by pointing to his head. This was reported to the Senate, which decided that the gesture meant that he wanted a diadem (a white cloth headband signifying royal power) and was aspiring to be king.

  Throughout the history of the Republic, this ambition was the ultimate crime. Would-be tyrants deserved no mercy. Nasica seized his moment. “Since the Consul betrays the state, anyone who wants to save the constitution, follow me,” he declared. The pontifex maximus then pulled a fold of his toga over his head, as if he were about to conduct a sacrifice, and ran out of the temple followed by senators and their attendants.

  The Gracchans were startled by the sight of so distinguished a company rushing at them and lost their nerve. Nasica and his people snatched the makeshift weapons with which their opponents had armed themselves—sticks, rods, and the like—and broke up the benches that had been laid out for the meeting. They then chased the Gracchans over the precipitous edges of the Capitoline Square. Somebody grabbed at Tiberius’s clothes. He let his toga fall and ran off. With bitter symbolism, he was caught, this (allegedly) potential despot, beside a cluster of statues of Rome’s kings. An assailant hit him on the head with a bench leg; others piled in, and the sacrosanct tribune was beaten to death. He was not quite thirty years old. When the riot was over, all the corpses were thrown into the Tiber under the cover of darkness.

  The death of Tiberius was an earthquake that shook the pillars of the state. Reactions were contradictory. Tiberius’s cousin and the leading man of his day, the cultured Scipio Aemilianus, gave the deed his cautious approval. The Senate instructed the consuls for 132 to investigate and execute those who had conspired with Tiberius. However, Nasica was the object of popular fury and was challenged even in the Senate to justify his actions. His continued presence in Rome was an embarrassment. He was sent off on a foreign assignment and soon conveniently died in Pergamum.

  Tellingly, no one challenged the land-reform legislation, and the implementation commission got on with its work unhindered. It was Tiberius’s methods, not so much his policies, that had incensed Rome’s élite. Furthermore, repeal could well lead to dangerous public disturbances. Best to leave well enough alone.

  ONE DAY A Roman consul paid a visit to Teanum Sidicinum (modern Teano), an Oscan-speaking settlement on the borders of Samnium. His wife accompanied him, and said that she wanted to bathe in the men’s baths. (These seem to have been something of an attraction, and the remains of extensive baths can be seen by today’s visitors.) A certain Marcus Marius, the town treasurer, was instructed to send the bathers away so that she could have the place to herself. Later, she complained to her husband that the baths were not cleared quickly, and that they were not clean enough.

  The consul had a stake planted in the main square and Marius, Teanum’s leading citizen, was led to it. Then his clothes were stripped off and he was whipped with rods. When news of this reached a nearby municipality, its Assembly passed a law forbidding anyone to use the public baths when a Roman elected official was in town.

  Gaius Sempronius Gracchus told this story in a speech complaining of the outrageous behavior of senior Romans when traveling in Italy. It was not only officeholders who acted with criminal insolence. “I will give you a single example of the lawlessness of our young men, and their complete lack of self-control,” Gracchus said on another occasion. “Not many years ago a young man who had not yet held public office was sent as an envoy to the province of Asia. He was carried in a curtained litter. A herdsman from Venusia in southern Italy [presumably, the Roman was on his way to the port of Brundisium] met him and, not knowing who the passenger was, asked as a joke if the litter-bearers were carrying a dead body. The young man heard this. He ordered that the litter be set down and that the peasant be beaten to death with the leather thongs by which it was fastened.”

  Rome’s allied communities were seething with resentment. They not only complained of arrogance by roaming dignitaries; they felt that the historic concordat between them and their conqueror all those centuries ago was breaking down.

  The system of some one hundred and fifty bilateral treaties between Rome and each of them had worked well. As we have seen, they were obliged to supply troops on request to help fight Rome’s many wars. In return, allies were guaranteed security and a share of the very considerable spoils of victory. They also had the right to benefit from land assignations and to join or found coloniae.

  With the acquisition of a large overseas empire, the terms of advantage changed. The regular taxes paid by new provinces were monopolized by the Roman exchequer. Colonization dried up and, although Tiberius Gracchus recognized that Italians were as much in need of succor as Roman citizens, his reforms had meant a loss of ager publicus in their territories.

  Just as observant Romans recognized the case for land reform, they also saw that something would have to be done to quiet the allied communities and compensate them for their economic losses. One of these was Scipio Aemilianus, to whom allied landowners made representations. They objected to having a Roman commission interfere with their local property rights, and Scipio arranged for their cases to be considered by the consul; that official, however, knew what a thankless task he had been given and immediately went abroad to his province.

  Scipio had already caused offense by his opposition to Tiberius Gracchus, and his sympathy for the allies only compounded his unpopularity with the urban mob, which saw no reason to make concessions to “foreigners.” His political enemies claimed that he was set on undoing Tiberius’s agrarian law and was plotting an armed massacre. With the city in this ill-tempered mood, few were surprised when, in 129, Scipio was found dead, his body unmarked. Intending to write a speech that night which he was due to deliver at a meeting of the Assembly, he had a notebook beside him.

  The rumor mill got to work. Perhaps Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi (as she now certainly was known), had killed Scipio to prevent a repeal of her son’s legislation. Very probably, word went, her daughter Sempronia had aided and abetted her; she was Scipio’s wife, but unloved because of her ugliness and her childlessness. Others claimed that Scipio had committed suicide in the realization that he could not accomplish what he had undertaken to do. Apparently, Scipio’s slaves were put to the torture (this was the rule when a paterfamilias was murdered). They confessed, it was said, that strangers had been brought into the back of the house and had strangled their master.

  Scipio may have been murdered, but if the reports of how he was found and the appearance of his body are correct, it is more likely that he succumbed to a heart attack or a stroke. In any case, he was dead, and despite the distinction of his career public opinion would not allow him the honor of a state funeral.

  * * *

  FOR SOME YEARS after his brother’s killing, Gaius had stayed away from the Forum and the alarms of public life. But he disliked having nothing to do and was uninterested in the sexual promiscuity, drinking, and moneymaking practiced by many of his peers. He enjoyed army life but lost his temper when his commission as quaestor in Sardinia was unfairly extended. He sailed away to Rome in a rage. Ch
arged with dereliction of duty, he easily cleared himself with a powerful speech in his defense. He had already served longer than the law required, he pointed out, and added, “I am the only man in the army who entered the campaign with a full purse, and left it with an empty one. My colleagues brought amphorae of wine with them which they drank on service, and then took back home with them, stuffed with silver and gold.”

  Supporters of reform kept prompting him to stand for tribune, and conservative senators let it be seen how much they feared that he would. Tiberius was said to have appeared to Gaius in a dream and said, “However much you try to defer your destiny, you must die the same death that I suffered.” His mother was no ghost, and expressed her disapproval. A letter of hers has survived in which she tells her son, “Apart from those who killed Tiberius Gracchus, no enemy has caused me so many troubles and so many labors as you. As my only surviving son, you should have taken trouble and care that I should have the fewest anxieties in my old age.”

  Gaius refused Cornelia’s pleas and bowed to the inevitable. He was elected tribune in 123.

  In a sign that times were slowly changing, he had no trouble getting reelected for a second year and he introduced a far-reaching catalog of reforms. First of all, he appeased his brother’s spirit by introducing two new laws. The first banned anyone who had been deposed from public office from serving again in any capacity. This was obviously aimed at Octavius, but, according to Plutarch, Cornelia made representations and persuaded her son to withdraw it. This magnanimous gesture delighted public opinion.

  Second, a bill was passed forbidding any capital trials without the Assembly’s approval. Anyone found to have deprived a citizen of his civic rights through execution or exile, as if he were an enemy of the state, was to be arraigned before the People. The prohibitions were retrospective, and the former consul who chaired the commission that persecuted Tiberius’s followers in 132 was driven into exile. It was not simply that revenge was sweet; reactionary senators needed to be reminded of the dangers they faced if they ignored the will of the People.

  Gaius reaffirmed Tiberius’s land act but exempted some ager publicus from redistribution, perhaps so that it could be leased to non-Romans. He also announced the foundation of three coloniae in Italy and one in northern Africa, on the desolate site of Carthage. This last was to be named Junonia, or Juno’s Place (a tactful nod in the direction of the goddess?). It was a controversial project to countermand the recently dead Aemilianus’s curse and, in the event, the sheep pastures of Carthage were left undisturbed. Plans were commissioned for the building of new roads across Italy. All these measures would have the effect of alleviating unemployment.

  The burgeoning city of Rome required reliable and copious supplies of grain, imported from Africa and Sicily. When harvests failed, famine followed. Food riots imperiled government. Gaius arranged permanent stockpiles of grain as an insurance policy against shortages and set a bargain price for its sale to citizens.

  The tribune turned his attention to corruption in public life. He passed laws against fraud and theft by governors of provinces, and a special extortion court, quaestio de repetundis, heard cases in front of a jury of senators. The conviction rate was low, because the jurors were often friends of the defendants. Gaius decided to put this right by asking equites, originally Rome’s cavalry but now men possessing the next property qualification beneath that of senators, to share jury service. Then, on second thought, senators were barred altogether from serving on juries, which now consisted entirely of equites.

  This was not all that Gaius did to the advantage of equites. The class had grown in economic importance in recent years. Some were country landowners uninterested in entering national politics, but a growing number were prosperous businessmen. The Republic had little in the way of a civil service, and indirect revenue collection (customs dues and the like) was contracted out to companies, or societates of equites; they also won commissions for public works, the construction of public buildings and roads, and the provision of military supplies. Of course, senators were not allowed to engage directly in trade, but provincial governors, proconsuls, and propraetors were responsible for the collection of direct taxes, a profitable opportunity for the practise of extortion. However, to ensure an adequate inflow to pay for his reforms, the tribune put the collection of direct taxes in the wealthy new province of Asia up for auction. This was a plum concession for commercial interests, as well as a vote of no confidence in senatorial probity.

  These measures all served immediate, sometimes urgent purposes, but in the longer run Gaius probably intended to encourage the growth of a wealthy nonpolitical class as a counterweight to the aristocracy in the Senate, and if that was not his intention it was certainly the result.

  Other constitutional and administrative changes were made. As ever, honesty and efficiency were the watchwords. Gaius had a larger and more all-embracing vision than his brother. His reforms were a comprehensive political program. In fact, when he was out and about in the Forum it was as if he were a government; Plutarch reports him as being “closely attended by a throng of contractors, technicians, ambassadors, officials, soldiers and literary men.” Although nowhere did he say this, it is clear that he was aiming to rebalance the constitution in the direction of popular sovereignty.

  However, there is no evidence that he wanted to emasculate or even abolish the Senate; rather, his idea was to purify the Senate and make it more responsive to the interests of the People. He shared something of Cato’s disgust with the activities of the ruling élite and of Scipio Aemilianus’s commitment to fair treatment for the provinces. He was a radical, not a revolutionary.

  DURING HIS SECOND term, Gaius grasped the nettle of allied resentment. He could see from Aemilianus’s fate that it would be hard to win public opinion to the Italian cause. A colleague of his on the tribunician bench had tabled a proposal, while serving as consul a few years earlier, to grant citizenship to any allied community that wanted it and, for those who didn’t, the right of appeal against Roman officials. The Senate was nervous and dispatched the consul to Gaul in response to a conveniently timed call from the port of Massilia for military assistance. The matter had had to be dropped.

  The tribune would have been wise to let leave well alone, but the danger of serious disaffection across Italy was too great to ignore. He proposed that communities with Latin status (that is, a second-class citizenship—see this page) should be awarded the full franchise, and that plain and simple allies should receive Latin status. The Roman mob was displeased, and there was heated opposition in the Senate.

  One of the consuls led the assault, deploying the fear-inducing slogans of the anti-immigrant campaigner through the ages. He declaimed:

  I suppose you imagine that, if you give Latins the citizenship, there will still be room for you in the Assembly where you are standing now, and seats at the games and festivals. Don’t you realize that they will swamp everything?

  A fellow tribune, working for the Senate, trumped Gaius with a populist package designed to satisfy both the People’s Assembly and Italian opinion. This was approved but (as intended, no doubt) never implemented, and Gaius’s bill failed. The only practical result of the initiative was his rising unpopularity among the city’s masses.

  He failed to win a third term as tribune, and his opponents at once began to unpick his legislation. He had recently returned from a visit to Carthage to make arrangements for the building of Junonia, and at a crowded Assembly on the Capitol one of the new tribunes for 121 attacked the law authorizing it. Now that the crisis had arrived, Cornelia set aside her opposition to her son and helped him recruit bodyguards. These hired men lurked on the outskirts of the meeting, with Gaius walking up and down a portico in a nervous frame of mind. He may have intended only to observe the debate, but it is possible that he planned to disrupt the meeting.

  Fate then played a wild card. A servant of Lucius Opimius, one of the consuls, bared his arm and made an insulting
gesture. An overexcited Gracchan stabbed him fatally with a writing stylus. This was just the pretext the consul was hoping for. He immediately went to the Senate and persuaded it to vote a state of emergency. This was the first time that what came to be called the Final Decree, or senatus consultum ultimum, was passed. The Senate resolved: “Let the consuls see to it the Republic comes to no harm,” (“Videant consules ne quid detrimenti res publica caperet”).

  This vague formula was understood to give senior officeholders the power to use lethal force against malefactors who were endangering the state. But did the Senate actually have the power to suspend a Roman citizen’s constitutional rights? The answer depended on a man’s political point of view, on the emotion of the moment. If we look at the issue dispassionately, the Senate was, in the final resort, an advisory body and its resolutions had no legal force. A consul had imperium, but the law insisted that he could not execute citizens without trial (reinforced by Gaius Gracchus’s own recent legislation); this was because they had the right of appeal, of provocatio, to the People. In practice, few would disobey a serving consul’s command, but he was wise to remember that, once out of office, he was subject to the courts and the anger of the Assembly.

  Such fine considerations were of little interest in the heat of the present moment. Opimius called on senators to arm themselves, and for all equites to turn up the following morning with two armed servants. Rome passed an uneasy night. In the morning, the Gracchans seized the Aventine Hill, the traditional refuge of plebeian agitators through the ages. Gaius refused to arm himself (except for a dagger) and left home wearing a toga as if it were a normal day and he were just going down to the Forum on routine business.