THE REVOLUTION AND GAIUS GRACCHUS
Tiberius Gracchus was dead, but his two works, the land distribution and the revolution, survived their author. Faced by the starving agricultural proletariat, the Senate might commit a murder, but it could not thereby kill the Sempronian land law. The law itself had been signally strengthened, rather than shaken, by the frantic outburst of partisan fury. The reform-minded aristocrats who openly favored the distribution of the public domains—headed by Quintus Metellus, who was censor about this time (131 B.C.), and Publius Scaevola—together with the followers of Scipio Aemilianus, who were at least not opposed to reform, gained the upper hand for a time even in the Senate, and a senatorial decree expressly directed the land commissioners to begin their labors.
According to the Sempronian law the commissioners were to be nominated yearly by vote of the people, and this was probably done. However, from the nature of their task it was to be expected that the same men should be elected again and again, and new elections in the true sense occurred only when a place became vacant through death. Thus Publius Crassus Mucianus, the father-in-law of Gaius Gracchus, was appointed in place of Tiberius; and after the defeat of Mucianus in 130 B.C. and the death of Appius Claudius, the business of distribution was entrusted to young Gaius Gracchus and two of the most active leaders of the popular party, Marcus Fulvius Flaccus and Gaius Papirius Carbo. The very names of these men attest that the work of recapturing and distributing the occupied public lands was pushed with zeal and energy, and proofs to that effect are not wanting.
As early as 132 B.C. the consul Publius Popillius, who had directed the prosecutions of the followers of Tiberius Gracchus, recorded of himself on a public monument that he was “the first to turn shepherds out of the public lands and put farmers in their stead.” According to tradition, this land distribution took place all over Italy and everywhere increased the number of farms, for the purpose of the Sempronian law was to elevate the farmer class not by founding new communities, but by strengthening those already in existence. The wide extent of these distributions is proved by the numerous innovations in the art of land measurement that go back to the Gracchan distribution—for example, the placement of boundary stones. But the numbers on the franchise lists give the clearest evidence. The census published in 131 B.C., and probably taken early in the preceding year, counted only 319,000 citizens capable of bearing arms; whereas six years later, instead of continuing to fall off, the number rises to 395,000—unquestionably the result of the land commission’s work. Whether it increased the number of farms among the Italian allied communities in the same proportion may be doubted, but what it did accomplish yielded great and beneficial results.
These results, it is true, were not achieved without injury to respectable interests and existing rights. The land commission, composed of dedicated partisans and absolute judge of its own work, went about its labors in reckless and even disorderly fashion. Public notices summoned everyone who could give information about the extent of the public lands. The old land registers became the commission’s Bible, and not only were occupations revoked without distinction between new and old, but in various cases private property to which the holder was unable to prove his title was also confiscated. Loud and often well-founded as were the complaints, the Senate let the commission have its way; for it was clear that if the land question was to be settled at all, some such unceremonious vigor was necessary.
But this acquiescence had its limits. The Italian domain land was not solely in the hands of Roman citizens. Large tracts had been assigned to particular allied communities by decrees of the people or Senate, and other parts had been occupied with or without permission by Italians. The land commission at length attacked these possessions also. The recapture of the portions simply occupied by non-Romans was doubtless in accord with formal law, and the same applied presumably to domain lands granted to the Italian communities; for the state did not thereby renounce its ownership, but made its grants to communities (just as to private persons) subject to revocation. But charges of bad faith by these allied or subject communities could not simply be disregarded like the complaints of private Roman citizens. The former might have no better legal claim than the latter, but in the case of the Latin possessions the real question was the political wisdom of giving fresh offense to communities so important from a military point of view and already so seriously estranged.
The decision lay in the hands of the middle party, which after the fall of Tiberius Gracchus had protected reform against the aristocracy; now it alone was able to put a limit on reform. The Latins pleaded personally with the most prominent man of this party, Scipio Aemilianus, to protect their rights, and he promised to do so. Mainly through his influence, in 129 B.C. a decree of the people took away from the commission and gave to the censors (and as their proxies, the consuls) the responsibility for deciding what was public and what was private land. This was in effect a mild way of suspending further land distribution. The consul Tuditanus, by no means Gracchan in his views and little inclined to sweat over the difficult task of land surveying, seized the opportunity of joining the army in Illyria and leaving his land duties undone. The commission continued to exist, but judicial decisions as to what constituted public land were lacking, and the commission was condemned to inactivity.
The reform party was outraged, even men like Publius Scaevola and Quintus Metellus expressing disapproval of Scipio’s intervention. Other circles did not stop with disapproval. On a certain day Scipio had promised to make an address regarding relations with the Latins. On the morning of that day he was found dead in his bed. He was but fifty-six years old, in full health and vigor; he had spoken in public the day before, and that evening had retired earlier than usual to prepare the outline of his speech. That he was the victim of political assassination cannot be doubted. Shortly before, he himself had mentioned publicly the plots against him. What assassin’s hand struck down the foremost statesman and general of the age was never discovered, and it ill becomes the historian either to repeat the reports handed down from contemporary gossip, or to make the childish attempt to deduce the truth from such materials. This only is clear, that the instigator of the deed must have belonged to the Gracchan party, and that the assassination of Scipio was the democratic reply to the aristocratic massacre at the temple of Fidelity.
There was no attempt to bring the murderer to justice. The popular party, correctly fearing that its leaders Gaius Gracchus, Flaccus, and Carbo would be dragged into the case whether guilty or not, opposed an inquiry with all its might; and the aristocracy, which lost in Scipio as much an antagonist as an ally, was not unwilling to let the matter drop. The general public and all men of moderate views were shocked—none more so than Quintus Metellus, who, though disapproving Scipio’s interference with reform, turned away in horror from such confederates, and ordered his four sons to carry the body of his great antagonist to the funeral pyre. The funeral was hastily completed. With veiled head the last of the family of the conqueror of Zama was borne forth without anyone having been allowed to see his face, and the flames that licked at the remains of the illustrious man consumed with his body the traces of the crime.
The history of Rome records various men of greater genius than Scipio Aemilianus, but none equaling him in moral purity, in utter absence of political selfishness, and in generous love of country; and none, perhaps, was assigned by destiny a more tragic part. Conscious of the best of intentions and of no common abilities, he was doomed to see his country ruined before his eyes, while having to repress within himself every serious attempt to save it, because he clearly perceived that he would thereby only worsen the evil; doomed to the necessity of sanctioning outrages like the murder of Tiberius Gracchus, and at the same time of defending the victim’s work against his murderers.
Yet he might claim that he had not lived in vain. To him, at least as much as to the author of the Sempronian law, the citizens of Rome owed the increase of nearly 80,000 new farm allotments. It was also he who stopped the land distribution when it had produced its optimum benefit. That it was time to call a halt was doubtless a matter of argument even among well-intentioned men; but the very fact that Gaius Gracchus did not seriously seek to distribute those additional public lands which might have been allotted under the law surely implies that Scipio chose substantially the right moment. Both measures were extorted from the factions, the first from the aristocracy, the second from the friends of reform, and for each its author paid with his life. It was Scipio’s lot to return uninjured from many a battlefield that he might perish at home by an assassin’s hand; but in his quiet chamber he died for Rome no less than if he had fallen before the walls of Carthage.
The land distribution was at an end, but the revolution went on. The revolutionary party, with the land commission constituting its leadership, had skirmished now and then with the government even in Scipio’s lifetime. Carbo, in particular, one of the most talented orators of his time, had as tribune of the people in 131 B.C. given no little trouble. He had extended the practice of voting on legislative matters in the citizen assemblies, and had even proposed to permit the tribunes of the people to succeed themselves, the legal prohibition of which had thwarted Tiberius Gracchus. The initial proposal had been frustrated by the resistance of Scipio, but some years later (apparently after his death) the law was reintroduced and passed, though with some limitations.
The principal object of the reform party, however, was to revive the land commission, whose work had been practically suspended. The leaders seriously discussed removing the obstacles interposed by the Italian allies by conferring citizenship on them, and the agitation largely assumed that course. To meet it the Senate, in 126 B.C., got the tribune Marcus Junius Pennus to propose that all noncitizens be dismissed from the capital; and despite resistance from the democrats, especially Gaius Gracchus, and the ferment caused in the Latin communities, the odious measure was carried. The following year Marcus Fulvius Flaccus as consul retorted by proposing to make it easier for the allied communities to acquire Roman citizenship, and to allow even those who had not acquired citizenship to appeal to the Roman comitia against penal judgments. But he stood almost alone, for Carbo had meanwhile changed his colors and become a zealous aristocrat, while Gaius Gracchus was absent as quaestor in Sardinia. Thus the project was frustrated by the resistance not only of the Senate, but also of the citizens, who were little inclined to extend their privileges to others. Flaccus left Rome to take supreme command against the Celts, thereby laying the groundwork for great new democratic schemes, while at the same time avoiding the difficulty of having to bear arms against the allies whom he had aroused.
As a result of the rejection of Flaccus’ proposals, the thriving Campanian city of Fregellae, at that time perhaps the second city of Italy and the usual mouthpiece of all the Latin colonies in discussions with Rome, took up arms against Rome—the first instance in a hundred and fifty years of a serious insurrection against the Roman hegemony in Italy not instigated by foreign powers. On this occasion the fire was successfully extinguished before it had blazed in other allied communities. Not through superiority of the Roman arms but through the treachery of a Fregellan, the praetor 1 Lucius Opimius quickly became master of the revolted city, which lost its civic privileges and its walls, and was converted, like Capua, into a village. The colony of Fabrateria was founded on a part of its territory in 124 B.C., while the remaining land and the former city itself were distributed among the surrounding communities. This rapid and fearful punishment alarmed the allies; and endless impeachments for high treason pursued not only the Fregellans but also the leaders of the popular party in Rome, whom the aristocracy naturally regarded as accomplices of the revolt.
Meanwhile Gaius Gracchus reappeared at Rome. The aristocracy had first sought to detain the dreaded adversary in Sardinia, by failing to provide the usual replacement. Then, when he returned anyway, it had brought him to trial as one of the authors of the Fregellan revolt. But the citizenry acquitted him, and now he threw down the gauntlet. He became a candidate for the tribuneship, and was elected to that office for the year 123 B.C. at an unusually well-attended assembly. War was thus declared. The democratic party, always starved for leaders of ability, had from sheer necessity remained almost inactive for nine years; now, as the truce ended, it was headed by a man who, more honest than Carbo and more talented than Flaccus, was in every respect fitted to take the lead.
Gaius Gracchus (153-121 B.C.) was a man of greater stature than his older brother. Like the latter, he had no relish for vulgar pleasures and pursuits. He was a man of thorough culture and a brave soldier, who had served with distinction before Numantia under his brother-in-law Scipio, and afterward in Sardinia. But in talent, in character, and above all in depth of feeling, he was decidedly superior to Tiberius. The clarity and self-possession which the young man afterward displayed, under the pressure of all the varied labors required in carrying out his numerous laws, bespoke his genuine statesman’s talent; and the passionate devotion with which his intimate friends clung to him, even unto death, testified to his lovable and noble nature. The personal suffering which he had undergone, and his enforced silence through nine long years, served only to heighten his purposeful energy, and the indignation locked in his heart only glowed with greater intensity against the party which had disorganized his country and murdered his brother. His passionate temperament made him the greatest orator that Rome ever had: even without it, he would probably be reckoned among the great statesmen of all time. The few remains of his recorded orations even in their present condition include several of heart-stirring power, and we can well understand how those who heard or even merely read them were carried away by the impetuous torrent of his words.
And yet, great master though he was of speech, he was himself at times so mastered by anger that the orator’s flow became confused and faltering. In Gaius’ nature there was no vein, as in his brother, of the kind of sentimental, shortsighted, and confused good nature that could seek to change the mind of a political opponent by entreaties or tears; he entered with full consciousness on a career of revolution and revenge. “To me too,” his mother wrote to him, “nothing seems finer and more glorious than to retaliate upon an enemy, so far as it can be done without our country’s ruin. But if this is not possible, then a thousand times rather than that our country should perish, may our enemies continue to remain what they are.” Cornelia knew her son; his creed was just the reverse. Vengeance he would wreak on the wretched government at any price, though he himself and even the commonwealth were involved in the common ruin. The presentiment that fate would overtake him as surely as it overtook his brother only drove him to make haste, like a mortally wounded man who throws himself on the foe. The mother thought more nobly; but the son, with his deeply provoked, passionately excited, thoroughly Italian nature, has been more pitied than blamed by posterity, and posterity has been right in its judgment.
Tiberius Gracchus had brought a single administrative reform before the citizens. What Gaius Gracchus introduced, in a series of separate proposals, was nothing less than an entirely new constitution, the foundation-stone of which was the recent innovation that a tribune of the people should be free to succeed himself. This step enabled the popular chief to acquire a permanent and safe position. The next object was to attach the multitude of the capital steadfastly to him, for it was already plain that no reliance was to be placed on the country people who came to the city only from time to time. This purpose was served first of all by introducing the distribution of grain in the capital. The grain received by the state from the provincial tenths frequently had been given away at nominal prices to the citizens. Gracchus enacted that every citizen who personally presented himself in the capital should thenceforth receive monthly a definite quantity—apparently 1¼ bushels—from the public stores at a price not quite half of a low average figure; and for this purpose the public storehouses were enlarged by the construction of the new Sempronian granaries.
This distribution—which excluded the citizens living outside the capital, and thus could not fail to attract the whole mass of proletarian citizens to Rome—was designed to make the proletariat of the capital dependent upon the leaders of the popular party instead of upon the aristocracy, thus supplying the new master of the state at one stroke with a bodyguard and a firm majority in the comitia. For greater security in the latter, moreover, the order of voting was changed: in future they were to vote in an order determined by lot on each occasion, instead of the five property-classes in each tribe giving their votes one after another. But while these laws were designed mainly to give the new chief complete command of the capital and thereby of the state, the amplest control over the comitial machinery, and the possibility if need be of striking terror into the Senate and magistrates, at the same time he set out energetically to correct the existing social evils.
It is true that the Italian land question was in one sense settled. The agrarian law of Tiberius, and even the land commission, remained legally in force; the agrarian law carried by Gaius Gracchus did nothing but restore to the commission the jurisdiction which it had lost. That this step was taken only as a matter of principle, and that the distribution of land was resumed, if at all, only to a very limited extent, is shown by the census, which gives exactly the same number of citizens for the years 125 B.C. and 115 B.C. Gaius beyond doubt did not proceed further because the public lands held by Roman citizens were already largely distributed. The question of the lands held by Latin allies could only be taken up in connection with the very thorny problem of extending Roman citizenship.
On the other hand, he took an important step beyond the agrarian law of Tiberius when he proposed the establishment of colonies in Italy at Tarentum and especially at Capua. By that course he made the state land which had been leased (and which was hitherto excluded from distribution) liable also for parceling out—and parceling according to the colony system, rather than under the previous method which excluded the founding of new communities. Still more momentous was the measure by which Gaius Gracchus first provided for colonies of citizens in the overseas territories. He despatched to the site of Carthage some 6,000 colonists probably selected from Italian allies as well as from Roman citizens, and conferred on the new town (Junonia) the rights of a Roman citizen colony. The foundation of the colony was important, but still more important was the principle of overseas emigration thereby laid down, for it opened a permanent outlet for the Italian proletariat. At the same time, however, it abandoned the old principle that Italy alone did the governing, while the provinces were merely governed.
Beyond these measures, a further series of laws arose out of the general tendency to introduce milder and more humane principles in place of the antiquated severity of the existing constitution. For example, under the old laws there was no limit to the length of military service, except that no citizen was liable to ordinary service in the field before his eighteenth or after his forty-sixth year. When the occupation of Spain threatened to make service permanent, a new law seems to have granted the right of discharge to any one who had been in the field for six successive years, although this discharge did not protect him from being drafted again afterward. Later, perhaps about the middle of the second century B.C., the rule arose that twenty years in the infantry or ten years in the cavalry gave exemption from further military service. Gracchus renewed the rule (which seems often to have been infringed) that no citizen could be called into the army before his eighteenth year, and he apparently restricted the number of campaigns required for exemption from further service. The soldier’s clothing, whose value had always been deducted from his pay, was also thereafter furnished by the state.
Further, there was a tendency in Gracchan legislation, if not to abolish capital punishment, at least to restrict it—a tendency which was felt to some extent even in the military jurisdiction. Since the beginnings of the republic the magistrate could not inflict a death sentence upon a citizen without consulting the community, except under martial law. Soon after the Gracchan period this right of appeal by the citizen appeared even in the camp, and the general’s right to inflict capital punishment seems to have been restricted to allies and subjects. Moreover, the right of the community to inflict or rather confirm a sentence of death was further limited by the fact that Gracchus transferred jurisdiction over those crimes which most frequently resulted in capital sentences—poisoning and murder—from the public to permanent judicial commissions. These could not, like the tribunals of the people, be broken up by a tribune; there was no right of appeal to the community; and their sentences were as unlikely to be annulled by the community as those of the long-established civil jurymen.2
In the citizens’ tribunals it had long been the rule that the accused could remain at liberty during his trial, and was allowed by surrendering his citizenship to save life and freedom, if not necessarily property, for even an exile could be fined. But summary arrest and complete execution of the sentence were legally possible, and were sometimes inflicted even upon persons of rank. For example, Lucius Hostilius Tubulus, praetor in 142 B.C. who was impeached for a heinous crime, was refused the privilege of exile, arrested, and executed. On the other hand, from the outset the judicial commissions seem to have been proscribed from touching the liberty or life of the citizen, but could at most only pronounce sentence of exile. Thus exile, which hitherto had been a mitigation of punishment for those found guilty, became for the first time a formal penalty. But this involuntary exile, like the voluntary, left the banished person his property, to the extent not exhausted in paying fines and claims for compensation.
Lastly, Gaius Gracchus made no changes in the debt laws. However, respectable authorities assert that he held out to debtors the hope of reducing or wiping out their indebtedness—which, if it is correct, must also be considered a radical popular measure.
While Gracchus thus curried the support of the people both by the fact and the prospect of a material improvement in their position, he labored with equal energy for the ruin of the aristocracy. Perceiving clearly how insecure was any rule based solely on the proletariat, he applied himself to splitting the aristocracy and drawing a part of it over to his side. The materials for such a rupture already existed. The aristocracy of the rich, which had risen as one man against Tiberius Gracchus, consisted of two different bodies, comparable in some measure to England’s peerage and city aristocracy. One group consisted of the tight little circle of governing senatorial families, who kept aloof from direct speculation and invested their immense capital partly in land, partly as sleeping partners in joint ventures. The core of the second group was composed of the speculators, who, as managers of these joint ventures or for their own account, conducted vast mercantile and financial enterprises throughout Rome’s dominions.
This latter class, particularly since the middle of the third century B.C., had gradually moved alongside the senatorial aristocracy, though the legal exclusion of the senators from mercantile pursuits under a law proposed by Gaius Flaminius, a predecessor of the Gracchi, drew an outward line of demarcation between rich senators and those who were merely rich. In the present epoch the aristocracy of money began, under the name of the equites, to play a decisive part in political affairs. This name originally belonged only to the citizen-cavalryman in active service, but was gradually extended to all those who, as possessors of an estate of at least 400,000 sesterces, were liable for cavalry service. Thus it came to include the whole of upper Roman society, senatorial and nonsenatorial. But not long before the time of Gaius Gracchus a seat in the Senate had been ruled incompatible with service in the cavalry, thus eliminating the senators from those qualified to be equites. Accordingly, the equestrian order as a whole might be regarded the aristocracy of speculators as opposed to the aristocracy of the Senate. Nevertheless, younger members of senatorial families who had not entered the Senate continued to serve as equites and to bear the name. In fact, the citizen-cavalry as such—that is, the eighteen equestrian centuries 3—was made up by the censors chiefly from the young senatorial aristocracy.
This order of the equites—substantially, the wealthy merchants—ran athwart the governing Senate in various ways. There was a natural antipathy between the genteel aristocrats and the men whose money had brought them rank. The ruling lords, especially the better class of them, stood as much aloof from business as the business man ignored political questions and intrigues. The two classes had already come into sharp conflict, particularly in the provinces; for while the provincials had far more reason than the Roman capitalists to complain of the partiality of Roman justice, yet the ruling lords of the Senate did not give the capitalists quite the absolute free hand, in exploiting the provinces, that the men of money would have desired. In spite of their common hatred of a foe like Tiberius Gracchus, there was a deep gulf between the nobility and the moneyed aristocracy. Gaius, more adroit than his brother, enlarged it until the old alliance was severed and the mercantile class brought over on his side.
The special distinctions of the man of the equestrian census from the rest of the multitude—the finger-ring of gold instead of iron or copper, and the preferred place at public festivals—may or may not have been conferred on the equites by Gaius Gracchus. However, they emerged at about this period, and the extension of these previously senatorial privileges to the equestrian order was quite in the style of Gracchus. His aim was to make the equites a privileged order intermediate between the senatorial aristocracy and the common multitude; and this aim was promoted more by such class-insignia, though trifling in themselves, and though many equites might not avail themselves of them, than by many a more important ordinance. The party of material interests by no means despised such honors, and yet was not to be gained through these alone. Gracchus perceived that the victory would doubtless go to the highest bidder, but that a massive bid was needed. Therefore, he offered control of the jury courts, and the revenues of Asia.
The Roman system of financial administration, under which indirect taxes as well as the rent from public land were gathered by middlemen, already gave the Roman capitalist class the most extensive advantages at the expense of the taxpayers. But direct taxation consisted either of fixed sums payable by the provincial communities—which of itself excluded the intervention of Roman capitalists—or, as in Sicily and Sardinia, of a ground-tenth levied in the provinces themselves, so that wealthy provincials and tributary communities commonly farmed the tenth of their districts as “tax land” and thereby kept at a distance the dangerous Roman middlemen.
Six years before, when the province of Asia had fallen to the Romans, the Senate had organized it substantially according to the first, or “fixed fee,” system. Gaius Gracchus overturned this arrangement by a decree of the people. And he not only burdened the province, which hitherto had been almost free from taxation, with the most extensive indirect and direct taxes, particularly the ground-tenth; he also enacted that the tax-gathering for the province as a whole should be put up for auction in Rome—a rule which effectively excluded the provincials and called into existence an association of capitalists of colossal magnitude. A significant indication, moreover, of Gracchus’ intention to make the capitalist order independent of the Senate was the enactment that the stipulated rent could no longer, wholly or partly, be remitted by the Senate at pleasure, but only under specific circumstances defined by law.
While the mercantile class was thus granted a gold mine, and the members of the new Asian tax partnership constituted a kind of “senate of merchants,” a definite sphere of public action was also assigned to them in the jury courts. The jurisdiction of the citizens over criminal procedure, which was always very narrow among the Romans, was still further narrowed by Gracchus: most cases, whether civil or criminal in nature, were decided either by single jurymen or by permanent or extraordinary commissions. Both the former and the latter hitherto had been filled exclusively by senators; Gracchus transferred both functions of jurymen to the equestrian order, directing a new list of jurymen to be formed annually from all persons of equestrian rating, and excluding the senators themselves as well as, by an age limit, the young men of senatorial families. It is not improbable that the jurymen selected were chiefly the same men who led the great mercantile associations, particularly those farming the tax revenues of Asia and elsewhere, just because they had the closest personal interest in sitting in the courts; and if the lists of jurymen and the societies of tax gatherers thus coincided, one can all the more easily understand the significance of this new counter-senate.
The substantial result was that hitherto there had been but two authorities in the state—the government as the administering and controlling power, and the citizens as the legislative authority—with the courts divided between them. Now the moneyed aristocracy, united into a compact and privileged class on the solid basis of material interests, was also a judicial power, forming part of the state and taking its place on a footing of near equality with the ruling aristocracy. All the old antagonisms of merchant and nobleman could not fail to find practical expression in the jurymen’s sentences. When the senator as provincial governor was called to a reckoning, his fate was no longer decided by his peers, but by great merchants and bankers. The feuds between Roman capitalists and Roman governors were thus transplanted from the provincial administration to the dangerous battleground of the courts. Not only was the aristocracy of the rich divided, but care was taken that their hostilities should always find fresh nourishment and easy expression.
With his weapons—the proletariat and the mercantile class—thus prepared, Gracchus set about his main work, the overthrow of the ruling aristocracy. The overthrow of the Senate meant first depriving it of its functions by legislative changes, and then ruining the existing aristocracy by measures of a more personal kind. Gracchus did both. The administrative function, in particular, had long been exclusively the Senate’s; Gracchus took it away, partly by settling the most important administrative questions by popular legislation (or, in other words, practically through dictation by the tribunes), partly by restricting the Senate’s role in current affairs, and partly by taking as much business as possible into his own hands. Some measures of this kind already have been mentioned. The new master of the state, without consulting the Senate, dealt with the state chest by imposing a permanent and oppressive burden on the public finances in the distribution of grain. He disposed of the public lands by sending out colonists not by decree of the Senate and people, but by decree of the people alone. He also interfered with provincial administration, overturning through a law of the people the financial constitution given by the Senate to the province of Asia and substituting an altogether different one for it.
A most important prerogative of the Senate—that of setting the functions of the two consuls—was not withdrawn, but was limited by requiring the Senate to fix these functions before the consuls concerned were elected. And with unrivaled activity Gaius gathered the most varied strands of government in his own hands. He himself watched over the distribution of grain, selected the jurymen, founded colonies in person despite the fact that his magistracy legally chained him to the city, regulated the highways and concluded building contracts, led the discussions of the Senate, and settled the consular elections. In short, he accustomed the people to the pre-eminence of one man, and overshadowed the lax and lame administration of the senatorial college by the vigor and versatility of his personal rule.
Gracchus interfered with the judicial prerogatives of the Senate even more than with its administration. We have already mentioned that he forbade the senators to sit as jurymen; the same course was adopted with regard to the Senate’s practice of taking over the judicial function itself in exceptional cases. Under severe penalties he prohibited—apparently in his renewal of the law de provocatione—the appointment by senatorial decree of extraordinary commissions of high treason, such as that which after his brother’s murder had sat in judgment on his adherents. The aggregate effect of these measures was that the Senate wholly lost the power of control, and retained only so much of the administrative function as the head of the state thought fit to leave to it.
But above and beyond these measures the governing aristocracy was also directly assailed. In an act of revenge, the law prohibiting extraordinary judicial commissions was given retroactive effect, thereby compelling Publius Popillius—the aristocrat who after the death of Nasica was the prime target of the democrats—to go into exile. (It is remarkable that this proposal was carried only by 18 to 17 votes in the assembly of the tribes, a sign of the aristocracy’s influence with the multitude, at least in questions of a personal interest.) A similar but far less defensible decree—the proposal, directed against Marcus Octavius, that whoever had been deprived of his office by decree of the people should be forever prohibited from filling a public post—was recalled by Gaius at the request of his mother. He was thus spared the disgrace of openly mocking justice by a flagrant violation of the constitution, and of taking base vengeance on an honorable man who had not spoken any angry word against Tiberius Gracchus, and who had only acted in accordance with what he conceived to be his constitutional duty. But far more sweeping than these measures was the scheme of Gaius (which, it is true, was not carried through) to double the size of the Senate by adding 300 new members, who were to be elected from the equestrian order by the comitia. Such a wholesale creation of new peers would have reduced the Senate to abject dependence on the chief of state.
This was the political constitution which Gaius Gracchus projected and for the most part carried out during the two years of his tribunate (123-122 B.C.), apparently without encountering any resistance worth mentioning, and without requiring the use of force to attain his ends. The order in which these measures were carried is no longer recognizable from the confused accounts handed down to us, and various questions that arise must remain unanswered. But few elements of material importance seem to have escaped us. For on the principal matters we have quite trustworthy information; and Gaius, unlike his brother, was not merely swept along the course of events, but obviously had a well-considered and comprehensive plan which he implemented through a series of special laws.
Now the Sempronian constitution itself shows clearly, to all who are able and willing to see, that Gaius Gracchus did not (as many well-intentioned people in ancient and modern times have supposed) wish to place the Roman republic on a new democratic basis. On the contrary, he wished to abolish it and to introduce in its stead a tyrannis—in modern terms, an absolute (rather than a feudal or theocratic) monarchy—in the form of a magistracy made permanent by regular re-election and rendered absolute by unconditional control over the formally sovereign comitia, an unlimited tribuneship of the people for life. If Gracchus, as his words and especially his works plainly testify, aimed at overthrowing the government of the Senate, what other kind of government was possible but the tyrannis, in a commonwealth which had outgrown primary assemblies without creating a parliamentary system? Dreamers like his brother before him, and knaves such as later times produced, might question this. But Gaius Gracchus was a statesman; and though the formal shape of his great work has not been handed down to us and may be envisioned in various ways, yet he was beyond doubt aware of what he was doing.
Just as the intention of usurping power cannot be mistaken, so will those who survey the entire circumstances refuse to blame Gracchus. An absolute monarchy is a great misfortune for any nation, but less of a misfortune than an absolute oligarchy; and history cannot censure a man who chooses the lesser suffering, least of all a man so vehemently earnest and so far above vulgar selfishness as Gaius Gracchus. Nevertheless, the fact may not be concealed that his whole legislation was pervaded with most pernicious contradictions, on the one hand aiming at the public good, while on the other hand ministering to the personal ambition and in fact the personal vengeance of the ruler.
Thus Gracchus earnestly worked to remedy social evils and to check the spread of pauperism, yet at the same time he intentionally created a street proletariat of the worst kind in the capital by his distributions of grain, which were designed to be, and became, the support of all the lazy and hungry rabble. Gracchus censured in the bitterest terms the Senate’s venality, in particular laying bare with unsparing and just severity the scandalous buying and selling of the provinces of Asia Minor by Manius Aquilius; yet it was through the efforts of the same Gaius that the Roman citizens of the capital got themselves fed, in return for its cares of government, by the subjects of Rome. Gracchus warmly disapproved the disgraceful looting of the provinces: he not only instituted justly severe proceedings in particular cases, but also abolished the thoroughly corrupt senatorial courts, before which even Scipio Aemilianus had vainly staked his whole influence to punish the most flagrant criminals. Yet at the same time, by introducing courts composed of merchants, he delivered the provincials in chains to a party of vested interests, and thus to a despotism even more unscrupulous than that of the aristocracy; and he introduced into Asia a tax system compared with which even the taxation of Sicily after the Carthaginian model might be called mild and humane—just because on the one hand he needed the party of moneyed men, and on the other hand needed extensive new revenues to finance his distributions of grain and the other burdens. Gracchus beyond doubt desired a firm administration and even-handed dispensing of justice, as numerous thoroughly judicious ordinances testify. Yet his new system of administration rested on continuous individual usurpations only formally legalized, and he intentionally drew the courts—which every well-ordered state seeks to place at least aloof from politics, if not above it—into the midst of the whirlpool of revolution.
Admittedly much of the blame for these conflicting tendencies in Gaius Gracchus can be put on his position rather than on himself personally. At the very threshold of power he was confronted by the fatal dilemma, moral and political, that the same man had at the same time to act as a robber chieftain and as the first citizen of the state—a dilemma to which Pericles, Caesar, and Napoleon also had to make dangerous sacrifices. But the conduct of Gaius Gracchus cannot be explained entirely by this necessity. There also seethed in him the consuming passion for revenge, which foreseeing its own destruction hurls the firebrand into the house of the foe. He has himself told us what he thought of his jury law and similar measures intended to divide the aristocracy: he called them daggers which he had thrown into the Forum, that the men of rank might lacerate each other.
He was a political incendiary. Not only was the hundred years’ revolution which dates from him the work of Gaius Gracchus, so far as it was any one man’s work. He was above all the true founder of that terrible urban proletariat flattered and paid by the classes above it, which through its concentration in the capital (the natural result of the free distribution of grain) became at once utterly demoralized and aware of its power, and which—with its sometimes stupid and sometimes knavish demands, and its talk of the sovereignty of the people—lay like an incubus on the Roman commonwealth for five hundred years and only perished with it.
And yet, this greatest of political transgressors was in turn the savior of his country. There is scarcely a fundamental idea in Roman monarchy that is not traceable to Gaius Gracchus. From him proceeded the maxim (founded doubtless on the traditional laws of war, but new in the extension and practical application now given to it) that the land of the subject communities was the private property of the Roman state; and this maxim, which he employed primarily to support the state’s right to tax that land at pleasure, as in the case of Asia, or to establish colonies, as in Africa, became afterwards a fundamental principle of law under the empire. He showed future demagogues and tyrants how to lean for support on material interests while breaking down the governing aristocracy, and how subsequently to legitimize the change of constitution by substituting strict and efficient administration for previous misgovernment.
To him, in particular, are traceable the first steps toward the reconciliation between Rome and the provinces which the establishment of monarchy could not but bring in its train. His attempt to rebuild a Carthage destroyed by Italian rivalry, and generally to open the way for Italian emigration toward the provinces, formed the first links in a long chain of momentous and beneficial actions. Right and wrong, fortune and misfortune, were so inextricably blended in this singular man and in his marvelous political construction that history may well—in this case, though in few others—reserve her judgment.
When Gracchus had substantially completed his new constitution for the state, he applied himself to a second and more difficult work, the question of the Italian allies. The views of the democratic leaders regarding it have already been described: they naturally sought the broadest extension of the Roman franchise, not merely to bring in the domains occupied by the Latins for distribution, but above all to strengthen their party by an enormous mass of new citizens, who might bring the comitial machine still more fully under their power by widening the body of privileged electors, and might abolish a distinction which with the fall of the republican constitution had lost most of its importance.
But here they encountered resistance from their own party, especially from that wing which ordinarily gave ready assent to anything, with or without understanding it. Since Roman citizenship seemed to those people like a partnership which gave them a share in sundry very tangible profits, they were not at all disposed to enlarge the number of the partners. The rejection of the Fulvian law in 125 B.C., and the insurrection of the Fregellans arising out of it, were significant indications both of the obstinate perseverance of that fraction of the citizens who ruled the comitia, and of the impatient urgency of the allies. Toward the end of his second tribunate (122 B.C.) Gracchus, probably spurred on by promises which he had given to the allies, made a second try. In concert with Marcus Flaccus—who, although a consular,4 had again taken the tribuneship of the people, in order to carry the law which he had formerly proposed without success—he made a proposal to grant to the Latins the full franchise, and to the other Italian allies the former rights of the Latins.
The proposal, however, met united opposition from the Senate and the mob. The nature of this coalition and its style of conflict are clearly seen from an accidentally preserved fragment of the speech which the consul Gaius Fannius made to the citizens in opposing the proposal. “Do you then think,” said the Optimate, “that if you confer the franchise on the Latins, you will be able to find a place in future—just as you are now standing there in front of me—in the assembly of citizens, or at the games and popular amusements? Do you not believe, on the contrary, that those people will occupy every spot?” Among the Romans of the fourth century B.C., who on a single day conferred the franchise on all the Sabines, such an orator might perhaps have been hissed. Those of the second found his reasoning uncommonly clear, and felt that the right to assign the Latin domains, which Gracchus offered as inducement, was far too low. The very fact that the Senate approved a proposal to eject all noncitizens from the city before the day of the decisive vote showed the fate in store for the plan. And when Livius Drusus, a colleague of Gracchus, interposed his veto against the law, the people received the veto in such a temper that Gracchus did not venture to proceed with the vote, or to prepare for Drusus the fate of Marcus Octavius.
This success apparently emboldened the Senate to attempt the overthrow of the victorious demagogue. The weapons of attack were substantially those which Gracchus himself had formerly used. His power rested both on the mercantile class and on the proletariat, but primarily on the latter, which in this conflict (neither side having any military force) played the part of an undisciplined army. It was clear that the Senate was not powerful enough to wrest either from the merchants or from the proletariat their new-found privileges: any attempt to assail the grain laws or the new jury arrangement would have led, in one form or another, to a street riot against which the Senate was utterly defenseless. But it was also clear that Gracchus himself and these merchants and proletarians were held together only by mutual advantage, and that the moneyed men were ready to accept their lucrative posts, and the populace its bread, as quickly from someone else as from Gaius Gracchus.
The institutions of Gracchus were immovably firm with a single exception—his own supremacy. The weakness of his personal position lay in the fact that there was no relation of genuine allegiance between the chief and his followers; and while the new constitution possessed all the other elements of vitality, it lacked one—the moral tie between ruler and ruled, without which every state rests upon feet of clay. The rejection of the proposal to give the Latins the franchise demonstrated with decisive clarity that the multitude had in fact never voted for Gracchus, but simply for itself. The aristocracy conceived the plan of giving battle to the author of the grain laws and land assignments on his own ground.
The Senate thus offered the proletariat not merely the same advantages as Gracchus had already given it, but still greater ones. Acting for the Senate, the tribune Marcus Livius Drusus proposed to relieve those who had received land under the law of Gracchus from payment of rent; to declare their allotments free and unrestricted property; and further, to provide for twelve Italian colonies of 3,000 colonists each, for which the people might choose suitable men as leaders. (Drusus himself declined—in contrast with the family complexion of the Gracchan commission—to be considered for this honorable duty.) Presumably the Latins were to bear the costs of the plan, for they occupied the only sizable public domain still remaining in Italy; and we find isolated enactments of Drusus—such as the regulation that a Latin soldier could be scourged only by the Latin officer set over him, and not by a Roman officer—which seem intended to indemnify the Latins for other losses.
The Senate’s plan was not the most refined. The attempt to outbid the Gracchan opposition was too clear, the endeavor to create a bond between the nobles and the proletariat by exercising a joint tyranny over the Latins was too transparent. There was also the obvious question where—even granting that the whole domains assigned to the Latins were confiscated—enough public land was to be found for the formation of twelve new, populous, and compact colonies of citizens, since the Roman domains had been nearly all distributed. Lastly, Drusus’ declaration that he would have nothing to do with the execution of his law was prudent to the point of folly.
But the clumsy snare was quite suited to the stupid quarry. Gracchus, on whose personal influence everything depended, was absent establishing the Carthaginian colony in Africa, and his lieutenant in the capital, Marcus Flaccus, played into the hands of the Senate by his vehement and maladroit conduct. The “people” accordingly ratified the Livian laws as readily as they had ratified the Sempronian. Then, as usual, they repaid the latest benefactor by inflicting a gentle blow on the earlier one, declining to re-elect Gracchus tribune when he ran for that office for the third time in 121 B.C. (On this occasion, however, there are alleged to have been unjust proceedings by the tribune presiding at the election, who had been offended by Gracchus.) Thus the foundation of Gracchus’ despotism gave way beneath him. A second blow was inflicted on him in the consular elections, which placed at the head of the state Lucius Opimius, who as praetor in 125 B.C. had conquered the Fregellans, and who was one of the most extreme and unscrupulous chiefs of the aristocratic party, a man firmly resolved to get rid of this dangerous antagonist at the first opportunity.
Such an opportunity soon occurred. On the tenth of December, 122 B.C., Gracchus’ term as tribune expired; on the first of January, 121 B.C., Opimius took up the fasces 5 as consul. The first attack, as was fair, was directed against the most useful but most unpopular measure of Gracchus, the re-establishment of Carthage. While the overseas colonies had hitherto been assailed only indirectly through the greater appeal of the Italian ones, it was now alleged that African hyenas had dug up the newly placed boundary stones of Carthage; and Roman priests, upon request, certified that such signs and portents were an express warning against rebuilding on a site accursed of the gods. The Senate therefore felt compelled, as a matter of conscience, to propose a law prohibiting the founding of the colony of Junonia.
Gracchus, who with the other men nominated to establish it was just then selecting the colonists, appeared on the day of voting at the Capitol to seek the rejection of the law. He wished to avoid violence, so as not to supply his opponents with the pretext they hoped for. But he was not able to prevent some of his faithful partisans, who remembered the fate of Tiberius and were well acquainted with the plans of the aristocracy, from appearing in arms, and in the immense excitement on both sides quarrels could hardly be prevented. The consul Lucius Opimius offered the usual sacrifice on the porch of the Capitoline temple. One of the attendants at the ceremony, Quintus Antullius, with the holy entrails in his hand, haughtily ordered “bad citizens” to quit the porch, and seemed about to lay hands on Gracchus himself. Thereupon a zealous Gracchan drew his sword and cut the man down.
A fearful tumult arose, Gracchus vainly trying to address the people to disclaim responsibility for the sacrilegious murder. He only furnished his antagonists with an additional accusation, since, without being aware of it in the confusion, he interrupted a tribune in the act of speaking to the people—an offense for which an obsolete statute prescribed the severest penalty.
The consul Lucius Opimius took steps to put down the “insurrection for the overthrow of the republic,” as the aristocrats were fond of designating the day’s events. He himself passed the night in the temple of Castor in the Forum; at early dawn the Capitol was filled with Cretan archers, the senate house and Forum with men of the government party—the senators and those equites adhering to them—who by order of the consul had all appeared in arms, each attended by two armed slaves. None of the aristocracy were absent; even the aged and venerable Quintus Metellus, well disposed to reform, appeared with shield and sword. An officer of ability and experience, Decimus Brutus, was entrusted with the command of the armed force as the Senate assembled in the senate house. The bier with the corpse of Antullius was deposited in front. The Senate, as if surprised, appeared en masse at the door to view the dead body, and then retired to determine what should be done.
The leaders of the Gracchans had gone from the Capitol to their houses. Marcus Flaccus had spent the night preparing for war in the streets, while Gracchus apparently disdained to strive with destiny. Next morning, when they learned of the preparations made by their enemies at the Capitol and the Forum, both proceeded to the Aventine, the old stronghold of the popular party in the struggles between patricians and plebeians. Gracchus went silent and unarmed; Flaccus called the slaves to arms and entrenched himself in the temple of Diana, while he sent his younger son Quintus to the enemy’s camp to arrange a compromise if possible. The latter returned with the news that the aristocracy demanded unconditional surrender, and he also brought a Senate summons to Gracchus and Flaccus to appear before it to answer for their violation of the majesty of the tribunes. Gracchus wished to comply with the summons, but Flaccus prevented him, although he repeated his weak and mistaken attempt to move such opponents to compromise.
When instead of the two cited leaders young Quintus Flaccus again appeared alone, the consul treated the failure to appear as the beginning of open insurrection. He ordered the messenger arrested and gave the signal for an attack on the Aventine, at the same time proclaiming that the government would pay its weight in gold to whosoever should bring in the head of Gracchus or Flaccus, and offering amnesty to anyone who left the Aventine before the conflict began.
The ranks on the Aventine speedily thinned; the valiant nobility in union with the Cretans and slaves stormed the almost undefended mount and killed all whom they found, about 250 persons, mostly of humble rank. Marcus Flaccus fled with his eldest son to a place of concealment, but they were soon hunted out and put to death. Gracchus had at the beginning of the conflict retired to the temple of Minerva, and was about to pierce himself with a sword when his friend Publius Laetorius seized his arm and pleaded with him to preserve himself for better times. Gracchus was induced to try to escape to the other bank of the Tiber; but hastening down the hill, he fell and sprained his foot. To gain time for him to escape, his two attendants turned to face the pursuers and allowed themselves to be cut down, Marcus Pomponius at the Porta Trigemina under the Aventine, Publius Laetorius at the bridge over the Tiber where Horatius was said to have once singly withstood the Etruscan army. Gracchus, attended only by his slave Euporus, reached the suburb on the right bank of the Tiber. There, in the grove of Furrina, the two dead bodies were found; it appears that the slave had put to death first his master and then himself.
The heads of the two fallen leaders were handed over to the government as required. The stipulated price, and more, was paid to Lucius Septumuleius, a man of quality, who brought in the head of Gracchus; but the murderers of Flaccus, persons of humble rank, were sent away with empty hands. The bodies of the dead were thrown into the river, and the houses of the leaders were abandoned to the pillage of the multitude.
Prosecutions against the partisans of Gracchus began on a vast scale. As many as 3,000 of them are said to have been strangled in prison, among them the eighteen-year-old Quintus Flaccus, who had taken no part in the conflict, and who was universally lamented on account of his youth and amiable disposition. In the open space beneath the Capitol the altar of Camillus and other shrines erected to internal peace were pulled down, and out of the property of the killed or condemned traitors (which was confiscated even to the portions of their wives) a new and splendid temple of Concord with its basilica was erected by the consul Lucius Opimius, in accordance with a decree of the Senate.
It was indeed in keeping with the spirit of the age to remove the old memorials to civic peace, and to inaugurate a new monument over the remains of the three grandsons of the conqueror of Zama, all of whom—first Tiberius Gracchus, then Scipio Aemilianus, and finally the youngest and greatest, Gaius Gracchus—had now been engulfed by the revolution. The memory of the Gracchi remained officially proscribed, and Cornelia was not even allowed to put on mourning for the death of her last son. But the passionate attachment which so many had felt toward the two noble brothers, especially toward Gaius, was touchingly displayed after their deaths in the almost religious veneration which the multitude, in spite of all police prohibition, continued to pay to their memory and to the spots where they had fallen.
1. Two praetors (of the total of six, at this period of the Republic) were charged with administering justice in the capital, while four others were assigned to four major provinces. See Glossary.
2. The term juryman is used in two senses: (1) a single arbitrator appointed to hear and settle disputes and suits between citizens; (2) a member of a jury (approximately 50) selected by lot from lists of eligible citizens to hear major cases before the permanent courts (quaestiones). See Glossary.
3. For voting purposes, Roman citizens were grouped into centuries, or hundreds. See Glossary.
4. A former consul, and hence an elder statesman. See Glossary.
5. The ceremonial axes which were the symbols of the consul’s authority in the Roman state. See Glossary.