The Grandeur That Was Rome: a survey of Roman culture and civilisation

by J. C. Stobart

The Gracchi

But first we have to recall a futile attempt at reform of the economic distresses of the imperial city. It is not so much the actual schemes of the brothers Gracchus which interest us—for the schemes themselves were unworkable and contained as much folly as wisdom—as the manner in which reform was proposed and defeated. The Gracchi themselves, though of plebeian origin, belonged by numerous ties to the liberal aristocracy. Their famous mother, Cornelia—one of the many Roman women who by their influence help to make Roman history so different from Greek—was the daughter of Scipio Africanus. Tiberius, the elder brother, was married to a Claudia; among his friends were Scævola and Crassus. Thus on all sides he belonged to the circle of progressive nobles. His education had been such as one would expect from such surroundings. As their father had died at an early age, it was Cornelia’s task to make her two “jewels” worthy of her glorious name. Accordingly she employed the most eminent Greeks for their tutors. The boys were trained, no doubt, in Greek oratory to declaim in praise of liberty and tyrannicides, in Greek history and political science to divide constitutions up into monarchies, aristocracies, and democracies, and to believe that in the latter all power belongs to the people. At the same time their military training was not neglected; in horsemanship and feats of arms they outshone all their comrades. Their prospects were in every way brilliant and hopeful. While still a youth of about sixteen, Tiberius was elected augur. The proud aristocrat, Appius Claudius, as it is related by Plutarch, offered him the hand of his daughter, and, having secured it, rushed home to announce her betrothal. As soon as his wife heard of it she exclaimed: “Why in such a hurry unless you have got Tiberius Gracchus for our daughter?” It is the misfortune of rhetorical history that all its good characters appear to be prigs and all its bad ones scoundrels; but it is certain that if Tiberius had been content with the easy road to fame which stretched before him in youth, he might without trouble have had the world at his feet. He accompanied his brother-in-law, the younger Africanus, in the last expedition against Carthage. In camp he was the most distinguished of the young officers, and the first to scale the walls of the city. He served his quæstorship in Spain, and there showed all the diplomatic skill of the Cornelian family. He saved an army of 20,000 men from destruction at Numantia. The Spaniards loved him no less for his name than for his uprightness. Thus at the age of thirty-one he had his future assured. A brilliant orator with distinguished public service behind him, he was obviously destined for the consulship in the near future, and then for a huge province, for wealth, fame, and honour.

Call him a prig and a doctrinaire, if you will, for not being content with that prospect. In passing through, on his way to Spain, he had seen the pleasant lands of Tuscany lying forlorn and desolate, chained gangs of foreign slaves working in the fields or tending the flocks of absentee Roman landlords, while the sturdy peasants who should have been in their place were loafing in the streets of Rome. The public land, conquered in war, had sometimes been simply embezzled by Roman politicians; sometimes granted to veteran soldiers only to fall into the hands of speculators. The old Licinian land-law, which had limited the amount of land which might be held in one hand, was openly flouted, and leases were treated as freeholds.

Seeing these things, the young man was filled with a passion for reform, and deliberately devoted his life to that task. The modern historians who call him prig and demagogue do not deny the awful mischief which he set himself to repair. It is hard to know what he should have done to please them. The senate, by now an entrenched stronghold of property dishonestly acquired and privilege dishonestly maintained, could obviously never be converted. Filled with Greek ideas, Tiberius determined to appeal to the demos. That of course was a mistake. There was no such thing as a demos at Rome, and there never had been. The relation between Senate and Comitia was not in the least the same as that between Council and Assembly in Greece. At Rome the Senate deliberated and the Comitia ratified; at Athens the Council prepared business for the Assembly to discuss and decide. It is not that the letter of the constitution really matters—when people are hungry it does not—but that there was lacking at Rome the very elements of democracy, an articulate commons, an organised will of the people. Failing that, any attempt to pose as champion of the people must be a fraud, conscious or unconscious. But it is grossly unfair to Gracchus to suppose that it was conscious. He thought that he was living in a democracy, he thought that a tribune of the plebs might fairly claim to be champion of the people, unaware that the plebs was now an anachronism, and the tribunate merely a clumsy brake on the wheels of the state. In 133 B.C. Tiberius had himself elected as one of the ten tribunes, and immediately prepared to introduce the millennium by legislative process.

He proposed to enforce the old Licinian laws by which no individual citizen could claim a large holding of public land. Then presently, in his childlike ignorance of the tenacity of property, annoyed at the resistance he encountered, he further proposed to make his measure retrospective, so as to evict thousands of noble land-grabbers. The land thus escheated to the state he proposed to lease on nominal terms as small holdings to the poorer citizens of Rome. The distribution was to be carried out by a commission of three. Very unwisely, but probably because there were no men of standing in the senate whom he could trust, he made this commission a family party consisting of himself, his father-in-law, and his young brother. Property was immediately up in arms against him. The liberal senators discovered, as even liberals are apt to do, that one’s own property has a sanctity far superior to other people’s. Accordingly, they took the Roman constitutional method of putting up another tribune to veto the proposals of Tiberius. Thereupon Tiberius, with his fantastic notions of the people and the people’s rights, declared that a tribune who opposed the people was no tribune, and so had Octavius deposed. The senate’s answer was the only constitutional answer left to them, a threat of prosecution when the tribunate should be over. That, of course, made it necessary for Tiberius to perpetuate his office. He gathered a band of followers sworn to protect his life, proposed a string of attractive measures to secure popular support, and stood for a second term of office. The senate put up more tribunes to veto his election. Thus the state was at a deadlock; there were no more resources for such a situation within constitutional limits, so the senators simply girt up their togas and, led by a Scipio, marched down into the forum to settle the question of reform in a truly Roman manner. Tiberius Gracchus was murdered, and his followers left for judicial assassination.

Ten years later Gaius Gracchus, with a similar programme and the added motive of piety to his brother’s memory, took up the campaign afresh. The senate, indeed, having slain the author of reform, had been forced to allow the reforms themselves at any rate to start. Some lands had been redistributed, and when another Scipio got a decree passed to stop the work of the land commission, he too was assassinated. It is clear that by this time the agrarian agitation had been largely appeased; what follows is political merely. The reformers had got the constitution altered to permit the re-election of tribunes, and in 123 Gaius was elected to that office; he was rather more practical, and therefore far more dangerous, than his brother, but the passion for vengeance against the stubborn and brutal nobility had no doubt blinded his judgment. Coupled with the land-agitation there was now a loud demand for political rights by the Italians, who were debarred even from the elementary rights of market and marriage with each other.

The platform upon which Gaius Gracchus stood was a radical one. Henceforth every poor citizen was to be supplied with cheap corn at less than half price, about 4d. a bushel. The land commission was to be restored. The Assembly was to be reorganised upon a new basis, which would destroy the preponderant voting power of the nobility. New colonies were to be founded, including one at Carthage—a most salutary measure. Easier terms of military service were to be granted, including free equipment and the right of appeal. By these measures, some of them wise and just, some of them mere vote-catching devices, Gaius won the support of the people. Then he turned to the second estate—the capitalist Equites. To buy their favour he took up their demand that the taxes of “Asia,” as the Romans called their new province bequeathed to them by King Attalus III., should be put up for auction not locally but in Rome. It seemed to the Romans that since the Asiatics were bound to be plundered in any case, as indeed the inhabitants of Asia Minor always had and always have been plundered, the proceeds might as well flow straight into the pockets of Roman capitalists. To this he added the proposition that the jury-lists should henceforth be drawn from the Equestrian order and the senators excluded. It was probably more iniquitous that money-lenders and governors should be tried by a jury of money-lenders exclusively than that they should come before a jury of governors past and future. Neither would seem to us or to the provincials an ideal arrangement.

FIG. 1. ETRUSCAN WARRIOR: BRONZE STATUETTE	FIG 2. ROMAN LEGIONARY OF THE EMPIRE: BRONZE STATUETTE
Plate XII.

Much of this policy, we have to admit, was pure demagogy, but for that the conservative nobles, who cared nothing for the welfare of the state, and were impervious to anything but force, are directly responsible. Gracchus got his measures through the comitia, and secured his re-election for the next year. Feeling that his policy had secured him a large and faithful party of supporters, he now prepared to introduce a measure which he knew to be necessary for the salvation of his country, but which he must equally well have known to be unpopular at Rome, namely, the grant of citizen rights to the Italians. By this we see that Gaius Gracchus, if he sometimes stooped to the arts of the demagogue, was also capable of real statesmanship. The progressive grant of burgess rights as soon as subject peoples were sufficiently Romanised to be fit for them was the old Roman policy, which had made the city great in the past, and kept her safe in the shock of invasion. But the Romans had now become jealous and exclusive. The proposal was detested in Rome. Each side organised its gangs of roughs; there were daily riots in the streets, and at last the senatorial party once more charged down into the forum and slaughtered the second reformer as they had slaughtered the first. In the prosecutions that followed no fewer than 3000 of his partisans were executed.

In all this it is evident that the Roman political system had completely broken down. The constitution had always been incredibly ill-defined. There is no doubt that sovereignty legally belonged to the people, and that senatorial government was a usurpation, as the Gracchi called it. By calling the citizen body of Rome a mob or a rabble you do not alter the rights of the case. It was largely the fault of the Government that they had been allowed to become so selfish, so disorderly, and so corrupt. The extraordinary machinery of the tribunate—ten magistrates, each with an absolute veto upon all government—had made it impossible to find any constitutional method of reform. The policy of Gaius Gracchus was the only possible one if Rome was to be saved, and as a matter of plain fact it was the policy which after a century of unceasing bloodshed Rome eventually adopted. It was to be a disguised monarchy, like that of Pericles at Athens, working on the basis of the tribunician powers. The old ascendancy of the Senate could not stand a challenge; not only did it rest upon no legal title, but it had lost whatever claim to respect it ever possessed on the score of patriotism or statesmanship. For the agrarian problem it had no policy but to hold fast to its ill-gotten lands; to the demands of the Italian allies it had nothing but a miserly “no.” It watched with indifference the ruin of Italy, the degeneracy of Rome, and the oppression of the provincial world. The policy of the Gracchi may have included dreams and nightmares, but it did look forward and hold out hopes. The Gracchi had now definitely started a party system. They had laid the foundation of a democratic movement, and it is Rome’s misfortune that this foundation was built of such rotten materials. The democracy had been bought by bribes, but it had failed to exhibit a spark of disinterested statesmanship. If ever a state needed a master that state was Rome. Henceforth until a master came the condition of Rome and Italy and the provinces was simply deplorable. Nothing could be done in politics without a hired gang of bravos.