THE REFORM MOVEMENT AND TIBERIUS GRACCHUS
For a whole generation after the battle of Pydna 1 the Roman state enjoyed a profound calm, scarcely troubled by a ripple here and there on the surface. Its dominion extended over three continents; the luster of the Roman power and the glory of the Roman name were constantly on the increase; all eyes rested on Italy, all talents and all riches flowed thither. It seemed as if a golden age of peaceful prosperity and intellectual fruitfulness must surely soon begin. The Orientals told each other with astonishment of the mighty republic of the West, “which subdued kingdoms far and near, so that everyone who heard its name trembled; but which kept good faith with its friends and dependents. Such was the glory of the Romans, and yet no one usurped the crown and no one glittered in purple dress; but they obeyed whomsoever from year to year they made their master, and there was among them neither envy nor discord.”
So it seemed at a distance; matters looked differently at closer view. The government of the aristocracy was well on the way to destroying its own work. It was not that the sons and grandsons of the vanquished at Cannae and the victors of Zama 2 had utterly degenerated from their fathers and grandfathers; the difference was not so much in the men who sat in the Senate as it was in the times. Where a few old families of established wealth and hereditary political importance conduct the government, they will display in seasons of danger an incomparable tenacity of purpose and heroic self-sacrifice—just as in seasons of tranquility they will be short-sighted, selfish, and negligent: the germs of both traits are inherent in their hereditary character. The aristocratic rottenness had long existed, but the sun of prosperity was needed to ripen it. There was profound meaning in Cato’s 3 question, “What will become of Rome when she no longer has any state to fear?”
That point had now been reached. Every neighbor whom she might have feared was politically annihilated; and of the men who had been reared under the old order of things in the severe school of the Hannibalic wars, and whose words still echoed that mighty epoch so long as they survived, death called one after another away until at length the voice of the last of them, the veteran Cato, ceased to be heard in the Senate and the Forum. A younger generation came to the helm, and their policy was a sorry answer to the question of that veteran patriot.
In internal affairs the Romans were, if possible, still more disposed than in foreign affairs to let the ship drift before the wind: if internal government means more than the mere transaction of current business, there was in this period no government in Rome at all. The single thought of the governing clique was the maintenance and, if possible, the increase of their usurped privileges. The state did not have the right to get the best man for its supreme magistracy; rather, every member of the clique had an inborn title to the highest office of the state—a title not to be threatened by the unfair rivalry of his peers or the encroachments of the excluded. Accordingly the clique set as its most important political aim the restriction of reelection to the consulship and the exclusion of “new men.” It succeeded, in fact, in obtaining the legal prohibition of the former about 151 B.C., and thenceforward contented itself with a government of aristocratic nobodies. Even the government’s inaction in external affairs was doubtless connected with this policy of the nobility, exclusive toward commoners and suspicious of individual members of their own order. There was no surer means to keep commoners, whose deeds might become their patent of nobility, out of the pure circles of the hereditary aristocracy than by allowing no one to perform any deeds at all. Even an aristocratic conqueror of Syria or Egypt would have embarrassed so mediocre a government.
It is true that there was no want of opposition, some of it even partly effective. The administration of justice was improved. The administrative jurisdiction which the Senate exercised either personally or by extraordinary commissions over provincial officials was confessedly inadequate; and the innovation proposed in 149 B.C. by Lucius Calpurnius Piso, for a standing commission to try the complaints of the provincials against the extortions of their Roman magistrates, had a momentous bearing on the whole public life of the Roman community. An effort was made to free the comitia 4 from the domination of the aristocracy. The panacea of Roman democracy was vote by ballot in the assemblies of citizens, introduced first for the election of magistrates by the Gabinian Law (139 B.C.), then for the public tribunals by the Cassian Law (137 B.C.), and lastly for voting on legislative proposals by the Papirian Law (131 B.C.). Soon afterwards the senators were also required by decree of the people to give up their command of mounted soldiers on admission to the Senate, and thereby to renounce their privilege of voting in the equestrian order.5 These measures, directed to the emancipation of the electorate from the ruling aristocracy, may perhaps have seemed to the party which suggested them the first steps toward regenerating the state. In reality, they made not the slightest change in the impotence of the legally supreme organ of the Roman community, the citizenry. That impotence, indeed, was only the more obvious to all, whether it concerned them or not. Equally ostentatious and equally empty was the formal recognition of the independence and sovereignty of the citizens by transferring their place of assembly from the old Comitium below the Capitol to the Forum (c. 145 B.C.).
But this hostility between the formal sovereignty of the people and the actually existing constitution was largely a sham. Party phrases were in free circulation, but of parties themselves there was little trace in important practical affairs. Throughout the republic’s last century the annual public election, especially to the consulship and censorship,6 was the real focus of political activity; but only in rare and isolated instances did the opposing candidates represent different political principles. Ordinarily the contests were purely between personalities, and it was a matter of practical indifference whether the majority of votes fell to a Caecilian or a Cornelian. The Romans thus lacked the great compensation for the evils of party politics—the spontaneous choice by the masses of the goals which they preferred—and yet endured all those evils solely for the benefit of the paltry game played by the ruling clique.
It was comparatively easy for the Roman noble to begin a political career as tribune of the people or as quaestor,7 but the consulship or the censorship was attainable only by great exertions prolonged over the years. The prizes were many, but those really worth having were few: the competitors ran, as a Roman poet once said, over a racecourse wide at the starting point but gradually narrowing toward the end. This was right so long as political office was (as it was called) an “honor,” and so long as men of military, political, or juristic ability competed for the ultimate prizes. But now the exclusiveness of the nobility did away with the benefits of competition, and left only its disadvantages. With few exceptions the young men of the ruling families crowded into the political arena, and their impetuous and premature ambition soon sought channels more effective than mere public service. The first prerequisite for a career came to be powerful connections. Therefore that career began not, as it once had, in the camp, but in the waiting-rooms of influential men. A new and genteel body of hangers-on began to do what had formerly been done only by dependents and freedmen, to come and wait on their patron early in the morning and appear publicly in his train.
But the populace was also a great lord, and desired its share of attention. The rabble began to demand as its right that the future consul should recognize and honor the sovereign people in every ragged idler of the street, and that every candidate should in his “going round” (ambitus) salute every individual voter by name and press his hand. The world of quality readily entered into this degrading canvass. The candidate cringed not only in the palace but also on the street, and recommended himself to the multitude by flattering attentions, indulgences, and civilities. A demagogic cry for reform was sedulously employed to attract public notice and favor, and was the more effective the more it attacked personalities. It became the custom for beardless youths of genteel birth to introduce themselves noisily into public life by replaying with boyish eloquence the part of Cato, proclaiming themselves state prosecutors against some man of high standing and great unpopularity. Thus the Romans permitted the courts and the police to become a means of soliciting office. The provision (or still worse, the promise) of magnificent popular amusements had long been the accepted route to the consulship, but now the votes of the electors began to be directly bought, as is shown by the prohibition issued about 159 B.C.
Perhaps the worst consequence of this continual courting of popular favor by the ruling aristocracy was the incompatibility of such begging and fawning with the position which government should rightfully occupy in relation to the governed. The government was thus converted from a blessing to a curse for the people. It no longer ventured to dispose of the blood and treasure of the citizens, as exigency required, for the good of their country. It allowed the people to become habituated to the dangerous idea that they were legally exempt from direct taxes even as an advance: after the war with King Perseus of Macedonia ending in 168 B.C. no further advance was asked of the community. It allowed the military system to decay rather than compel the citizens to enter the hated overseas service; and hard was the fate of officials who attempted strict enforcement of the conscription laws.
In the Rome of this epoch, the twin evils of a degenerate aristocracy and an infant democracy already cankered in the bud were joined in a fatal marriage. According to their party names, which were first heard during this period, the “Optimates” wished to give effect to the will of the best, the “Populares” to that of the community; but in fact there was in Rome of that day neither a true aristocracy nor a truly self-governing community. Both parties contended alike for shadows, and numbered in their ranks none but zealots or hypocrites. Both were equally tainted by political corruption, both were equally worthless. Both were necessarily tied to the status quo, for neither had a single political idea (not to mention a political plan) reaching beyond the existing state of affairs. Accordingly, the two parties were in such entire agreement that their ends and means dovetailed at every step, and a change of party was a change of political tactics rather than of political sentiments. The commonwealth would doubtless have gained if the aristocracy had introduced a hereditary rotation, or if the democracy had produced from within itself a genuine popular government. But these “Optimates” and “Populares” of the Republic’s last century were far too indispensable to each other to wage internecine war; they not only could not destroy each other, but would not have done so if they could. Meanwhile the commonwealth, politically and morally more and more unhinged, was verging toward utter disorganization.
The crisis that sparked the Roman revolution arose not out of this petty political conflict, but out of the economic and social relations which the Roman government allowed, like everything else, simply to take their course. Thus the social infection, which had long been developing, was allowed to come to a head with fearful rapidity and violence. From a very early period the Roman economy was based on two factors, always interdependent and always at odds—the husbandry of the small farmer and the money of the capitalist. The latter, hand in glove with the great landholders, had for centuries waged a war against the small farmer, a war which seemed destined to end by destroying first the farmer class and then the commonwealth. But the struggle was broken off indecisively by the extensive distribution of new lands accruing to the state from successful wars.
In that same age, which renewed the distinction between patricians and plebeians under altered names, the disproportionate accumulation of capital was preparing a second assault on the farming system. It is true that the method was different. Formerly the small farmer had been ruined by loans of money, which practically reduced him to a mere steward of his creditor; now he was crushed by the competition of overseas, especially slave-grown, grain. The capitalists kept pace with the times. While waging war against labor and against personal liberty, as they had always done to the extent permitted by law, they waged it no longer in the unseemly fashion that converted the free man into a slave through his debts, but on the contrary with slaves regularly bought and paid for; the former usurer of capital appeared in contemporary guise as the owner of commercial plantations. But in both cases the ultimate result was the same: the undermining of the Italian farms; the supplanting of small farming first in part of the provinces and then in Italy by the farming of large estates; the concentration of these large Italian farms upon cattle, oil, and wine; and finally, the replacing of free laborers both in the provinces and in Italy by slaves. Just as the new nobility was more dangerous than the old patricians, because the former could not be set aside by changing the constitution, so the new power of capital was less controllable than that of previous centuries because nothing could be done to oppose it by changing the law of the land.
Before we attempt to describe this second great conflict between labor and captial, it is necessary to give some account of the nature and extent of the slave system. We do not now refer to the old, and in some measure innocent, rural slavery, under which the farmer tilled the field along with his slave, or, if he possessed more land than he could manage, placed the slave either as a steward or as a sort of share-tenant over a detached farm. Such relationships no doubt persisted (around Comum, for instance, they were still the rule in the time of the Empire), but only as exceptions in privileged districts and on humanely managed estates. What we now refer to is the system of slavery on a grand scale, which in the Roman state as formerly in the Carthaginian grew out of the ascendancy of capital. While the captives taken in war and the hereditary transmission of slavery sufficed to keep up the stock of slaves during the earlier period, this new system of slavery was, like that of America, based on the methodically prosecuted hunting of man. For owing to the manner in which slaves were used, with little regard to their life or propagation, the slave population was constantly on the wane, and even the wars that continually furnished fresh masses to the slave markets could not cover the deficit.
No country where this species of game could be hunted remained unmolested; even in Italy it was by no means unheard of for the poor free man to be placed by his employer among the slaves. But the Negro-land of that age was western Asia, where the Cretan and Cilician corsairs, the real professional slave hunters and slave dealers, robbed the coasts of Syria and the Greek islands, and where the Roman taxgatherers emulated their feats by instituting manhunts in the satellite states and enslaving those whom they captured. This was done to such an extent that about 100 B.C. the king of Bithynia declared himself unable to furnish the required contingent of auxiliaries to the Roman army, because all his people capable of labor had been dragged off by the taxgatherers. At the great market in Delos, where the slave dealers of Asia Minor sold their wares to Italian speculators, as many as 10,000 slaves are said to have been disembarked in one morning and to have been sold before evening—a proof of how enormous was the number of slaves, and of how the demand still exceeded the supply.
It was no wonder. The Roman economy of the second century B.C. was based, like all the large-scale economies of antiquity, on the employment of slaves. In whatever direction speculation applied itself, its instrument was invariably man reduced by law to the status of a beast of burden. Trade was in great part carried on by slaves, the proceeds belonging to the master. Tax-gathering in the lower departments was regularly conducted by the slaves of the associations that leased them. Servile hands performed the operations of mining, of making pitch, and others of a similar kind. It early became the custom to send herds of slaves to the Spanish mines, whose superintendents readily paid a high rent for them. The vine and olive harvest of Italy was not conducted by the people on the estate, but was contracted for by a slave operator. The armed, and frequently mounted, slave herdsmen who roamed the great pastoral districts of Italy were soon transplanted to those provinces which were favored by Roman speculation—Dalmatia, for example, had hardly been acquired (155 B.C.) before Roman capitalists introduced there the rearing of cattle on a great scale after the Italian fashion.
Far worse in every respect was the plantation system proper, the cultivation of the fields by a band of slaves sometimes branded with iron, who with shackles on their legs labored in the fields under overseers during the day, and were locked up together at night in their common and often underground prison. This plantation system had migrated from the East to Carthage, and seems to have been brought by the Carthaginians to Sicily, where it appears to have developed earlier and more fully than in any other part of the Roman dominions. The Sicilian territory of Leontini, for example, where about 30,000 acres of arable land were let out by the censors as Roman domain, was divided some decades after the time of the Gracchi among not more than 84 lessees, making an average of 360 acres per lessee; and among these only one was a Leontine, the rest being foreign, mostly Roman, speculators. We see from this instance with what zeal the Roman capitalists walked in the footsteps of their predecessors, and what extensive dealings in Sicilian cattle and Sicilian slave-grown grain must have been carried on by the Roman and non-Roman operators who covered that beautiful island with their pastures and plantations.
Italy, however, still remained substantially exempt from this worst form of slave-husbandry—although in Etruria, where the plantation system seems first to have emerged on the mainland, and where at any rate it was most extensive forty years afterwards, it is quite probable that plantations already existed. Yet Italian agriculture in this age was still carried on chiefly by free laborers or at least by unchained slaves, while larger undertakings were frequently let out to contractors. The difference between Italian and Sicilian slavery is clearly apparent from the fact that the slaves of the Mamertine community, which lived after the Italian fashion, were the only slaves who did not take part in the Sicilian servile revolt of 135-132 B.C.
The abyss of misery and woe which engulfed this most miserable of all proletariats we leave to be fathomed by those who can bear to gaze into such depths. It is quite possible that, compared with the sufferings of the Roman slaves, the sum of all Negro suffering is but a drop. Here, however, we are less concerned with the hardships of the slaves themselves than with the perils which they brought upon the Roman state, and with the government’s policy in confronting them. It was plain that this proletariat was not created by the government and could not be directly set aside by it, for this would have entailed remedies still worse than the disease. The duty of the government was simply (1) to avert by a vigilant police the direct threat of the slave population to property and life, and (2) to aim at restricting the spread of slavery as far as possible by the support of free labor. Let us see how the Roman aristocracy executed these two tasks.
The slave conspiracies and wars breaking out everywhere illustrate their management as regards police. In Italy the scenes of disorder which had been among the painful accompaniments of the Hannibalic war were now renewed; in one year (133 B.C.) the Romans were obliged to seize and execute 150 slaves in the capital, 450 in Minturnae, and 4,000 in Sinuessa. Still worse, as might be expected, was the state of the provinces. At about the same period the revolting slaves at the great market at Delos and in the Attic silver mines had to be put down by force of arms. The war against Aristonicus and his “Heliopolites” in Asia Minor was in substance a war of landowners against the revolted slaves.
But worst of all, of course, was the condition of Sicily, the chosen land of the plantation system. Brigandage, long a standing evil there, especially in the interior, began to swell into insurrection. Damophilus, a wealthy planter of Enna who emulated the Italian lords in the exploitation of his living capital, was attacked and murdered by his exasperated rural slaves; then the savage band flocked into the town of Enna and repeated the process on a greater scale. The slaves rose in a body against their masters, killed or enslaved them, and summoned to the head of their now considerable insurgent army a juggler from Apamea in Syria who knew how to vomit fire and utter oracles. Formerly named Eunus when he was a slave, as king of the insurgents he was styled Antiochus, King of the Syrians. And why not? A few years earlier another Syrian slave, who was not even a prophet, had in Antioch itself worn the diadem of the Seleucids of Syria. The Greek slave Achaeus, the brave commander of the new “king,” traveled throughout the island; and not only did the wild herdsmen flock from far and near to the strange banner, but also the free laborers, who bore no goodwill to the planters, made common cause with the revolted slaves.
In another district of Sicily Cleon, a Cilician slave who had in his native land been a daring bandit, followed the example of Eunus by occupying Agrigentum. Then the leaders came to a mutual understanding, and, after gaining various minor advantages, at length succeeded in totally defeating the praetor Lucius Hypsaeus and his army (mostly Sicilian militia) and in capturing his camp. By this victory almost the whole island fell into the hands of the insurgents, whose numbers, by the most conservative estimates, are put at 70,000 men capable of bearing arms. The Romans found themselves compelled for three successive years (134-132 B.C.) to send consuls and consular armies to Sicily, until, after several indecisive and even unfavorable conflicts, the revolt was finally subdued by the capture of Tauromenium and Enna. The most resolute insurgents threw themselves into the latter town with the determination of men who despair of deliverance or pardon. The consuls Lucius Calpurnius Piso and Publius Rupilius lay before it for two years, and finally reduced it more by famine than by arms.
Such was the quality of the policing by the Roman Senate and its officials in Italy and in the provinces. While the task of getting rid of such a proletariat all too often transcends the power and wisdom of a government, its police repression is comparatively easy for any large commonwealth. It would be well with states if the unpropertied masses threatened them with no greater danger than from bears and wolves; only the timid, and those who trade upon the silly fears of the multitude, prophesy the destruction of civil order through slave revolts or proletarian insurrections. But even this easier task of restraining the oppressed masses was beyond the capacities of the Roman government, despite the general peace and the inexhaustible resources of the state.
This was a sign of its weakness, but not of its weakness alone. By law the Roman governor was bound to keep the roads clear and to have the robbers who were caught crucified, if they were slaves, for slavery is not possible without a reign of terror. In this period in Sicily a roundup was doubtless initiated by the governor, when the roads became too insecure. But in order not to disoblige the Italian planters, the captured robbers were ordinarily handed over by the authorities to be punished at their masters’ discretion; and those masters were frugal people who, if their slave herdsmen asked for clothes, replied with lashes and with the inquiry whether travelers journeyed through the land naked. The result of such connivance was that on the subjugation of the Sicilian slave revolt the consul Publius Rupilius ordered all those who came into his hands alive—upwards of 20,000 men, it is said—to be crucified. It was no longer possible to spare capital.
The efforts of the government in supporting free labor, and thereby restricting the slave proletariat, promised fruits far more difficult to harvest but also far richer. Unfortunately, in this respect nothing was done at all. In the earlier social crisis the landlords had been required by law to employ free laborers proportionate to the number of their slaves. Now, at the government’s suggestion, a Punic treatise on agriculture, giving instructions in the Carthaginian system of planting, was translated into Latin for use by Roman speculators—the first and only instance of a literary undertaking initiated by the Roman Senate!
The same tendency showed itself in a more vital question—indeed, the vital question for Rome—the system of colonization. It needed no special wisdom, beyond a mere recollection of the course of Rome’s first social crisis, to perceive that the only real remedy for an agricultural proletariat lay in a comprehensive and regular system of emigration; and for this the external relations of Rome offered the most favorable opportunity. Until nearly the middle of the second century B.C., the continuous diminution of the small landholders of Italy was offset by the continuous establishment of new farm allotments. True, this was not done to the extent that it might and should have been done. Not only was the public land long occupied by private persons not recalled, but further occupation of newly won land was permitted. Other important acquisitions, such as the territory of Capua, though not abandoned to occupation, were leased to commercial operators rather than distributed to individual farmers. Nevertheless, allotments of land had given help to many sufferers and hope to all. But after the founding of Luna (177 B.C.) there is no trace of further distribution for a long time, with the isolated exception of the Picenian colony of Auximum in 157 B.C.
The reason is simple. After the conquest of the Boii and the Apuani no new territory was acquired in Italy except the unattractive Ligurian valleys. Therefore no land existed for distribution save the leased or occupied public land, the appropriation of which was, as might be expected, just as disagreeable to the aristocracy as it had been three hundred years before. The distribution of territory outside Italy appeared inadmissible for political reasons: Italy was to remain the ruling country, and the wall between the Italian masters and their provincial servants was not to be broken down. Unless the government was willing to set aside considerations of higher policy and even the interests of the ruling order, no other course was left for it but to remain a spectator of the ruin of the small Italian farmer; and precisely that result ensued.
The capitalists continued to buy out the small landholders, or, if they remained obstinate, to seize their fields outright—in which case, as might be supposed, matters were not always amicably settled. A particularly favored method was to evict the farmer’s wife and children while he was absent on military service, and thus to make him comply with a fait accompli. The landlords continued largely to employ slaves rather than free men, because the former could not like the latter be called into the army. Thus they reduced the free laborer to the slave’s level of misery. They continued to supersede Italian grain in the capital, and to lessen its value over the whole peninsula, by selling Sicilian slave-grown grain at a nominal price. In Etruria the old native aristocracy, in league with the Roman capitalists, as early as 134 B.C. had brought matters to such a pass that there were no free farmers left. It could be said aloud at Rome that the wild beasts of Italy had their lairs, but nothing was left to the citizens save the air and the sunshine, and that those who were called the masters of the world had no longer a clod to call their own.
The census lists of Roman citizens gave point to these words. From the end of the Hannibalic war (202 B.C.) down to 159 B.C. the number of citizens was steadily on the rise, mainly because of the continuous and extensive distributions of public land which occurred chiefly in the first twenty-five years of this period. After 159 B.C., when the census enumerated 328,000 citizens capable of bearing arms, there appears a regular decline to 324,000 in 154, 322,000 in 147, and 319,000 in 131—an alarming trend in a time of widespread peace at home and abroad. If matters went on at this rate, the whole population would end up either as planters or slaves, and the Roman state might ultimately, like the Parthian, buy its soldiers in the slave market.
Such was the condition of Rome when the state entered upon its seventh century of existence. Wherever the eye turned it encountered abuses and decay, and every wise and well-intentioned man could not but ask himself whether this state of things was not capable of remedy or amelioration. There was no lack of such men in Rome, but none seemed more called to the great work of political and social reform than Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus (184-129 B.C.), the favorite son of Aemilius Paullus and the adopted grandson of the great Scipio, whose glorious surname of Africanus he bore not through mere hereditary right but by personal achievement. Like his father, he was a temperate man, thoroughly healthy in body, and never at a loss to choose the immediate and necessary course of action. As a youth he had kept aloof from the usual antics of political novices, such as attending in the anterooms of prominent senators and delivering forensic declarations. At the same time he loved the chase: after serving with distinction as a youth of seventeen under his father in the campaign against Perseus, he had asked as his reward the free run of the deer forests of the Macedonian kings which had been untouched for four years. He was also especially devoted to literary and scientific enjoyment. Through his father’s care he had been early introduced to the genuine Greek culture, which elevated him above the tasteless Hellenizing then in vogue. By his appreciation of the good and bad in Greek character, and by his aristocratic bearing, this Roman impressed the courts of the East and even the scoffing Alexandrians.
His Hellenism was especially recognizable in the delicate irony of his discourse and the classic purity of his Latin. Though not strictly an author, like Cato he committed his political speeches to writing (like the letters of his adopted sister and the mother of the Gracchi, they were esteemed by later students as prose masterpieces); and he took pleasure in surrounding himself with the cream of the Greek and Roman intelligentsia, a plebeian crowd doubtless regarded with no small suspicion by his senatorial colleagues whose noble birth was their sole distinction. A man morally steadfast and trustworthy, his word held good with friend and foe. He avoided ostentatious building and speculation, and lived simply. In money matters he acted not only honorably and disinterestedly, but also with a humaneness and generosity that seemed the more singular alongside the mercenary spirit of his contemporaries. He was an able soldier and officer. He brought home from the African war the honorary wreath conferred on those who saved the lives of fellow-citizens at peril of their own, and he terminated as a general the war he had begun as an officer, though circumstances gave him no opportunity to try his military skill on really difficult tasks.
Scipio was not, any more than his father, a man of brilliant gifts (as indicated by his predilection for Xenophon, the sober soldier and correct author). But he was a man honest and true, who seemed pre-eminently suited to stem the incipient decay. All the more significant is the fact that he did not attempt it. It is true that he helped, when he had opportunity and means, to redress or prevent certain abuses, and he labored particularly at improving the administration of justice. It was chiefly through his aid that Lucius Cassius, an able man of old Roman austerity and uprightness, was able to carry against the vehement opposition of the Optimates his voting law, which introduced vote by ballot for those popular tribunals which comprised the most important part of the criminal jurisdiction. In like manner, though he had chosen not to take part in boyish impeachments, in his mature years he brought to trial several of the guiltiest of the aristocracy. In the same spirit, when commanding before Carthage and Numantia, he drove the women and priests out of the camp, and once more subjected the soldiers to the iron yoke of the old military discipline. As censor (142 B.C.) he cleared away the smooth-chinned coxcombs from the world of quality, and urged the citizens in earnest language to adhere more faithfully to the honest customs of their fathers.
But no one—least of all Scipio—could fail to see that increased stringency in the administration of justice was not even a first step toward healing the organic ills that burdened the state. These Scipio did not touch. His elder friend, political mentor, and confidant Gaius Laelius (consul in 140 B.C.) had conceived the plan of resuming the distribution of the Italian public lands which had not been given away but had been temporarily occupied, and thus relieving the visibly decaying Italian farmers; but he desisted when he saw what a storm he was going to raise, and was thenceforth named “the Judicious.” Scipio was of the same opinion. He was fully convinced of the greatness of the evil, and with honorable courage he remorselessly assailed it when he risked himself alone. But he was also persuaded that the nation could be relieved only at the price of a revolution similar to that which had accompanied the reforms of the third and fourth centuries B.C., and rightly or wrongly, the remedy seemed to him worse than the disease. Thus with a small circle of friends he held a middle position between the aristocrats (who never forgave him for his advocacy of the Cassian law) and the democrats (whom he neither satisfied nor wished to satisfy), solitary during his life, and praised after his death by both parties as the champion of the aristocracy and as the promoter of reform. Down to his time, the censors on giving up their office had prayed the gods to grant greater power and glory to the state. The censor Scipio prayed that they might deign to preserve the state, and his whole confession of faith lies in that painful exclamation.
But where the man who had twice led the Roman army from deep decline to victory despaired, a youth without achievements had the boldness to step forth as the savior of Italy. His name was Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (163-133 B.C.). His father of the same name (consul 177 and 163, censor 169 B.C.) was the model of a Roman aristocrat. The magnificence of his games (as aedile, 182 B.C.), not produced without oppressing the dependent communities, had drawn upon him the severe and deserved censure of the Senate. His intervention in the pitiful processes against the Scipios, who were personally hostile to him, gave proof of his chivalrous feeling, and perhaps of his regard for his own order; and his energetic action against the freedmen in his censorship evinced his conservative disposition. As governor of the province of the Ebro in Spain, he rendered a permanent service to his country by his bravery and integrity, and at the same time he raised to himself in the hearts of the subject nation an enduring monument of affection.
His wife Cornelia was the daughter of the great Scipio, the conqueror of Zama, who, simply on account of Gracchus’ generous intervention, had chosen his former opponent as a son-in-law. Cornelia herself was a highly cultivated and notable woman, who after the death of her much older husband refused the hand of the king of Egypt, and reared her three surviving children in memory of her husband and her father.
Tiberius, the elder of the two sons, was of good moral disposition and gentle bearing, apparently fitted for anything rather than for an agitator of the masses. He belonged to the Scipionic circle, whose refined and thorough culture, both Greek and Roman, he and his brother and sister shared. Scipio Aemilianus was at once his cousin and his sister’s husband; under him Tiberius, at the age of eighteen, had taken part in the storming of Carthage, and had by his valor acquired the commendation of the stern general. It was natural that the able young man should, with all the vigor and stringent precision of youth, adopt and intensify the views prevalent in his circle as to the pervading decay of the state, and more especially their ideas for relieving the Italian farmers.
It was not merely to the young men that Laelius’ hesitancy to carry out his ideas of reform seemed rather weak than judicious. Appius Claudius, who had already been consul (143 B.C.) and censor (136 B.C.), one of the most respected men in the Senate, censured the Scipionic circle for having so soon abandoned the scheme of distributing the domain-lands; and the passionate vehemence which was the hereditary characteristic of the Claudian house seemed in this case to have been tainted with greater bitterness, apparently because he had come into personal conflict with Scipio Aemilianus in his candidacy for the censorship. Similar views were expressed by Publius Crassus Mucianus, the pontifex maximus 8 of the day, who was universally honored by the Senate and the citizens as a man and a jurist. His brother Publius Mucius Scaevola, the founder of Roman scientific jurisprudence, seemed not averse to the plan of reform, and his voice was of greater weight in that he stood somewhat aloof from the parties. Similar sentiments were held by Quintus Metellus, conqueror of Macedonia and of the Achaeans, but respected less for his warlike deeds than because he was a model of the old discipline and manners in both his personal and public life. Tiberius Gracchus was closely connected with these men, particularly with Appius whose daughter he had married, and with Mucianus whose daughter was married to his brother. No wonder he cherished the idea of furthering the project of reform, as soon as he should find himself in a position which would constitutionally allow him the initiative.
Personal motives may have strengthened this resolution. The treaty of peace which Mancinus concluded with the Spanish city of Numantia in 137 B.C. was in substance the work of Gracchus. The recollection that the Senate had canceled it, that the general had on this account been surrendered to the enemy,9 and that Gracchus and other superior officers had escaped a like fate only through the greater favor which he enjoyed with the people, could scarcely put the proud and upright young man in better humor with the ruling aristocracy. The Hellenic rhetoricians with whom he was fond of discussing philosophy and politics, Diophanes of Mytilene and Gaius Blossius of Cumae, nourished within his soul the ideals over which he brooded. When his intentions became known in wider circles, there was no want of approving voices, and many a public placard summoned the grandson of Africanus to think of the deliverance of the poor people of Italy.
Tiberius Gracchus became tribune of the people on the tenth of December, 134 B.C., when the fearful consequences of the past misgovernment and the political, military, economic, and moral decay of the community were naked to all eyes. One of the two consuls of this year fought without success in Sicily against the revolted slaves. The other, Scipio Aemilianus, was employed for months in crushing rather than conquering a small Spanish country town. If Gracchus still needed a special summons to give effect to his resolution, he found it in this state of affairs which filled the mind of every patriot with unspeakable anxiety. His father-in-law promised assistance in counsel and action, and the support of the jurist Scaevola, who had just been elected consul for the coming year, might be hoped for.
Accordingly Gracchus, immediately upon taking office, proposed an agrarian law which was fundamentally a renewal of the Licinio-Sextian Law of 367 B.C. Under it all the state lands which were occupied and enjoyed by the possessors without remuneration (regularly leased lands, such as the territory of Capua, were not affected) were to revert to the state. However, there was the restriction that each occupier should reserve 500 acres for himself and 250 acres for each son (not, however, to exceed 1,000 acres in all) in permanent and guaranteed possession, or should be entitled to claim equivalent compensation in land elsewhere. Indemnification appears to have been granted for any improvements executed by the former holders, such as buildings and plantations.
The public land thus recaptured was to be broken up into plots of 30 acres. These were to be distributed partly to citizens and partly to Italian allies, not as their absolute property but as inalienable heritable leaseholds, whose holders bound themselves to use the land for agriculture and to pay a moderate rent to the state treasury. A commission of three men, who were to be regarded as ordinary and standing magistrates of the state to be annually elected by the assembly of the people, was to be entrusted with the work of recapture and distribution, to which was later added the important and difficult function of legally settling what was public and what was private property. The distribution was thus designed to go on for an indefinite period until the very extensive and complicated Italian domains had been dealt with. The new features in the Sempronian agrarian law as compared with the Licinio-Sextian were (1) the clause in favor of the hereditary possessors, (2) the leasehold and inalienable tenure proposed for the new allotments, and especially (3) the permanent regulatory commission, the lack of which had been the chief reason why the older law had become a dead letter.
War was thus declared against the great landholders, who, as three centuries before, found their major ally in the Senate; and once again a single magistrate stood up in defiance of the aristocratic government. The Senate began the conflict by means long sanctioned in such cases, by countering the innovation of one magistrate by the conservative power of the magistracy itself. Another tribune, Marcus Octavius, a resolute man convinced of the objectionable character of the proposed land law, interposed his veto when it was about to be put to vote—a step whose constitutional effect was to set aside the proposal. Gracchus in his turn suspended the business of the state and the administration of justice, and placed his seal on the public treasury. The government acquiesced: it was inconvenient, but the year would draw to an end. Gracchus, in perplexity, offered his law to the voters a second time. Octavius of course repeated his veto, and when his colleague and former friend pleaded with him not to obstruct the salvation of Italy, he replied that opinions differed as to how Italy could be saved, but that his constitutional right to use his veto against the proposal was beyond all doubt.
The Senate now attempted to open up a decent retreat for Gracchus. Two former consuls challenged him to debate the matter further in the Senate, and the tribune agreed with alacrity. He sought to construe the offer of debate as implying that the Senate had conceded the principle of distributing the public lands; but since this was not the case, nor was the Senate disposed to yield at all in the matter, the discussions ended without result. Constitutional means were thus exhausted. In former days men were not indisposed to let the proposal sleep for the current year, and to take it up in each succeeding one until the urgency of the demand and the pressure of public opinion overcame the resistance. But things were now at a higher tension, and Gracchus felt he had reached the point when he must either wholly renounce his reform or begin a revolution.
He chose the latter course. He came before the people with the declaration that either he or Octavius must retire as tribune, and suggested to Octavius that a vote of the citizens should determine which of them should be dismissed. Octavius naturally refused this strange challenge: the tribune’s veto existed for the very purpose of giving scope to such differences of opinion among colleagues. Then Gracchus broke off the discussion, and asked the assembled multitude whether a tribune of the people who acted in opposition to the people had not forfeited his office. The assembly, long accustomed to approve all proposals presented to it, and for the most part composed of farmers who had flocked in from the country and were personally interested in the success of the law, gave an almost unanimous affirmative. At the bidding of Gracchus, Marcus Octavius was removed by the lictors from the tribunes’ bench. Then, in the midst of universal rejoicing, the agrarian law was carried and the first allotment commissioners were nominated.
Those chosen were Tiberius Gracchus himself, his brother Gaius (who was only twenty years of age), and his father-in-law Appius Claudius—a family selection that heightened the exasperation of the aristocracy. When the new magistrates applied to the Senate for an appropriation to cover their equipment and daily expenses, the equipment outlay was refused, and twenty-four asses (one shilling) was set as a daily allowance. The feud spread, and became more envenomed and more personal. The intricate task of defining, recapturing, and distributing the public domains carried strife into every Roman community, and even into the allied Italian towns.
The aristocracy made no secret that, while they might acquiesce in the law because they had to, its officious author would never escape their vengeance; and the announcement of Quintus Pompeius, that he would impeach Gracchus on the very day he resigned the tribunate, was far from the worst of the threats hurled at the tribune. Gracchus believed, probably with reason, that his personal safety was imperiled, and he no longer appeared in the Forum without a retinue of 3,000 to 4,000 men—a step which drew bitter condemnation from the Senate, even from men like Metellus who were not averse to reform itself. If he had expected to reach his goal by passing his agrarian law, he now learned that he was only at the starting point. The “people” owed him gratitude, but he was a lost man if he had no further protection than the gratitude of the people, and if he did not continue indispensable to them by constantly arousing fresh interests and hopes through new and more comprehensive proposals.
Just at that time the kingdom and wealth of the Attalids had fallen to the Romans by the testament of the last king of Pergamus. Gracchus proposed to the people that the Pergamene treasure should be distributed among the new landholders for the purchase of the necessary implements and livestock; and he proposed, contrary to existing practice, that the status of the new province should be decided by popular vote. He is said to have prepared further popular measures for shortening the period of military service, for extending the right of appeal, for abolishing the exclusive prerogative of senators to serve as civil jurymen, and even for admitting the Italian allies to Roman citizenship. How far his projects actually reached cannot now be ascertained. This alone is certain, that Gracchus saw that his only safety lay in inducing the people to elect him again to the office which protected him, and that, to obtain this unconstitutional re-election, he dangled the prospect of further reforms. Where at first he had risked himself to save the commonwealth, he was now obliged to imperil the commonwealth for his own safety.
When the assembly met to elect the tribunes for the following year, the first divisions cast their votes for Gracchus. But the opposing party’s veto prevailed in the end, at least to the extent that the assembly broke up without decision, which was postponed to the next day. For this second meeting Gracchus marshaled every resource. He appeared in public dressed in mourning, and commended to the people the care of his youthful son. Then, anticipating that the election would once again be disturbed by a veto, he made provision for expelling the adherents of the aristocracy from the place of meeting by force. On the second day of election the votes fell as on the first. Again the veto was exercised, and the tumult began. The citizens dispersed, the elective assembly was practically dissolved, and the Capitoline temple was closed. It was rumored in the city that Tiberius had deposed all the tribunes, and was resolved to continue his magistracy without reelection.
The Senate met in the temple of Fidelity, close by the temple of Jupiter. The bitterest opponents of Gracchus spoke in the sitting, and when Tiberius moved his hand to his forehead to signify to the people amid the wild tumult that his head was in danger, it was charged that he was summoning the people to grant him the crown. The consul Scaevola was urged to order the traitor immediately put to death. When that temperate man, by no means averse to reform in itself, indignantly refused the barbarous demand, the ex-consul and chief priest Publius Scipio Nasica, a harsh and vehement aristocrat, summoned those who shared his views to arm themselves as they could and to follow him. Few of the country people had come into town for the election, and the people of the city timidly gave way before men of quality with fury in their eyes and chair-legs as clubs in their hands. With a few attendants, Gracchus attempted to escape, but in his flight he fell on the slope of the Capitol, and was killed by a blow on the head from the bludgeon of one of his furious pursuers (Publius Satureius and Lucius Rufus afterward contested for the infamous honor) before the statues of the seven kings at the temple of Fidelity. Three hundred others died with him, not one by weapons of iron. When evening came the bodies were thrown into the Tiber, Gaius Gracchus vainly pleading that his brother’s corpse might be spared for decent burial.
Such a day had never before been seen in Rome. The strife of more than a century during the first social crisis had led to no such catastrophe. The better men of the aristocracy might shudder, but they could no longer retreat. With no choice save to abandon a great number of their most loyal partisans to the vengeance of the multitude, or to assume collective responsibility for the outrage, they chose the latter course. They gave official sanction to the story that Gracchus had sought the crown, and justified this latest crime by the primitive precedent of Servilius Ahala.10 In fact, they even formed a special investigating commission to ferret out Gracchus’ accomplices, placing at its head the consul Publius Popillius, to put a kind of posthumous legal stamp on the murder by issuing bloody sentences against a large number of lesser persons (132 B.C.).
Nasica, against whom the multitude breathed special vengeance, and who at least had the courage to admit his deed openly and to defend it, was sent on an honorable mission to Asia, and invested during his absence with the office of pontifex maximus. Nor did the leaders of the moderate party dissociate themselves from these actions. Gaius Laelius took part in the investigations against the supporters of Gracchus; Publius Scaevola, who had tried to prevent the murder, defended it afterwards in the Senate; and Scipio Aemilianus, when challenged publicly on his return from Spain (132 B.C.) to declare whether he approved the killing of his brother-in-law, gave the ambiguous reply that so far as Tiberius had aspired to the crown, he had been justly put to death.
Let us endeavor to form a judgment on these momentous events. The appointment of an official commission to counteract the dangerous diminution of the farmer class, by the comprehensive creation of new small holdings from the public lands owned by the state, was hardly a sign of a healthy national economy; but it was, under existing conditions, well suited to its purpose. The distribution of the public domain was, moreover, not a revolutionary issue. It might have been carried out to the last sod without changing the constitution or threatening the government of the aristocracy. Nor could there be any complaint of a violation of rights. The state was admittedly the owner of the occupied land. The holder, as a possessor on sufferance, could not generally claim even a bona fide proprietary tenure; and in the exceptional instances where he could do so, he confronted the fact that under Roman law mere possession could not invalidate the right of the state. The distribution of the domains was not a negation but an exercise of the right of property, and all jurists were agreed upon its formal legality.
But the attempt to carry out the state’s legal claims was far from being politically warranted by the fact that distribution of the public lands neither infringed the existing constitution nor violated any right. These occupied domains had undeniably been in heritable private possession, some of them for three hundred years. The state’s proprietorship of the soil, which by its very nature loses the character of a private right more quickly than that of the individual citizen, had in the case of these lands become virtually extinct, and the present holders had universally come into their possession by purchase or other regular acquisition. The jurist might say what he would: to men of business the measure appeared to be an ejection of the great landholders for the benefit of the agricultural proletariat, and in fact no statesman could give it any other name. Less objectionable perhaps, but still not without hazard, was the arrangement by which the new allotments bore the character of inalienable heritable leaseholds. The most liberal principles in regard to freedom of dealing had made Rome great; and it was hardly in keeping with the spirit of Roman institutions that these new farmers were committed to cultivate their lands in a definite manner, and that their allotments were subject to revocation and all the cramping measures associated with governmental restriction.
Granted that these objections to the Sempronian agrarian law were of no small weight, they were still not decisive. The proposed eviction of the occupiers of the public lands was certainly a great evil, yet it was the only available means of checking a much greater evil directly destructive to the state—the approaching ruin of the Italian farmers. We can well understand why the most distinguished and patriotic conservatives, headed by Gaius Laelius and Scipio Aemilianus, heartily approved, in principle, the land distribution.
But if Tiberius Gracchus’ aims appeared good and salutary to the great majority of discerning patriots, the methods which he adopted did not and could not meet with the support of a single man of note. The Rome of this period was governed by the Senate. Anyone who carried a legislative measure against the majority of the Senate made a revolution. It was revolution against the spirit of the constitution when Gracchus submitted the land question to the people. It was revolution against the letter when he overrode (and set the precedent for overriding) the tribunician veto—the corrective of the state machine—by deposing his colleague, which he justified with unworthy sophistry.
But it was not in this step that the moral and political mistake by Gracchus lay. There are no set forms of high treason in history: whoever provokes one power in the state to conflict with another is certainly a revolutionist, even though he may be at the same time a discerning and praiseworthy statesman. The essential defect of the Gracchan revolution, too frequently overlooked, lay in the nature of the existing popular assemblies. The agrarian laws of Spurius Cassius 11 and of Tiberius Gracchus had the same tenor and the same object, but the enterprises of the two men were as different as the former Roman citizenry which shared local spoils differed from the Romans who established the provinces of Asia and Africa. The former was a town community, whose members could meet and act together; the latter was a great state, in which the attempt to bring all the citizens into one great legislative body yielded a result as lamentable as it was ridiculous.
The fundamental defect of ancient politics—that it never developed from an urban constitution to that of a state, or (what is the same thing) from a system of primary assemblies to a representative system—in this case avenged itself. The sovereign assembly of Rome was what the sovereign assembly of England would be if all the voters of England, instead of sending representatives, should meet together as a parliament in an unwieldy mass, wildly agitated by interests and special passions, in which intelligence was totally lost; a body neither able to take a comprehensive view nor even to form a will of its own; above all, a body in which, with rare exceptions, a couple of hundred or thousand individuals accidentally picked from the streets acted and voted in the name of the whole citizenry.
But although these voting assemblies were attended, at least mainly, by Roman citizens, in the great popular meetings (contiones) everyone in the shape of a man—Egyptians and Jews, street-boys and slaves—was entitled to take his place and shout. Such a “meeting” certainly had no legal significance, for it could neither vote nor decree. But in practice it ruled the street, and already the opinion of the street was a power in Rome, so that it was of some importance whether this confused mass received the communications made to it with silence or uproar, and whether it applauded or hooted the orator. Not many had the courage of Scipio Aemilianus to face down the mob when he was hissed for his remarks on the death of his brother-in-law: “Ye to whom Italy is naught but step-mother ought to keep silent!” And when their fury grew still louder, “Surely you do not think I will fear those let loose, whom I have sent in chains to the slave-market?”
It was bad enough that the rusty machinery of the comitia should be used for legislation and elections. But when the masses—including in practice the contiones—were permitted to meddle in the government, and the instrument which the Senate employed to prevent such meddling was wrested out of its hands by the disregard of the tribunician veto; when this so-called citizens’ assembly was allowed to decree to itself farms and equipment out of the public purse; when anyone able to command the streets for a few hours could impress on his projects the legal stamp of the sovereign people’s will—then Rome had reached not the beginning but the end of popular freedom, and had arrived not at democracy, but at monarchy. For such reasons Cato and his followers in a previous age never brought such questions before the people, but discussed them solely in the Senate. For such reasons the men of the Scipionic circle, contemporaries of Gracchus, described the Flaminian12 agrarian law of 232 B.C. as the beginning of the decline of Roman greatness. For such reasons they allowed Tiberius Gracchus to fall, and saw his dreadful end as a kind of rampart against similar attempts in the future, while at the same time they carried out the land distribution his law had provided.
So sad was the state of things in Rome that honest patriots were forced into the horrible hypocrisy of abandoning the man and yet appropriating the fruit of his deed. For that reason too the opponents of Gracchus were in a sense not wrong, when they accused him of aspiring to the crown. That he himself probably had no such thought is a fresh impeachment rather than a justification. For so thoroughly pernicious was the aristocratic government, that the citizen who was able to depose the Senate and put himself in its place might have benefited the commonwealth more than he injured it.
Such a bold player Tiberius Gracchus was not. He was a tolerably capable, thoroughly well-meaning, conservative patriot who simply did not know what he was doing. In the belief that he was arousing the people he evoked the rabble, and grasped at the crown without being himself aware of it. But the iron sequence of events swept him irresistibly along the career of the demagogue-tyrant, until the family commission, the tampering with the public finances, the further “reforms” exacted by necessity and despair, the bodyguard from the gutter, and the conflicts in the streets betrayed the usurper more and more clearly to himself and others; and at last the unchained spirits of revolution seized and devoured the clumsy conjurer. The infamous butchery through which he perished condemns itself, as it condemns the aristocratic faction which perpetrated it. But the glory of martyrdom that has embellished the name of Tiberius Gracchus came in this instance, as usual, to the wrong man. The best of his contemporaries judged otherwise. When the catastrophe was announced to Scipio Aemilianus, he uttered the words of Homer:
“So perish all who dare such deeds as he.”
And when the younger brother of Tiberius seemed inclined toward the same career, his own mother wrote to him: “Shall our house have no end of this madness? Where shall be the limit? Have we not already enough to be ashamed of, in having confused and disorganized the state?”
So spoke not the anxious mother, but the daughter of the conqueror of Carthage, who knew and experienced a misfortune still greater than the death of her children.
1. In 168 B.C., when the Romans crushed the power of Macedonia and consolidated the Roman dominion in the East.
2. Crushing of the Romans by Hannibal at Cannae (216 B.C.) preceded total victory over the Carthaginians at Zama (202 B.C.).
3. Marcus Porcius Cato, “the Elder” (232-149 B.C.).
4. The electoral and legislative assemblies of the people. See Glossary.
5. The middle class of capital and business. See Glossary.
6. The two consuls, elected annually, were the executive heads of the state, while the primary function of the two censors was choosing new senators and removing unworthy ones from the rolls. See Glossary.
7. The tribunes of the people were the guardians of popular freedom; the quaestors were auxiliary officials acting for the two consuls. See Glossary.
8. Head of the official priesthood. See Glossary.
9. A curious Roman custom, dating from the disgraceful surrender at the Caudine Forks (321 B.C.), was to repudiate, on occasion, agreements made with the enemy by field commanders, and to offer a kind of moral compensation for the bad faith by surrendering the offending general and his principal officers.
10. A legendary figure of the first century of the Republic, whose assassination of Spurius Maelius for seeking the kingship by currying popular favor was a much-quoted example.
11. A probably legendary figure of the first period of the republic (c. 485 B.C.). He brought forward an agrarian law for the relief of the propertyless citizens, was accused of aiming at royal power, and was hurled from the Tarpeian Rock.
12. Gaius Flaminius, the greatest popular leader before the Gracchi, was tribune of the people in 232 B.C., and against bitter opposition by the Senate carried a law to distribute newly conquered territory in Picenum and Italian Gaul. He later commanded against Hannibal, and was killed in the disastrous ambush at Lake Trasimene (217 B.C.).