CHAPTER 4 THE POLITICS OF FRUSTRATION

THE DESTRUCTION OF CARTHAGE AND Corinth in the year 146 BC affirmed Roman domination of the Mediterranean world. Macedonia and North Africa, the homes of Rome’s two great rivals in the wars of the late third and early to mid-second centuries, were now controlled by Roman governors appointed by the Senate. The taxes their residents paid now supported the Roman army and fueled a rapidly developing Roman economy. The explosion of Roman power and individual Roman wealth over the five decades between Hannibal’s defeat at Zama and Carthage’s destruction revolutionized both the Mediterranean world and Rome itself. In one lifetime, Rome had shifted from a relatively poor regional power into the state at the political and economic center of the Mediterranean world.

The deliberative and consensus-based political culture of the Roman Republic was designed to prevent revolutions, not to manage them. And, though the first half of the second century saw relatively little political turmoil within the Republic, the economic, demographic, and military changes that occurred during this period were indeed revolutionary. Their effects needed to be managed, but change came too quickly for the slow and deliberative Roman political system to manage it effectively. An empire like the one Rome now possessed required a permanent administration that could collect taxes, promote commerce, and convey information from its far-flung domains back to the capital. The city at the center of the empire also required dedicated attention to ensure that it grew sustainably and provided the basic necessities for its population.

By the middle of the second century, Rome had become the place in which the business of empire was conducted, through which much of its wealth passed, and to which increasing numbers of the empire’s population gravitated. But instead of meeting these changes by rapidly expanding the size of its administration and the scope of its political activities, the Republic stumbled into a system in which the maintenance of the infrastructure of the growing capital and the essential elements of the Roman imperial project were effectively outsourced to private contractors. Roman contractors, not Roman government officials, ran the mines, built the roads, and collected the taxes that fueled the empire. These legitimate activities could be lucrative, but lax monitoring by magistrates in Rome enabled contractors as well as provincial governors to corruptly pocket even more.¹

The outsourcing of empire brought huge profits to those who had enough money to bid for these new government contracts. It also proved a boon to the elected magistrates who moved on to provincial governorships when their terms in office ended, a fact that vastly increased the amount of money candidates were willing to spend to get elected. The large majority of Italians, however, could not afford to join the scramble. They certainly could not afford political campaigns, and, as large families divided their lands among many heirs, many Italians found their holdings slipping below the property qualification that enabled their sons to serve in the military.

Even for those still wealthy enough to serve, the nature of military service and the rewards it offered began to change in the mid-140s. The wars in Africa and Greece had been, relatively speaking, conventional affairs in which armies met each other on battlefields. The areas in which fighting occurred also had been relatively wealthy. When the Romans emerged victorious in those wars, there was plenty of plunder for soldiers to take home as a reward. Service in these campaigns was not easy, but soldiers embarking on them fought with the reasonable expectation that the fighting would, at the very least, earn them more than simply the basic military pay the state provided. The Republic continued to fight after 146, but the nature of the campaigns changed. Now military service was required in places like Spain, where warfare was asymmetrical and the plunder was modest. Whereas recruits for some of the Roman armies sent to Greece in the mid-second century had been easy to find, Romans rioted to avoid being conscripted into the armies sent to Spain.²

By the end of the 140s, it was clear that significant portions of the population living under Roman control felt frustrated at the Republic’s inability to police the corruption and inequality resulting from Rome’s rapid economic and military expansion. One of the first signs of this discontent came in 149 BC with the creation of a standing criminal court, manned by senators, that was charged with trying cases involving extortion and other misuses of power by Roman governors in their provinces.³ Although Romans had articulated the principle that provincials had the right to bring charges against the magistrates governing them since at least the 170s BC, this is not what motivated the creation of a permanent court for trying corrupt governors.⁴ It seems instead that senators had become concerned that excessive wealth gained from provincial service could allow political rivals to gain an advantage over their competitors in future elections. As money became a crucial factor in one’s ability to win the offices and honors that determined the success of the Roman elite, the incorruptibility of Fabricius now looked increasingly like a relic of a much different Rome.

Other signs of discontent appeared in a series of laws designed to change the way Romans voted. Before the 130s, Romans voting in elections or as members of a jury did so by personally approaching an election official and announcing their vote aloud. Although efforts to intimidate voters were rare, there was nothing to prevent someone from “observing” how the votes were cast, and there was no written record of the breakdown of the votes against which one could check the tally.⁵ In 139, a tribune named Aulus Gabinius pushed to change the election of magistrates so that voters placed a clay tablet bearing the name of their chosen candidate into a basket. Then, in 137 BC, the tribune Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla backed a law extending the use of secret ballots to juries presiding over trials for every offense but treason. Then, in 131, a third tribune, Gaius Papirius Carbo, extended the use of secret ballots to votes on legislation taken within assemblies.⁶

No contemporary literary sources survive that describe what prompted this outpouring of support for secret ballots, but later Republican authors make it clear these reforms proved to be quite controversial, especially among members of the senatorial elite. Gabinius was later criticized as an “unknown and sordid man” whose law was thought to have disrupted political affairs by estranging ordinary citizens from the Senate. The Cassian reform prompted even more vocal opposition at the time it was proposed. Although Cassius came from a noble family, the extension of the secret ballot to trials was seen as a populist measure that brought shame to his family because it courted the “fickle praise of the mob.” One of Cassius’s fellow tribunes worked alongside one of the consuls to block this law. Scipio Africanus the Younger finally broke the impasse by persuading the tribune to withdraw his veto. Carbo, for his part, is called “a seditious and wicked citizen” who elite audiences apparently viewed as a particularly craven opportunist.⁷

4.1. Denarius minted by P. Licinius Nerva in 113–112 BC showing Roman citizens walking across a platform to cast their votes (Crawford 292/1). Private collection. Photo by Zoe Watts.

Such criticisms notwithstanding, the introduction of secret ballots responded to at least two genuine political problems. First, secret ballots made voter intimidation much more difficult. Although people could (and, apparently, did) still physically position themselves in ways that might allow them to see what was written on an individual ballot, no figure now could stand nearby and listen to how each individual voted. Second, this reform also made it much more risky to try to influence an election through the distribution of political favors or bribery. There was now no way for a corrupt candidate to determine whether the people he paid actually delivered the votes they promised.⁸

The introduction of secret ballots also coincided with some clear evidence that new paths were emerging through which politicians could build a career for themselves by seeming like they were advancing the cause of good governance amid tremendous economic inequality. Though Gabinius, the author of the first secret ballot law, does not appear to have parlayed this achievement into any higher offices, another Gabinius, who may have been his grandson, served as consul in 58 BC.⁹ Both Cassius and Carbo were rewarded more promptly. Cassius’s status as a champion of voting protections propelled him to a consulship in 127 and the censorship in 125. Carbo, for his part, built his early career as a populist around the voting reform he sponsored, although upon winning the consulship for 120, he turned dramatically against other populists.

The impact of these reforms extended beyond the careers of the tribunes who sponsored them. They helped to catalyze the emergence of a personality-driven, populist politicking through which ambitious politicians sought out ways to define and disseminate their own individualized political brand. Nothing shows this better than the rapid evolution of the design scheme for the silver denarius. Every year the Republic selected three relatively junior members of elite families to preside over the Roman mint. These moneyers superintended the minting of the coins and often signed the coins minted under their supervision. Initially, these signatures served essentially as a quality control mechanism that forced the moneyer to acknowledge any inferior design or poor execution. The denarius had maintained a more or less consistent appearance across the nearly eighty years since its creation during the Second Punic War. Like Greek civic coins, early denarii usually had a standard design, with a helmeted head of Roma (a female deity who personified Rome) on the front and either an image of the divine twins Castor and Pollux (the Dioscuri) on horseback or an image of a divine figure in a chariot on the reverse.¹⁰

Almost immediately after Gabinius introduced the secret ballot for the election of magistrates, however, the behavior of moneyers changed. In 139, one decided to replace the customary divine figure in a horse-drawn chariot on the reverse of the coin with an image of Hercules in a chariot drawn by centaurs. The following year saw two different moneyers issue denarii with new adaptations of this standard iconography on their reverse. One coin showed Juno drawn in a chariot by goats, and the other depicted a warrior drawn in a chariot. Although the significance of these particular images remains unclear, it is assumed that all three of these moneyers chose these specific designs because they communicated something about themselves while remaining broadly consistent with the historical iconography of the denarius.

4.2. Denarius of 133 BC showing the head of Roma and Jupiter in a four-horse chariot (Crawford 248/1). This iconography reflects the standard design of the denarius in the early and mid-second century BC. Private collection. Photo by Zoe Watts.

In 137 BC, two of the moneyers chose to break away completely from the traditional design of the denarius.¹¹ Whereas Roma remained on the front of the coin, one chose to depict on the reverse a scene from Rome’s founding mythology in which the shepherd Faustulus found Romulus and Remus suckling from the she wolf (see figure 4.3). The other moneyer, Ti. Veturius, broke completely with precedent. The front of his coin depicted Mars, not Roma, and the reverse shows a scene in which two warriors take an oath while standing over a kneeling figure (see figure 4.4). Apparently a reference to a historical incident in which the Romans honored an unfavorable treaty with the Samnites, this coin seems to weigh in on a contemporary political controversy over whether or not the Romans should abide by a treaty that a relative of the moneyer had helped to negotiate in Spain.¹² Then, in the years 135 and 134, two brothers descended from the Minucia family each issued denarii showing two of their ancestors who had once served as consuls standing beside a monumental column that had been erected to honor a third ancestor, L. Minucius, for paying for a public distribution of grain to the poor in 439 BC (see figure 4.5).¹³ These coins, issued amid a period of growing discontent among Rome’s poor, branded the contemporary Minucii family as benevolent figures who had historically served as protectors and champions of Rome’s vulnerable.

Veturius and the Minucii brothers understood that high-value denarii offered an ideal platform to build a political brand among the soldiers who received them as military pay. Soldiers worried about the financial pressures felt by Italian farmers or the status of a treaty suspending fighting in Spain would see these coins and might understand that the moneyers responsible for them shared their concerns. And with Romans now able to vote by secret ballot, appeals like these suddenly had the possibility of swinging elections toward populist candidates and policy ideas that elite Roman politicians may once have been able to hold back. The innovative moneyers and reformist tribunes of the early 130s BC tried to build support for themselves by seizing on the growing popular discontent with the directions of Roman political and economic life. They broke with precedent to use their offices in ways that defined them as champions of particular reforms and that developed individual political brands. But none of them had done anything to threaten the stability of Rome’s republican government.

4.3. Denarius of 137 BC showing the head of Roma and a scene with the she wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, an iconographic evocation of Roman traditions (Crawford 235/1). Private collection. Photo by Zoe Watts.

4.4. Denarius of 137 BC showing Mars on the obverse and two warriors taking an oath while standing over a kneeling figure, a probable reference to a Roman-Samnite treaty (Crawford 234/1). Private collection. Photo by Zoe Watts.

4.5. Denarius of 134 BC showing an ancestor of the moneyer giving grain to the poor (Crawford 243/1). Private collection. Photo by Zoe Watts.

It would not take long before a tribune would decide that reform required him to disrupt the basic norms governing the Republic. The author of this challenge was a man named Tiberius Gracchus. Tiberius came from one of the plebeian families that had fared best in the competitive arena of elite Roman politics. His great-grandfather held the consulship in 238 BC and was the Roman general responsible for conquering Sardinia. His great-uncle had held two consulships during the height of the war against Hannibal and had served as the deputy commander to Fabius Maximus. And Tiberius’s father, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, served as consul in 177 and 163 BC, secured two triumphs for his service in Spain and Sardinia, served as an augur, and helped to fill the ranks of the Senate through his service as censor in 169.¹⁴

Tiberius’s mother, Cornelia, came from even more prominent stock. She was the younger daughter of Hannibal’s conqueror Scipio Africanus and his wife, Aemilia, who was herself a member of the old patrician family that also produced Aemilius Paullus (the victor in the Third Macedonian War). Cornelia’s marriage to Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus represented the consummation of a great political alliance between the Gracchi and the Scipiones. Historical rivals, the two families had come together in 184 when Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (who was then serving as tribune) twice used his veto to prevent the imprisonment of Scipio Africanus and Scipio Asiaticus while they were being tried for improperly taking money secured from Antiochus III. Cornelia then arranged for Sempronia, the only one of her daughters to survive into adulthood, to marry Scipio Aemilianus just before he captured and destroyed Carthage. This marriage again reinforced the bonds among the families of the Gracchi, the Scipiones, and the Aemilii.¹⁵

Tiberius Gracchus was born, then, into one of the most enviable positions imaginable. He bore the name of a famous consular family and his mother descended from two of the second century’s most successful clans. These connections ensured that he would receive some of the most promising lower offices the state had to offer, but Tiberius was also well prepared to excel once he took office. Tiberius was an intellectually talented youth and Cornelia ensured that he had a world-class training in public speaking and philosophy so that he could develop the skills necessary to command the attention of both voters and soldiers.¹⁶

Tiberius’s first public service could not have been better chosen. He served under his brother-in-law Scipio Aemilianus in the Third Punic War, sharing a tent with him and earning an award for bravery when he was the first Roman soldier to successfully get over the wall of an enemy town. Following the war, Tiberius married Claudia, the daughter of the former consul and censor Appius Claudius and the great-great-granddaughter of the Appius Claudius who once had urged Rome to resist Pyrrhus of Epirus. The Claudii were another one of Rome’s oldest and most outstanding elite families, with nearly twenty different members of the family holding a consulship in the century and a quarter between the First Punic War and the 140s. Although he belonged to one of the clans on which the Republic had historically depended most heavily, Tiberius’s father-in-law Appius Claudius also had a bit of a rogue streak. After provoking a battle so that he might give himself the pretext to celebrate a triumph, Appius Claudius celebrated it without authorization. One of his daughters had to intervene to prevent him from being dragged from the triumphal carriage by a tribune.¹⁷

Tiberius’s talents and family alliances marked him as a rising star in Roman politics by the time that he next entered office. In 137 BC, Tiberius was chosen to serve as quaestor, the lowest office that qualified one for membership in the Senate. Assigned to assist the consul Gaius Hostilius Mancinus while he campaigned in Spain against the city of Numantia, Tiberius almost certainly assumed that his father’s experiences in the region and the connections his family had developed with local leaders would help Tiberius succeed there much as he had in Africa. Unfortunately, Mancinus’s military incompetence proved nearly as great as Scipio’s genius. After a series of battlefield reverses forced him back into his fortified camp, Mancinus panicked and tried to retreat at night. By morning, the Roman army was completely surrounded and Mancinus sued for peace. Because of the reputation of his family, the Numantines demanded that Tiberius negotiate the agreement. The treaty they agreed upon permitted the thousands of surviving Roman forces to withdraw, but their Spanish captors kept all of the plunder they had taken.¹⁸

When he returned to Rome, Tiberius was shocked to see that some senators, including his brother-in-law Scipio Aemilianus, had denounced the agreement he had negotiated “as a disaster and disgrace” to Rome. Members of the Senate called for the entire army, including its leaders, to be returned in chains to Numantia. Scipio in particular wanted the treaty nullified because he hoped to continue the war and to secure a command for himself that would enable him to subdue Numantia as he had earlier subdued Carthage.

Tiberius recognized that his fortunes had changed dramatically since his return from Spain. No longer the golden child of the establishment, he had instead become a polarizing figure who believed that Scipio and his allies had attacked his reputation unjustly.²⁰ He now faced a significant dilemma. It would be seen as a terrible failure if a man of his talent and pedigree did not attain a consulship. His shame would only be compounded by the fact that most male relatives on both sides of his family and his wife’s family had served as consul. The break with Scipio, however, had blocked the inside path to the consulship. Tiberius confronted the choice of either trying to rebuild his reputation within elite circles or capitalizing on his new popularity among the Roman citizenry. He chose the second option.

After Scipio set off for Spain in 134, Tiberius stood for election as a tribune of the plebs. His brother Gaius would later write that Tiberius was motivated in part by the sight of a countryside populated not by hearty Roman small landowners but by large estates and pastures tended by barbarian slaves. Although archaeological evidence shows clearly that the Italian countryside was neither deserted nor filled with large estates in the 130s BC, there can be no doubt that the growing inequality between wealthy figures like Scipio and the men he commanded in the armies had become a serious problem. This economic inequality provided Tiberius with a potent issue that simultaneously inflamed the anger of ordinary Romans who felt that the new imperial economy had left them behind and emphasized how Tiberius would continue to fight for their interests against the entrenched Roman elite.²¹

Surviving sources do not say whether Tiberius campaigned on the issue of land reform, but it is clear that, once he was elected, he began to work immediately on a land reform bill that could provide farmland to some of Rome’s poorer citizens. Inspired, we are told, by slogans and pleas written by his supporters on walls all over the city, Tiberius gave an impassioned speech in which he lamented the impoverishment of the people of Italy and, alluding to a recent slave rebellion in Sicily, spoke dramatically about the consequences of farms manned primarily by slaves.²²

This speech set the stage for a reform that Tiberius then proposed. He focused on the publicly owned land that Rome had taken from cities that opposed it in war. These parcels of land were scattered across Italy, and the state had rented the land out to farmers, shepherds, and herdsmen. A law from 367 BC forbade people from working more than 500 iugera (about 300 acres) of this public land, with additional restrictions placed on the number of animals that one could pasture on it. The law originally tasked freed slaves with observing activities on the land, but, as the public properties grew to include land spread across all of Italy, monitoring and enforcement both slackened. People came to occupy more than the maximum 500 iugera, they began making improvements to the land, and they grazed more than the permitted number of cattle.²³

Tiberius proposed a law that required those who held more than 500 iugera to surrender any land above that threshold back to the state in return for fair compensation. They would also be allowed to keep an additional 250 iugera for each son to farm. Any land that came back into the possession of the state would then be redistributed in lots of 30 iugera (around 20 acres) to the poor or landless by a commission of three men. Those receiving the land would take possession of it, but they could not sell or transfer the land to people looking to piece together larger portfolios of property. Although many of those who held the public lands at present were not Roman citizens, it seems the law proposed to redistribute land only to Roman citizens.²⁴

This modest reform addressed popular interest in land redistribution while simultaneously offering compensation to those who would lose use of public property. Indeed, something like it had been proposed in 140 BC by Scipio’s friend the consul Gaius Laelius, though Laelius ultimately withdrew the proposal when elite Italians loudly objected to it. The climate was different in 133, however. Scipio remained in Spain, and one of the two consuls for the year was in Sicily dealing with a slave revolt. The consul remaining in Rome, Publius Mucius Scaevola, favored Tiberius’s proposal, as did Tiberius’s father-in-law, Appius Claudius, and Scaevola’s brother Crassus, who would be named pontifex maximus, the head of the college of priests in Rome, the following year. This looked like a reform that could gain broad support and quickly be voted into law.²⁵

Despite Tiberius’s prominent supporters and the moderation of his measure, however, the Senate refused to endorse the proposal. At the same time, opponents began waging a public relations campaign to convince people that Tiberius aspired to take over the state. The accusation seemed absurd. But Tiberius was indeed proposing something novel: that the Republic play a role in balancing the distribution of the wealth of empire that Rome’s citizens, both rich and poor, had created together. What alarmed Tiberius’s opponents in the Senate was not the practical effect of the law but the principle behind it. A further cause for alarm lay in the reaction of non-Roman upper-class Italians, many of whom rented this public land and would have been adversely affected by the redistribution. Tiberius had then effectively proposed to take property used by Rome’s Italian allies without their consent or their input.²⁶

After the Senate refused to endorse the proposal, Tiberius decided to break with custom and bring his motion directly to the concilium plebis. This was neither illegal nor entirely unprecedented, but it was also not at all ordinary. And Tiberius’s action only prompted an even greater senatorial backlash. Tiberius’s opponents took their fears to Octavius, one of his fellow tribunes, and persuaded Octavius to veto the measure before it could come up for a vote. It was, of course, Octavius’s prerogative to veto any law he wanted, and it was also common for the Senate and the tribunes to work together to ensure that no measure strongly opposed by the Senate became law. In all likelihood, Octavius and his backers hoped that Tiberius would follow the example of Laelius seven years prior and simply withdraw his bill. But Tiberius was not Laelius. Unlike Laelius, Tiberius was not a consul and, if he backed down, he could probably not expect to become one. And, perhaps just as importantly, Tiberius had no intention of bowing to the demands of a tribune who acted on behalf of the same senators who had turned on him after the peace treaty with Numantia—especially when the law he had authored enjoyed enthusiastic public backing.

Sensing that he could not succeed politically if he played by the existing rules, Tiberius responded to Octavius’s opposition with fury. In Plutarch’s words, “These tactics angered Tiberius. He then withdrew his conciliatory law and introduced one which was more gratifying to the people and harsher to the illegal owners of the land. It demanded that they should vacate the land which they had acquired in defiance of the earlier laws, but this time it offered no compensation.”²⁷ Tiberius then called a series of public debates in which he and Octavius discussed the merits of the law. He pointed out that Octavius, as a holder of large tracts of public land, had a clear motivation for opposing the law. Tiberius even offered to pay Octavius out of his own funds for the property he would lose, an offer intended to both emphasize Octavius’s conflict of interest and insulate Tiberius from the charge that he had personal animosity against Octavius. When none of this worked, Tiberius then decreed a ban on all public activity until a vote could be taken on the new law. He made sure that this ban was observed by sealing the Temple of Saturn so that no money could be withdrawn from the public treasury. And yet Octavius still refused to yield.²⁸

Tiberius then called for a vote again. On the day the ballots were to be cast, however, the voting urns disappeared, leaving the supporters of Tiberius on the verge of rioting. When the Senate proved unable to mediate the dispute, Tiberius resorted to some political stagecraft. He announced that he saw no way out of the impasse with Octavius and claimed that the people could justly take away the power of office that they had bestowed on Octavius when they elected him tribune. He then proposed that he and Octavius should each submit to a vote in which the people could decide whether or not they should continue in office. Knowing full well that the voters would support him in these circumstances, Tiberius offered to go first. Octavius also understood the political dynamics of the moment. He refused the offer and, on the following day, the assembly voted to strip him of his office. Despite Tiberius’s calls for calm, Octavius barely escaped an angry mob outraged by his obstruction and eager to take vengeance on him now that his person was no longer protected by the sacrosanctity of the tribunate.²⁹

Octavius’s deposition fell into a legal gray area. Other officials had seen their terms of office end prematurely, as we saw earlier when the Senate effectively rescinded the consular power of Flaminius in the third century. But Tiberius had done something quite different and much more dangerous. Resentful of the obstacles that had been thrown in the way of his proposals, Tiberius fanned the flames of popular resentment against the narrow group of elites who blocked the state from responding to the needs of ordinary Romans. He did not actively encourage violence from his followers, but, by potentially touching everyone in the city, the threat of physical violence that now rippled through Rome spread more fear than even an actual riot could. The volatility of Tiberius’s followers constituted a potent political weapon that could fire anywhere, at any time, and for unpredictable reasons.³⁰

The deposition of Octavius removed the threat of a veto and ensured the passage of Tiberius’s reform. Tiberius, his brother Gaius, and Appius Claudius were then chosen as the three commissioners who would redistribute the public land. Tiberius now faced another very real problem. The unusual political procedures and threats of violence that he had used to pass the law creating the land commission had intensified the opposition of those who had sought to derail his reform. Their alarm only increased when it became clear that Tiberius intended to use the commission as a vehicle to advance his own career and those of his family members. The Senate could not rescind the law authorizing the land commission, but it could refuse to fund the commission’s operations. Land redistribution would, at the very minimum, require teams of surveyors and other skilled people to determine plot boundaries, assess whether people actually were using more than five hundred iugera of land, and set new property lines within the parcels of land that were redistributed. Those to whom the land was redistributed also required assistance to buy agricultural equipment, seeds, and other start-up materials. The Republic had a significant role to play in ensuring that this reform succeeded—and the Senate controlled the funds on which all of these actions would depend.

The Senate unsurprisingly refused to provide any money for Tiberius’s land commission. Under ordinary circumstances, this would end the matter. The land commission would continue to exist legally, but, without funds, it was effectively dead. The Senate pushed even further, however. Under the influence of Tiberius’s cousin Scipio Nascia, the Senate refused to approve even a tent for Tiberius to use while conducting land commission business, and it set his per diem at an absurdly low amount. Helped in part by a rumor that his opponents had poisoned one of Tiberius’s friends, the tribune remained popular, but it was clear that he would have to foot the bill personally for his land commission if he wanted it to do much of anything at all.³¹

Fortune then intervened spectacularly. Attalus III, the king of Pergamum, died and left his kingdom and its treasury to “the Roman people.” While there was no exact precedent for a bequest like this one, the Republic had clear procedures for dealing with situations of this sort. The Senate handled foreign relations and the disbursement of public funds. By rights, the Senate would be expected to accept this bequest and administer the distribution of the unexpected windfall. Tiberius, however, saw in the language of Attalus’s bequest a further opportunity. Because the will marked the beneficiaries as the Roman people, Tiberius claimed that the concilium plebis, not the Senate, should decide how to disburse Attalus’s money and determine the fate of the territory he left to Rome. He then proposed that the money should be used to pay for the land commission and provide supplies to the small landholders the committee would resettle. The assembly would also vote at a later time about how to handle the territory that Attalus left to Rome.³²

Tiberius now pushed the Roman political system in a new and troubling direction. He was advocating for a sort of mediated direct democracy in which the old institutional balances between the Senate and the concilium plebis would be stripped away. In Tiberius’s conception, the assembly would become the dominant force directing all facets of Roman policy. Led by assertive tribunes and protected by secret ballots that enabled plebeians to vote anonymously for the first time, the assembly could legislate as the popular will demanded. It would also depose at will any tribunes who tried to work with senators to block the proposals the assembly wanted to pass. Beneath this empowerment of the tribunes and the assembly lay a revolutionary new idea that true liberty for Romans existed only when popular voices and votes overcame the distorting forces of the Senate and elites.³³

First, Tiberius had proposed that the Republic assume a new role in redistributing property to Rome’s poorer citizens. Now he had effectively advocated for a rebalancing of power between the key Republican institutions of the Senate and the assembly in a way that again empowered Rome’s less wealthy by challenging the authority of the city’s elites. Both of these steps proved disturbing to senators and their wealthy Roman and Italian allies, but what perhaps troubled them most of all was Tiberius’s own role at the center of these transformations. With his masterful command of the public mood and his skill at conjuring the threat of violence, Tiberius stood to benefit most directly from the institutional revolution that he was advocating. Many senators began to fear that, if Tiberius succeeded in empowering the assembly while marginalizing the Senate, his talents and popularity might result in a brand of personal rule constructed around his ability to manage popular moods.

The public discussion concerning Attalus’s bequest featured a series of powerful attacks against Tiberius from some of the Republic’s most distinguished men. A number of former consuls rose to charge Tiberius with aspiring to absolute power in the state. One of them, who lived near Tiberius, even claimed that a diadem and royal purple robe had been taken out of Attalus’s treasury so that it could be given to Tiberius when he became king.³⁴ Another challenged Tiberius to explain why senators should not expect that other tribunes who sided against him and with the Senate would not, like Octavius, also be deposed.³⁵ Tiberius responded the next day by explaining that he did not deprive Octavius of his tribunate. The people did. And it was then and remained now their right to bestow and withdraw the power of that office as they saw fit.

After this tumultuous public discussion, the concilium plebis again voted to follow Tiberius’s direction. Attalus’s treasury would fund the land commission and provide supplies to those settled by it. Land reform could move forward. But it would soon become clear that the constitutional damage that Tiberius had done far outweighed any benefits the law might have created. Despite the threats of violence and the radical political steps that Tiberius had taken to create and fund his land commission, the commission itself had a rather limited remit. It could indeed redistribute land worked in parcels larger than five hundred iugera, but only in certain parts of Italy. The rich farmland of Campania, for example, seems to have been largely left alone.³⁶ Even if the commission had redistributed all of the public land in Southern Italy, however, it is estimated that perhaps fifteen thousand poor families could then have been resettled—out of an Italian population then numbering several million. The reform would do even less damage to the wealthiest Italians. Although those holding large tracts in areas the commission proposed to redistribute would undoubtedly take a financial hit, landholdings represented only a part of the diversified investment portfolios of Italy’s wealthiest families. Few (if any) of the very richest families in Rome or Italy would be ruined by this reform. But many Romans would eventually be harmed by the breaching of institutional norms that it took to get land reform put in place.³⁷

Tiberius made two crucial and ultimately fateful choices that ensured this controversy would become far more explosive than past moments of political discontent in Rome. For the 150 years that had passed since the end of the Conflict of the Orders, the Republic had avoided political violence because Romans had largely respected the unwritten customs that determined how the Senate, magistrates, and assemblies divided power. Politicians understood the damage that could be done if one used the full legal authority that the assembly could technically claim as a tool to overturn the customs that shaped these patterns of interaction between different parts of the Republic. For more than a century, they had voluntarily held back from doing this. Tiberius’s decision to openly challenge both the Senate and a sitting magistrate by direct appeal to the concilium plebis deeply upset these norms. It was suddenly unclear which rules now governed political disputes and which mechanisms, if any, continued to check the power of the Republic’s various institutions.

Tiberius’s strategic use of the threat of force at moments of political confrontation made the situation even more dangerous. As tensions surrounding the land commission grew, Tiberius fanned the flames of public anger by encouraging rumors that political opponents had threatened him and poisoned one of his friends. This sometimes led crowds of angry supporters to accompany him through the city.³⁸ Tiberius’s household attendants physically removed Octavius from the Rostra, and a mob of his supporters threatened to assault Octavius after his removal. Tiberius never ordered or even condoned violence, but he did make regular use of the threat of it.

This flirtation with violence put Tiberius in a precarious position as the end of his one-year term as tribune approached. Tribunal sacrosanctity had protected him as long as he was in office, but he would have no such sacred safeguard once he was again a private citizen. Amid rumors that his opponents would target him the moment he left office, Tiberius decided to seek a second consecutive term as tribune. Standing for a second term was not illegal, but it was nonetheless without precedent. Tiberius himself understood that this extraordinary decision required public justification. He again drew upon his skill as an orator. Summoning his followers, he told them that his safety depended on him continuing to hold office. When his rural supporters did not come to the city in large enough numbers to ensure that Tiberius would win the votes of the rural tribes, Tiberius even resorted to canvassing personally among some of the urban poor in the city of Rome. After the first two of the thirty-five tribes had cast their votes, an objection was raised about the legality of Tiberius standing for a second consecutive term. In this procedural chaos, the assembly adjourned for the day.³⁹

Tiberius appealed directly to his followers for protection. He told them that he feared “his enemies would break into his house at night and kill him.” Many of his supporters camped outside of his home, spending “the night there on guard.” Whereas Tiberius had previously used threats of mob violence quite skillfully, never before had he confronted such a real threat to his safety. He lost his deft touch in this climate of fear and uncertainty. When the people assembled again the following morning to continue casting votes, a scuffle between supporters and opponents of Tiberius broke out on the margins of the crowd. Meanwhile, the Senate convened to discuss a response to the situation. The consul Scaevola pointedly refused to agree to use force to put down any disturbances connected to the election, but Tiberius’s cousin the pontifex maximus Scipio Nascia led a group of senators and attendants out of the Senate to where Tiberius stood. At first, the crowd parted, perhaps out of respect for Rome’s chief religious officer or out of fear of the men he led, and then began to flee, breaking benches as they ran. Some of Nascia’s mob carried clubs. Those who did not picked up broken pieces of benches and began attacking the members of Tiberius’s entourage who did not flee fast enough. In the mayhem, Tiberius was grabbed by the toga, pulled to the ground, and clubbed to death. He was one of perhaps two hundred or three hundred Romans killed that morning.⁴⁰

Romans understood that the Republic changed irreversibly on that day in 133. Centuries later Plutarch would write that this was the “first outbreak of civil strife in Rome that resulted in the bloodshed and murder of citizens since the expulsion of the kings.”⁴¹ Cicero, writing just a lifetime after the events of that year, claimed that “the death of Tiberius Gracchus, and even before his death, the whole manner of his tribunate divided one people into two factions.”⁴² And Appian portrayed Tiberius both as “the first to die in civil strife” and as a figure whose death polarized the city between men who mourned him and those who saw in his demise the fulfillment of their deepest hopes.⁴³ Appian also noted that Tiberius “was killed on the capital while still tribune, because of a most excellent design he pursued violently.”⁴⁴

Appian understood the most destructive aspect of Tiberius’s tribunate. Fortified by his deep personal conviction that land reform was essential, Tiberius normalized the use of threats and intimidation as tools to advance a political program that he believed to be just. Although Appian agreed with the excellence of Tiberius’s proposal, he understood that one courted danger by using violence instead of regular political means to pursue even the most admirable goal. The Republic was based on compromise and competition guided by a set of political norms that could be unfair but that were nevertheless recognized by all elites. They allowed themselves to be bound by the rules of the Republic in exchange for the chance to compete for the rewards it offered. Appian likely speaks for himself when he writes that some of those who mourned Tiberius’s death also mourned for themselves and for that moment when his murder revealed that there was “no longer a Republic but the rule of force and violence.”⁴⁵

These authors all wrote with the considerable advantage of hindsight. Though shocking, it is unclear how quickly Romans understood the profound damage that had been done to Republican institutions and norms of conduct in 133 BC. Perhaps in an attempt to turn the page on the entire episode, the Senate allowed the land reform to proceed even though its author was dead. Attalus’s bequest continued to fund its operations, a new commissioner was appointed to replace Tiberius, and the land commission began judicial inquiries against those who refused to document their landholdings. The Gracchan commission would continue to work until perhaps 118 BC, though other land reform measures continued even after that date.⁴⁶ There was also a swift reaction against those involved with Tiberius’s death. Scipio Nascia was sent to Asia after he was threatened with impeachment for murdering a tribune. He died soon after leaving Rome.⁴⁷ Crowds once even shouted down Scipio Aemilianus when he indicated before the assembly that he disapproved of Tiberius.⁴⁸

But, as the 120s dawned, it became clear that the Roman political system had not stabilized. Italian allies whose farms were affected by the investigations and lawsuits of the Gracchan land commission had no direct ability to change policies created by and for Roman citizens. They first tried to seek redress through political allies who had influence in Rome, with Scipio Aemilianus serving as a particularly vocal advocate of their interests. In 129 BC, Scipio seems to have argued that land use issues involving Italian allies were essentially matters of international relations that should fall under the authority of the Senate, not the assembly or agents appointed by it. Popular anger against Scipio grew as rumors flew that he intended to abolish the land commission, but his efforts came to an abrupt end when he turned up dead under mysterious circumstances. Whispers that Scipio’s wife Sempronia and Tiberius’s mother Cornelia had poisoned him soon flitted about the city.⁴⁹

After Scipio’s death, Italian allies began to wonder whether the Republic really wished to protect their interests. A measure in 126 BC to expel non-Roman citizens from the crowded city of Rome deepened distrust between Romans and their Italian allies. Then, in 125, two events made clear the depth of the problem. The consul Fulvius Flaccus, who was also one of the Gracchan land commissioners, proposed extending citizenship to those Italian allies who asked for it, but the law failed to receive approval. Perhaps because of the measure’s failure, the Latin colony of Fregellae, which had remained loyal even during Hannibal’s presence in Italy, revolted against Roman authority. This touched off wider anti-Roman unrest and resulted in the destruction of the city by a Roman army.⁵⁰

Even greater uncertainty gripped both Rome and its Italian allies when Tiberius’s brother Gaius held the tribunate in 123 and was reelected for the year 122. Gaius came into office defined in large part by his brother’s land reform program and violent death. Not only did Gaius have the Gracchan name but he had also served for ten years on the Gracchan land commission before standing for election. Gaius enhanced his association with his late brother by claiming that he decided to seek the tribunate only after Tiberius appeared to him in a dream. This made him popular with the people who had supported his brother but scorned by those in the Senate who had once opposed Tiberius.⁵¹

Once elected, Gaius undertook a legislative program that far exceeded anything his brother had imagined. Tiberius had forcefully argued for the principle that the magistrates of the Republic should do something to improve the economic situation of the rural poor. In practice, however, Tiberius’s vision of the state’s role was relatively modest. Gaius, however, extended this principle much more widely. He passed a law creating a publicly funded grain distribution that sold grain at below-market rates to all Roman citizens who needed or wanted it. He also reformed the process by which land was distributed by the land commission, apparently exempting some of the land farmed by Italian allies. He backed a law requiring the state to provide military equipment and clothing to soldiers free of charge, while setting a minimum recruitment age of seventeen years. He then restarted the process of founding colonies for landless Roman citizens, with a colony planned for the site of what once had been the city of Carthage.⁵²

To pay for this growth in government expenditures, Gaius also revolutionized the process of tax collection in the province of Asia.⁵³ What had in the past been a piecemeal effort, in which small bidders worked district by district under the supervision of the governor, was transformed into one in which the censors at Rome awarded one contract for the entire province. This centralized approach was designed to simultaneously maximize the revenue collected by the state and minimize the opportunity for corruption among provincial governors. Gaius then paired this new tax-collecting scheme with a judicial reform that ended the senatorial monopoly on acting as judges in civil cases and serving as jurors in criminal cases. An allied tribune also pushed through a law requiring that only equites (the members of the second highest social class in Rome, after members of the Senate) serve on juries deciding cases of extortion. This key reform ended a system in which senatorial juries sat in judgment of their elite peers, and thereby made convictions for corruption more likely. Although all of these measures attracted vociferous senatorial opposition, there was no repeat of the procedural gridlock that Tiberius encountered. Not only did Gaius’s popularity and rhetorical skills surpass those of his brother, but senators understood that obstruction would only lead to a recurrence of the violence of 133.

Gaius’s second year as tribune proved less successful. When Gaius spent two months of 122 in Africa supervising the planning of the new colony at Carthage, his opponents decided to take advantage of his absence. Instead of arguing against his popular reforms, they elected to outbid him. Tribunes opposed to Gaius began proposing (but apparently never passing) even more elaborate measures, like the creation of twelve new colonies in Italy that would provide land for perhaps thirty-six thousand families. Where Gaius pushed the idea of extending citizenship to all Italian allies, they instead raised the alternative that no Italian should be subject to flogging as punishment, while simultaneously pushing back against Gaius for too freely granting citizenship to non-Romans. This proposal, too, never passed, but that seems to have been beside the point. It succeeded in painting Gaius as an extremist while simultaneously allowing his opponents to appear willing to compromise. Whereas Gaius accomplished a great deal in 123, his rivals’ efforts to better his every proposal in 122 soon made him seem ineffective and out of touch.

The efforts of the Gracchan opponents in the 120s proved far more effective than the confrontational tactics used against Tiberius in 133. Gaius found himself out of office in 121 and, when he no longer held a position, one of the consuls for that year then moved to defund the colony that Gaius had hoped to found at Carthage. While one of the tribunes led an official public discussion of the issue, Gaius and an ally appear to have called for a rival, unsanctioned public discussion of policy. Their followers mixed with those attending the official event and violence broke out, leading to the death of an attendant of the consul. The Senate responded forcefully, reverting to the sort of aggressive measures it had taken in response to Tiberius. It declared an unprecedented emergency and voted to allow the consul Lucius Opimius to take any actions he deemed necessary to defend the Republic, including the killing without trial of Roman citizens. Lucius, in turn, called all senators and equites to arms, marched on Gaius and his supporters, and ultimately killed Gaius, Flaccus, and as many as three thousand of their followers. When Tiberius was killed by Nascia’s mob, perhaps three hundred other Romans died with him. A little more than a decade later, thousands died alongside Gaius as the Senate empowered the consul to use the resources of the Republic against a Roman citizen and his followers. Political violence had quickly moved from the fringes of Roman politics to become a senatorially sanctioned tool. And, to certain Romans, the use of this violence against the Gracchi made the brothers symbols of a political order willing to use any means (including murder) to block reformers.⁵⁴

Later historians picked up on this idea by highlighting the inevitability of the murders of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. Plutarch, for example, began his Life of Gaius Gracchus by describing a dream in which Tiberius appeared to Gaius and told him: “There is no escape. Fate has decreed the same destiny for us both, to live and die in the service of the people.”⁵⁵ Gaius mentioned this dream often and understood that it committed him both to serve the Roman people and to suffer a violent, premature death. But, in truth, it was not Fate but Tiberius himself who condemned Gaius to this death. Frustrated by a system that had first shut down his expected path to the consulship and then obstructed the legislative program he pursued as an alternative, Tiberius chose to attack the patterns of political behavior that had promoted deliberation and compromise in the Republic for the previous 150 years. And he did so with an air of menace. Though his political creativity and the threats of violence from his crowds of supporters did enable Tiberius to get his land reform measure passed, they also removed the restraints that had long defined how Roman political controversies unfolded. No one could now be sure that disputes would play out peacefully. Any violent incident, however small, could now seem like a threat to the Republic. Although Gaius took pains not to use threats in the same way that Tiberius had, it did not matter. Once violence and intimidation became political tools, any disturbance at all provided an excuse for overreaction. The Gracchi brothers were the first victims of this new world Tiberius created. They would not be the last.