In the morning, Flaccus had to be roused from a hungover stupor, but when he woke he distributed weapons to the men from his own private collection. As they left the house Gaius had to disentangle himself from his wife, who begged him to stay: “Not to the rostra, O Gaius, do I now send you forth, as formerly, to serve as tribune and law-giver, nor yet to a glorious war, where, should you die… you would at all events leave me in honored sorrow.” Instead, he was exposing himself to men who likely aimed to murder him. “The worst has at last prevailed; by violence and the sword men’s controversies are now decided… Why, pray, should men longer put faith in laws or gods, after the murder of Tiberius?” But Gaius pushed his way past her—honor would not be satisfied by staying home.51
The Gracchan faction occupied the Aventine Hill, which lay across a shallow valley from the Palatine Hill and along a plebeian enclave going back to the founding of the city. Flaccus was clearly spoiling for a fight, but Gaius prevailed upon them all to give reason one last chance. They dispatched Flaccus’s young son Quintus to the Forum to find out what—if anything—would defuse the crisis.52
In the Forum, Opimius waited with his forces arrayed. Reinforced by some auxiliary slingers and archers recently returned from a campaign in the Balearic Islands, Opimius had at his command about three thousand men. When Flaccus’s son arrived Opimius told the young man that at a minimum the Gracchans had to lay down their arms, come to the Forum, and beg forgiveness. He also said that if the answer was anything less than total capitulation, the boy best not come back at all. Gaius, for one, appeared ready to back down, but Flaccus and his more radical supporters talked him out of it. Ignoring Opimius’s threat, they sent Flaccus’s son back to reject the terms. Good to his word, Opimius arrested the young man, tossed him in jail, and then led his small army toward the Aventine. Before leaving he offered a bounty of gold for the heads of Flaccus and Gaius—the amount of gold determined by the weight of the head.53
When Opimius’s small legion ascended the Aventine, the archers lobbed arrows and the assembled Gracchans were forced to disperse. In the chaos they lost cohesion, and the strength they might have had in numbers never materialized. Just minutes into the fight, it was already every man for himself. Gaius led a party to the nearby Temple of Diana, while Flaccus went into hiding either in a vacant bath or the workshop of one of his clients. Opimius’s men knew Flaccus was somewhere in the area but no one would identify which house he was in. When they threatened to burn the whole block down, someone came forward and ratted Flaccus out. So it was that Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, senator, consul, tribune, and citizen of Rome, was apprehended and summarily executed on a random street on the Aventine Hill.54
Gaius meanwhile could see that it was all falling apart. Rumors flew that Opimius was now offering immunity to anyone who laid down their arms. The same cocky crew that had spent the night drinking and boasting now tossed down their weapons and begged for mercy. Gaius’s few remaining supporters urged him to run for it. So Gaius ran for it. With a small handful of his most loyal friends, Gaius ran from the Aventine down to a bridge across the Tiber. But a company of Opimius’s men were in hot pursuit. As Gaius fled across the Tiber, his loyal friends posted themselves at the head of the bridge to fight off their pursuers and give Gaius time to get away. They were cut down to a man.55
Gaius and a single slave made it as far as the Sacred Grove, an ancient patch of trees on the outskirts of Rome. It was there that Gaius decided that he would run no more and that his time was at hand. Handing a dagger to his slave, Gaius exposed his neck and ordered the slave to plunge the dagger into his throat. The slave obliged. Another Gracchus now lay dead in a pool of blood.56
After his body was found, Gaius’s head was duly cut off and secured by a savvy former supporter. The erstwhile Gracchan carried the head home and “bored a hole in the neck, and drawing out the brain, poured in molten lead in its place.” Then he carefully “stuck the head of Gaius on a spear and brought it to Opimius, and when it was placed in a balance it weighed seventeen pounds and two thirds.” Opimius paid him in full.57
AS WITH TIBERIUS, the day of sharp violence was followed by a more methodical purge. As many as 250 people died that same brutal morning as Gaius and Flaccus. But thousands more were identified and executed in the days to come as Opimius rid Rome of Gracchan partisans. Even the son of Flaccus—arrested for being the messenger of his father—was only given the courtesy of choosing his method of death. The Gracchan faction was broken.58
Carbo, the last remaining Gracchan land commissioner, only survived the purge by switching sides. He likely secured a consulship for 120 by promising to defend Opimius’s conduct in front of the Assembly. But since no one likes a traitor, Carbo was himself arraigned on vague charges of treason the minute he left office in 119. The prosecution was led by a rising young noble named Lucius Licinius Crassus. Just twenty years old, Crassus dazzled the crowd with incisive wit and eloquence that shredded Carbo’s attempt to escape his past: “Although, Carbo, you defended Opimius, this audience will not on that account esteem you a good citizen; for it is clear that you dissembled and had other views.” For a decade Carbo had been a radical Gracchan—the last-minute defense of Opimius didn’t fool anyone. Loathed by all and his reputation destroyed, Carbo “rescued himself from the severity of the judges by a voluntary death” (as Cicero so eloquently put it). Gaius Papirius Carbo was the last victim of the Gracchan purge.59
But though the Gracchi were now dead, many of their reforms lived on. The Extortion Court remained staffed by Equestrian jurors. The grain dole remained in place, and though for the moment it was merely a small price-controlled ration, it entered permanently into the fabric of Roman administration. The road building and public works continued, and though the colonies were never completed, any early colonist who had secured land was allowed to keep it. Drusus’s magical twelve colonies were never heard from again now that Gaius’s headless body had been dumped in the Tiber.
As for the land commission, it remained existent but inert. Within a few years the Assembly amended the Lex Agraria to allow possessors of the Gracchan allotments to sell their land. It did not take long for wealthy magnates to buy up the majority of the lots. By 111, a further law transferred all currently held ager publicus to outright private property. The Lex Agraria had been a creative attempt to solve the problem of widening inequality in Italy and reverse the gradual disappearance of the small Roman farmer—a problem that ultimately would not be solved until after the fall of the Republic.60
After their deaths, the Gracchi brothers themselves were transformed into legendary martyrs of the people. The Romans erected statues of them where each had been slain. Citizens dropped offerings and sacrifices at these quasi-religious shrines. Their mother Cornelia was moved by the devotion and said, “the sacred places where her sons had been slain… were tombs worthy of the dead which occupied them.” Cornelia herself retired to a villa at the port city of Misenum and lived for another twenty years. She maintained a running salon of Greek intellectuals and philosophers and welcomed visitors from all corners of the Mediterranean including the kings from the Hellenic east. Of her sons, she always spoke “without grief or tears, and narrated their achievements and their fate… as if she were speaking of men of the early days of Rome.” Some found her calm demeanor off-putting, but as Plutarch says, “While fortune often prevails over virtue when it endeavors to ward off evils, she cannot rob virtue of the power to endure those evils with calm assurance.” When Cornelia died, the Romans built a statue of her in the Forum.61
As the years passed the Gracchi name came to mean more than just the brothers: it stood for an array of programs and tactics that collectively represented a new populare movement in Roman politics. The standard populare programs included a grain dole for the urban poor, land for the rural poor, control of the courts with the Equestrians, secret ballots in the Assembly, subsidies for military service, and punishment of corrupt nobles. Tactically, the populare h
arnessed the democratic power of the Assembly rather than the aristocratic weight of the Senate. While populare leaders came and went, the citizens of Rome remained the same and would support those who offered them what they wanted.
Opposing the populares were the optimates. Meaning literally “the best” or “the good,” the term invoked a variety of characteristics. But since Cicero is our main source, those characteristics tended to align with his own worldview. For Cicero, an optimate was a well-educated senator with an active interest in oratory, politics, and war, and skewing away from the severe Roman virtues in the mold of old Cato the Elder. An optimate senator was comfortable with exotic food and Greek ideas. These grandly sophisticated statesmen were the natural guardians of the Republic, standing as sentinels against enemies both foreign and domestic.
For the great historian Sallust—himself an active partisan in the politics of the Late Republic—the divide between populare and optimate meant that “the institution of parties and factions” had come to Rome. He felt both sides were to blame for the treacherous polarization because “the nobles began to abuse their position and the people their liberty… thus the community was split into two parties, and between these the state was torn to pieces.” But despite Sallust’s observation, the Romans did not have political parties in the modern sense. There was no “Populare Party” and “Optimate Party.” Tactics, strategies, and alliances were fluid to all factions. But though Cicero deplored the tribunes and the Assembly, his beloved optimate were just as adept at using the Assembly to get their way as the populare. In fact, most of the greatest popular orators of the coming generation spoke on behalf of the optimate rather than populare.62
But though there were no formal parties, it is true that there were now two broadly opposing worldviews floating in the political ether waiting to be tapped as needed. As the crisis over the Lex Agraria revealed, it was no longer a specific issue that mattered so much as the urgent necessity to triumph over rivals. Reflecting on the recurrent civil wars of the Late Republic, Sallust said, “It is this spirit which has commonly ruined great nations, when one party desires to triumph over another by any and every means and to avenge itself on the vanquished with excessive cruelty.” Accepting defeat was no longer an option.63
In fact, memories of that excessive cruelty doled out to the Gracchans lived on the minds of those who had been witness to the methods of the noble optimates. Though it was the Gracchi who Cicero later accused of “throwing daggers in the Forum,” it was the optimates who had murdered thousands in the name of public order. Most insulting was the Senate’s order to Opimius to rebuild and refurbish the Temple of Concord, which had been damaged during the fighting in 121. The temple was dedicated to the unity of the Roman people, but for many in Rome, calling a bloody purge the foundation of unity was an insult. After the restoration was complete an anonymous vandal inscribed at the base of the temple: “A work of mad discord produces a temple of concord.”64
CHAPTER 4
A CITY FOR SALE
We are silent when we see that all the money of all the nations has come into the hands of a few men; which we seem to tolerate and to permit with the more equanimity, because none of these robbers conceals what he is doing.
CICERO1
GAIUS MARIUS WAS BORN IN 157 BC IN ARPINUM, AN ITALIAN city that had only recently been enfranchised by the Senate. Though later denigrated as “a man of rustic birth, rough and uncouth, and austere in his life,” Marius was in fact the son of a respected Equestrian family, raised in comfort and privilege. But though he was the well-educated son of a prosperous family, Roman politics in the second century seemed designed to make a mockery of his ambitions. Marius was a novus homo Italian without sufficient ancestry or connections to dream of anything more than a respectable career in local government. But Marius wanted more than that. So upon completing his education he took the only path to political prominence available to a relative outsider: service in the legions. Marius had “no sooner reached the age for military life than he had given himself the training of active service, not of Grecian eloquence.”2
A family connection to the Scipione allowed twenty-three-year-old Marius to join the personal legion Scipio Aemilianus raised for the final expedition to Numantia in 134. Contrary to long-standing myth, Marius did not begin his career as a common legionary: his Equestrian status qualified him to be an officer. During his service in Spain, Marius’s superiors commended his bravery, diligence, and honesty. Marius proved time and again that he was a man to be counted on. According to an oft-told story from the end of the siege of Numantia, Aemilianus’s friends asked him one night where the Roman people would find a man to replace him. Aemilianus tapped young Marius on the shoulder and said, “Here, perhaps.”3
After Numantia fell, Marius likely joined the scramble for a piece of commercial spoils, which in Spain meant mining. If he did acquire a share of the mining rights, it would explain how he had enough money to fund an expensive political career in Rome. But even as he benefited from these business connections, Marius was acutely aware of the resistant social pressures to a public career. He had “neither wealth nor eloquence, with which the magnates of the time used to influence the people,” but “the very intensity of his assurance, his indefatigable labors, and his plain and simple way of living, won him a certain popularity among his fellow citizens.”4
DESPITE HIS SOCIAL background, Marius did have one thing going for him. He was a hereditary client of the Caecilii Metelli, a noble family just emerging as the dominant faction in Rome. A plebeian family ennobled for five generations, the Metelli rose to prominence thanks to one great man: Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus. A contemporary of Scipio Aemilianus, Macedonicus earned his triumphant cognomen by crushing the last remnants of Macedon in 147.* This victory heralded a long and impressive career that took Macedonicus across the empire from Spain to Greece. But as he rose, Macedonicus avoided throwing his family’s lot in with either the Scipione circle or the Claudians, instead remaining aloof to both.5
The real strength of the Metelli, though, lay in manpower. Macedonicus and his brother Lucius had, between them, six sons and three daughters. This brood of Metelli went forth into high Roman politics in the 120s and took it over for a generation. Wherever a war was being fought, a Metelli was sure to be there. From 123 to 106 the Metelli cousins held six consulships. Their name dominates the rolls of triumphal honor that recorded successful campaigns in Macedonia, Thrace, Sicily, Gaul, Spain, and North Africa. This herd of cousins filled all ranks of the cursus honorum through the 120s and 110s. By the time the eldest attained their consulships, the youngest filled the ranks of quaestors, aediles, and praetors. This domination of the magistracies gave the family direct control over the levers of power.6
But the Metelli were not just successful because there were so many of them; they also cultivated talent. In fact, the real mastermind behind the Metellan faction was not one of the cousins at all, but rather a shrewd young operator named Marcus Aemilius Scaurus. Scaurus hailed from a noble family, but recent generations had seen their political and economic fortunes collapse. Scaurus’s father didn’t even bother with a public career and instead spent his life as a coal merchant to rebuild the material fortunes of the family. Coming from such humble origins, Scaurus was later slandered as the novus homo son of a publicani, but he was neither. Scaurus was not a great orator like Gaius Gracchus, but he had a knack for persuasion in intimate conversations, relying more upon “his judgment in affairs of consequence, than upon his ability in speaking.” He talked his way into the Metelli just as the family was rising in status and he married one of Macedonicus’s daughters. From the moment Scaurus entered the family, he began to take the reins. Cicero would later say of Scaurus that “nothing happens without his word.” Sallust recalls that Scaurus “was greedy for power, fame, and riches, but clever in concealing his faults.”7
While Scaurus was a consummate backroom operator, the Metellans also needed men to comm
and attention in the Assembly. Among the most promising was the vibrant young orator Lucius Licinius Crassus. The quintessential optimate, Crassus came from an illustrious family and had a keen intellect and a born talent for oratory. He had burst on the scene in 119 as the prosecutor of the turncoat land commissioner Carbo. He was now considered the greatest orator in Rome, a mantle he inherited from the dead Gaius Gracchus. But Crassus was more of a scholar than the Gracchi—a student of the law, philosophy, and literature. The only thing missing from his sterling resume was an interest in battlefield glory. While a man like Gaius Marius was stamped by service in the legions, Crassus was stamped by the Forum. He later said, “I entered the Forum quite a youth, and was never absent from it longer than during my quaestorship.” No one better knew the Forum, or was better known in the Forum, than Lucius Crassus the Orator.8
The Metellans also recruited Crassus’s great friend and political ally Marcus Antonius. Four years older than Crassus, Antonius acknowledged Crassus’s superior ability: he said that while men listened to him and dreamed of equaling his own skill, when Crassus spoke, “no one is so conceited as to have the presumption to think that he shall ever speak like him.” Though loyal to his friends, Antonius was also a subtle player who understood the power of circumspection. He once said that he never wrote his speeches down so that if later “he had said anything which was not desirable, he might be able to deny that he had said it.” He carried this basic inscrutability throughout his entire life, and where Crassus was the master of the great public occasion, Antonius shined in judicial proceedings. With the skill of the best Greek sophists, Antonius could argue any side of a debate and win. He was a formidable force in the courts and often deployed in defense of Metellan interests.9
The Storm Before the Storm Page 10
