The Senate attempted to mollify potential conscripts by making life in the army a little less harsh. They capped service at six years and gave soldiers the right to appeal punishments handed down by their officers. But ultimately, this did little to improve the morale of the legionaries in Spain. In 140, veterans who had served six years were mustered out and replaced by raw recruits. These new soldiers were “exposed to severe cold without shelter, and unaccustomed to the water and climate of the country, fell sick with dysentery and many died.” Not exactly something you can put on a recruitment poster.17
As the tribunes watched their constituents driven off the land or hauled off to fight in the quagmire in Spain, they took their first steps toward curbing the power of the nobles. For the entire history of the Republic, citizens had declared their vote out loud, making it easy for powerful patrons to ensure clients voted the way they had been ordered to. In 139, a tribune defiantly passed a law requiring secret ballots for elections. Two years later the secret ballot was extended to judicial assemblies. It would take time for the effects of these reforms to be felt, but the introduction of the secret ballot would prove a hammer blow to the foundations of the senatorial oligarchy.18
Surveying the state of Italy in the 130s, some among the nobility could see that there was a greater problem. Conscripts still had to meet a minimum property requirement to be enrolled, but with the rich pushing the poor off the land fewer citizens could meet the minimum requirement to be drafted. The Romans had faced crises like this in the past and responded by lowering the property requirements to bring more men under arms. But by the mid-second century, many citizens could not even meet minimal standards of service. The consuls were forced to rely on an ever-shrinking pool of men to fight wars and garrison the provinces.19
WITH ALL THESE social and economic problems swirling, Tiberius Gracchus was elected quaestor for 137. This was supposed to be the routine first step on his ascent up the cursus honorum, but instead it nearly ended Tiberius’s public career before that career even began. Attached to the command of consul Gaius Hostilius Mancinus, Tiberius landed in Spain in the spring of 137 to continue the war against the Numantines, a Celtiberian tribe who had managed to resist all Roman attempts at pacification. Upon arrival Tiberius found himself caught up in one of the most embarrassing defeats the legions ever suffered. The consul Mancinus was far more a scholar than a soldier and the experienced Numantine guerrillas ran circles around his clumsy maneuvers. After a series of poorly executed skirmishes, Mancinus attempted a strategic retreat under cover of darkness, but discovered as the sun rose that his army was surrounded.20
Having fallen prey to Roman treachery in the past, the Numantine leaders demanded young Tiberius Gracchus be sent forward to negotiate. While serving in Spain a generation earlier, Tiberius’s father had brokered an equitable peace treaty with the Numantines, and they remembered the name Gracchi and trusted the son to play as fair as his father. On his first campaign and with as many as thirty thousand lives on the line, Tiberius negotiated a treaty that allowed the legions safe passage out of the region in exchange for a pledge of future peace.21
Though there was little else Tiberius could have done under the circumstances, when Rome heard about the surrender, senators tripped over themselves bewailing the humiliating terms. The Senate recalled Mancinus and his senior staff to Rome to explain the cowardly capitulation. Though the embarrassed Mancinus attempted to justify his conduct, the Senate brutally smacked him down. They stripped Mancinus of his consulship and ordered him deposited at the gates of Numantia in chains to signal Rome’s rejection of the treaty. The Numantines responded by sending Mancinus back to Rome with a message that “a national breach of faith should not be atoned for by the blood of one man.”22
Tiberius and his fellow junior officers escaped official censure for their role in the scandal, but that did not spare them a severe tongue lashing. Tiberius cannot have expected to return home to a hero’s welcome, but the intensity of the invective the Senate laid on him seemed disproportionate to his “crime.” All he had done was save tens of thousands of men from certain death—did the Senate really expect him to choose voluntary mass suicide? But in contrast to the self-righteous fury of the old men in the Senate, when Tiberius emerged from the Senate house, he was greeted by cheers from the families of the men he had saved.23
WHILE TIBERIUS LICKED his political wounds, the road to redemption was already being paved by a group of senators intent on rebuilding the population of small citizen-farmers. These reformist senators were crafting a novel piece of legislation called the Lex Agraria that would hopefully reverse the decades-long trend of growing economic inequality. They believed they had hit upon an ingenious method of redistributing land from rich to poor without running afoul of the iron-clad private property rights that defined Roman law. They would focus exclusively on ager publicus illegally occupied by wealthy squatters.
As you might have guessed from squinting at the Latin, ager publicus was publicly owned land. As the Romans conquered Italy, they typically confiscated a third of a defeated enemy’s territory and turned it into state-owned ager publicus. In the early days of the Republic, this public land was converted into a Roman colony, but by Tiberius’s day it was usually leased to individual renters who would work the land in exchange for a portion of the produce. To prevent rich families from monopolizing the state lands, the Assembly passed a law that no family was allowed to lease more than five hundred iugera (about three hundred acres) of public land. But this prohibition was mostly ignored. The magistrates tasked with enforcing the limits were themselves wealthy landowners occupying excessive public land, so everyone colluded to get away with it together.24
The legal rationale of the Lex Agraria was simple: the five-hundred-iugera prohibition would be strictly enforced. Anyone caught occupying ager publicus over the legal limit would be forced to relinquish the excess back to the state. The excess could then be divided up into small manageable plots and redistributed to landless citizens. Since the whole point of the reform was to rebuild the class of small holders, the bill stipulated that the newly created plots could not be broken up and sold. The authors of the Lex Agraria did not want to hand a plot of land to a poor man just so he could turn around and sell it back to a rich man.25
Somewhat counterintuitively, the senators crafting this piece of radical reform legislation were not backbench agitators, but rather some of the most powerful men in Rome. The group was led by Tiberius’s father-in-law, Appius Claudius Pulcher, who was princeps senatus. Joining him were a prominent pair of brothers: the wealthy jurist and scholar Publius Licinius Crassus Mucianus and Publius Mucius Scaevola, one of the most respected legal theorists of his generation. There were other prominent senators and rising young nobles surrounding Claudius’s group of reformers; among them was Tiberius Gracchus.26
For historians, one of the most controversial aspects of the Lex Agraria is whether the authors intended only Roman citizens to qualify for allotments or whether the noncitizen Italian Allies also qualified. The Italians provided much of the manpower for the legions and Tiberius himself was personally anxious about their plight, “lamenting that a people so valiant in war, and related in blood to the Romans, were declining little by little into poverty and paucity of numbers without any hope of remedy.” But whatever the original intent, there is no evidence the Italians were ultimately included in the redistribution program. It seems an obscure point, but the fight over the Lex Agraria was an early test of Roman willingness to treat the Italians as equals. It was a test they failed.27
Historians also still argue about the motivations of the authors of the bill. Maybe they were acting on high-minded principle and simply wanted to restore the citizen-farmer and rebuild the manpower reserves of the legions. But it could also be that the law was cynically designed to add thousands of new clients to the political networks of its authors. Traditionally, the man tasked with distributing land absorbed the families that benefited
onto his client rolls. And it is here that we might also detect the source of the intransigent opposition to the bill. Because what the Lex Agraria proposed to do was take all the miserable tenants attached by default to their landlords and transfer their political allegiance to the Claudian faction—an intolerable shift in the balance of senatorial power.28
A piece of legislation this controversial and far-reaching was not drafted on a whim. Claudius, Scaevola, and Mucianus would have spent years carefully picking through Roman law, laying out how the survey process would work, and who would arbitrate contested claims. But once the law was written they simply had to wait for the right time and the right person to introduce the bill. And for that, Claudius had his eye on his talented young son-in-law Tiberius, who was now trying to recover from the shame of the Numantine Affair.
WHILE THE AUTHORS of the Lex Agraria waited for the right time to introduce their bill, the unpopular war in Spain continued. After the Senate rejected Tiberius’s treaty, two more years of inconclusive fighting followed—more men dead, more farms ruined, more families dislocated—all for no discernable gain or purpose. The people of Rome were getting fed up, so just as they had done during the war against Carthage, they turned to Scipio Aemilianus to end the war once and for all. But they faced a similar problem to one they had faced back then: Aemilianus was tecÚically prohibited from running. During the Carthaginian war fifteen years earlier, the problem was that he was too young. Now the problem was that a law had been passed barring a man from serving more than one consulship in his career. But just as the Assembly had voted an exemption that allowed Aemilianus to stand for the consulship of 147, they exempted Aemilianus from the prohibition on multiple consulships. He was duly elected for the consulship of 134.29
With his ability to secure special treatment from the Assembly, the career of Aemilianus became a prototype for ambitious politicians in the years to come. Aemilianus showed how easy it was to manipulate the mob to serve personal ambition—inducing them to suspend inconvenient rules. But that was not the only dangerous example Aemilianus set. During the campaign for the consulship of 134, he promised to raise new recruits from his own extensive client network. The Scipione were a major center of political gravity in Rome, and many friends and allies readily agreed to accompany Aemilianus to Spain—among them Tiberius’s younger brother Gaius. Raising a personal legion of four thousand men, Aemilianus was able to depart for Spain without the need for forced conscription. This was, for the moment, a welcome answer to an emergency situation, but it also set the precedent of a powerful noble raising a personal army from his own client network—an army whose loyalty to the powerful noble might outweigh their loyalty to the Senate and People of Rome.30
From the perspective of Claudius, though, all Aemilianus’s departure for Spain meant was that a formidable political opponent would now be absent from Rome for at least a year. With his biggest rival out of the way, Claudius wasted no time dispatching his son-in-law Tiberius Gracchus to ram through the Lex Agraria before anyone could stop it.
WITHIN MONTHS OF Aemilianus’s departure for Spain, Tiberius Gracchus stood for the tribunate. The office was slightly beneath his standing, and had the Numantine Affair not darkened his prospects, it is likely Tiberius would have moved right on to an aedileship to set up his inevitable runs for praetor and consul. But given that he had to overcome the shame of the debacle in Spain, he could use his year as tribune to boldly vault back to the forefront of Roman politics.
Before Tiberius took office, the Claudian reformers floated the contents of the Lex Agraria to their senatorial colleagues, but met with incredulous resistance. After occupying the ager publicus for many years, these wealthy landowners had come to regard the public land as their personal property. They had invested in it, improved it, used it as collateral for loans, given it away as dowries, and bequeathed it to their heirs. The authors of the bill wrote a number of concessions to lessen opposition: offering compensation for the ager publicus seized, giving clear title to the five hundred iugera that remained, making allowances for larger families to hold more land. But even with these concessions, a large faction in the Senate planned to resist the bill no matter what. To have their land confiscated and handed over to the shiftless rabble was simply out of the question.31
With the majority of the Senate hostile, the Claudians elected to break with mos maiorum and have Tiberius present the bill directly to the Assembly without giving the Senate a chance to register their opinion. There was no law stating that a bill must be presented to the Senate before it was introduced in the Assembly—it was simply the way things had always been done. Tiberius’s provocative gambit set everyone on edge. Shortly after taking office in December 134 Tiberius appeared before the Assembly and announced his intention to pass a law redistributing ager publicus from the rich to the poor.32
According to Roman law, after a bill was introduced three market days had to pass before it could be voted on. With market days occurring about once a week, the interval between the introduction and the vote could be anywhere from eighteen to twenty-four calendar days. This delay allowed time for voters to make their way to Rome for the vote. Since Tiberius was tapping into real resentment, dispossesed citizens flooded into Rome over the next three weeks “like rivers flowing into the all-receptive ocean.” Even nonvoting Italians came in to support the bill. Though they could not vote they could still register their physical and psychological support for land redistribution. During these weeks, Tiberius regularly addressed the citizens in the Forum to harness and solidify their energy. He planned to have a large and eager majority in the Assembly when it came time to vote.33
After three market days had passed, Tiberius convened the Assembly on the Capitoline Hill to consider the Lex Agraria. The space would have been packed with voters, giving the area in front of the Temple of Jupiter “the appearance of stormy waves on the sea.” Before the official presentation, Tiberius defended the Lex Agraria with the speech of his life. The Gracchi had been trained by the best orators in the Mediterranean, and Tiberius perfected an irresistibly calm and dignified presence on stage. He did not pace the rostra or beat his chest. He stood perfectly still and allowed the inherent force of his argument to hold the audience’s rapt attention. According to Plutarch, Tiberius composed himself in the center of the rostra and delivered an impassioned defense of the common citizens of Rome.34
“The wild beasts that roam over Italy have every one of them a cave or lair to lurk in,” he said, while “the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common air and light… but nothing else; houseless and homeless they wander about with their wives and children.” Invoking the imagery of an Italian population dislocated by war and poverty, he said, “It is with lying lips that their commanders exhort the soldiers in their battles to protect sepulchers and shrines from the enemy… but they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury.” These ruinous wars had led to an unacceptable irony for the average Roman: “though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of earth that is their own.”35
After bringing the Assembly to tears, Tiberius requested the clerk read the bill in preparation for the vote that he would surely win. But as it turned out senatorial opponents of the Lex Agraria had themselves been busy over the past three weeks. Knowing they would lose the vote, they had recruited Marcus Octavius, one of Tiberius’s fellow tribunes, to prevent the vote from even taking place. One of the most powerful weapons a tribune wielded was the veto—which meant “I forbid.” A tribune could veto anything, at any time, for any reason, and not even another tribune could overturn it. So when the clerk rose to formally read the Lex Agraria, Marcus Octavius stepped forward and vetoed the reading of the bill. Everything stopped. The vote could not take place until the clerk read the bill, so as long as Octavius maintained his veto, the bill could not be read and the vote could not take place. With the proceedings ground to a halt, Tiberius adjourned the Assembly for the day.36
AFTER FAILING TO avoid senatorial opposition with a generous bill, Tiberius and his Claudian backers decided the best play was to rally his popular base by making villains of the rich. Tiberius stripped out the friendly concessions before the next vote so that the Lex Agraria would be “more agreeable to the multitude and more severe against the wrongdoers.” With luck, pressure from the populace would force Octavius to give up his veto and allow the bill to come to a vote—a vote they would surely win.37
In between sessions of the Assembly, Tiberius and Octavius came every day to the Forum to debate the merits of the Lex Agraria. The Forum is not a large area and like the stages at a music festival, there were few rostras available for speechmaking and their audiences often overlapped. In such close quarters, Tiberius and Octavius often engaged each other directly in debate. As Tiberius grew more and more exasperated, he promised to purchase all the ager publicus Octavius owned at a fair price if Octavius would drop his opposition the bill—hinting that Octavius’s opposition was rooted in crass self-interest rather than high-minded public spirit. But Octavius refused to give up.38
With traditional debate and persuasion failing to break the deadlock, Tiberius turned to radical action. Tiberius promised he would veto every piece of public business until Octavius relented. Then he marched up the Temple of Saturn and locked the state treasury with his personal seal so that “none of the usual business was carried on in an orderly way: the magistrates could not perform their accustomed duties, courts came to a stop, no contract was entered into, and other sorts of confusion and disorder were rife everywhere.” Tiberius then ratcheted up the dramatic atmosphere further. Alluding to reports that his enemies planned to assassinate him, he now carried a concealed short sword in his cloak and surrounded himself at all times with thousands of dedicated followers.39
The Storm Before the Storm Page 4
