A History of Rome During the Later Republic and Early Principate

by A. H. J. Greenidge

This was the fiercest challenge that he had yet flung to the senate. There might be a difference of opinion as to the right of a magistrate to put a question to the people without the guidance of a senatorial decree; the assignment of land was unquestionably a popular right in so far as it required ratification by the commons; even the deposition of Octavius was a matter for the people and would avenge itself. But there were two senatorial rights—the one usurped, the other created—whose validity had never been questioned. These were the control of finance and the direction of provincial administration. Were the possibility once admitted that these might be dealt with in the Comitia, the magistrates would cease to be ministers of the senate; for it was chiefly through a system of judicious prize-giving that the senate attached to itself the loyalty of the official class. There was perhaps less fear of what Gracchus himself might do than of the spectre which he was raising for the future. For in Roman history the events of the past made those of the future; there were few isolated phenomena in its development.

From this time the attacks of individual senators on Gracchus became more vehement and direct. They proceeded from men of the highest rank. A certain Pompeius, in whom we may probably see an ex-consul and a future censor, was not ashamed of raising the spectre of a coming monarchy by reference to the story of the sceptre and the purple robe, and is said to have vowed to impeach Gracchus as soon as his year of magistracy had expired;[384] the ex-consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus, of Macedonian fame, reproached Tiberius with his rabble escort. He compared the demeanour of the father and the son. In the censorship of the former the citizens used to quench their lights at night, as they saw him pass up the street to his house, that they might impress the censorial mind with the ideas of early hours and orderly conduct; now the son of this man might be seen returning home amidst the blaze of torches, held in the stout arms of a defiant body-guard drawn from the neediest classes.[385] These arrows may have Missed the mark; the one that hit was winged by an aged senator, Titus Annius Luscus, who had held the consulship twenty years before. His wit is said to have been better established than his character. He excelled in that form of ready altercation, of impaling his opponent on the horns of a dilemma by means of some innocent question, which, both in the courts and the senate, was often more effective than the power of continuous oratory. He now challenged Tiberius to a wager (sponsio), such as in the public life of Rome was often employed to settle a disputed point of honour or of fact, to determine the question whether he had dishonoured a colleague, who was holy in virtue of his office and had been made sacrosanct by the laws. The proposal was received by the senators with loud cries of acclamation. A glance at Tiberius would probably have shown that Annius had found the weak spot, not merely in his defensive armour, but in his very soul. The deposition of Octavius was proving a very nemesis; it was a democratic act that was in the highest degree undemocratic, an assertion and yet a gross violation of popular liberty.[386] The superstitious masses were in the habit of washing their hands and purifying their bodies before they entered into the presence of a tribune.[387] Might there not be a thrill of awe and repentance when the idea was brought home to them that this holy temple had been violated: and must not this be followed by a sense of repugnance to the man who had prompted them to the unhallowed deed? Tiberius sprang to his feet, quitted the senate-house and summoned the people. The majesty of the tribunate in his person had been outraged by Annius. He must answer for his words. The aged senator appeared before the crowd; he knew his disadvantage if the ordinary weapons of comitial strife were employed. In power of words and in repute with the masses he stood far behind Tiberius. But his presence of mind did not desert him. Might he ask a few questions before the regular proceedings began? The request was allowed and there was a dead silence. "Now suppose," said Annius, "you, Tiberius, were to wish to cover me with shame and abuse, and suppose I were to call on one of your colleagues for help, and he were to come up here to offer me his assistance, and suppose further that this were to excite your displeasure, would you deprive that colleague of yours of his office?" To answer that question in the affirmative was to admit that the tribunician power was dead; to answer it in the negative was to invite the retort that the auxilium was only one form of the intercessio. The quick-witted southern crowd must have seen the difficulty at once, and Tiberius himself, usually so ready and bold in speech, could not face the dilemma. He remained silent and dismissed the assembly.[388]

But matters could not remain as they were. This new aspect of Octavius's deposition was the talk of the town, and there were many troubled consciences amongst the members of his own following. Something must be done to quiet them; he must raise the question himself. The situation had indeed changed rapidly. Tiberius Gracchus was on his defence. Never did his power of special pleading appear to greater advantage than in the speech which followed. He had the gift which makes the mighty Radical, of diving down and seizing some fundamental truth of political science, and then employing it with merciless logic for the illustration or refutation of the practice of the present. The central idea here was one gathered from the political science of the Greeks. The good of the community is the only test of the rightness of an institution. It is justified if it secures that end, unjustified if it does not: or, to use the language of religion, holy in the one case, devoid of sanctity in the other. And an institution is not a mere abstraction; we must judge it by its use. We must, therefore, say that when it obeys the common interest, it is right: when it ceases to obey it, it is wrong. But the right must be preserved and the wrong plucked out. So Gracchus maintained that the tribune was holy and sacrosanct because he had been sanctified to the people's service and was the people's head. If then he change his character and do the people wrong, cutting down its strength and silencing its voice as expressed through the suffrage, he has deprived himself of his office, for he has ceased to conform to the terms on which he received it. Should we leave a tribune alone who was pulling down the Capitolium or burning the docks? And yet a tribune who did these things would remain a tribune, though a bad one. It is only when a tribune is destroying the power of the people that he is no longer a tribune at all. The laws give the tribune the power to arrest the consul. It is a power given against a man elected by the people; for consul and tribune are equally mandataries of the people. Shall not then the people have the right of depriving the tribune of his authority, when he uses this authority in a way prejudicial to the interests of the giver? What does the history of the past teach us? Can anything have been more powerful or more sacred than the ancient monarchy of Rome? The Imperium of the king was unlimited, the highest priestly offices were his. Yet the city expelled Tarquin for his crimes. The tyranny of a single man was alone sufficient to bring to an end a government which had its roots in the most distant past, which had presided over the very birth of the city. And, if sanctity alone is to be the ground of immunity, what are we to think of the punishment of a vestal virgin? Is there anything in Rome more holy and awe-inspiring than the maidens who tend and guard the eternal flame? Yet their sin is visited by the most horrible of deaths. They hold their sacrosanct character through the gods; they lose it, therefore, when they sin against the gods. Should the same not be true of the tribune? It is on account of the people that he is sacred; he cannot retain this divine character when he wrongs the people; he is a man engaged in destroying the very power which is the source of his strength. If the tribunate can justly be gained by a favourable vote of the majority of the tribes, can it not with greater justice be taken away by an adverse vote of all of them? Again, what should be the limits of our action in dealing with sacred things? Does sanctity mean immobility? By no means. What are more holy and inviolable than things dedicated to the gods? Yet this character does not prevent the people from handling, moving, transferring them as it pleases. In the case of the tribunate, it is the office, not the man, that is inviolable; it may be treated as an object of dedication and transferred to another. The practice of our own State proves that the office is not inviolable in the sense of being inalienable, for its holders have often forsworn it and asked to be divested of it.[389]

The strongest part of this utterance was that which dealt with the sacred character of office; it was a mere emanation from the performance of certain functions; the protection, not the reality, of the thing. Gracchus might have added that even a treaty might under certain circumstances be legitimately broken. The weakest, from a Roman standpoint or indeed from that of any stable political society, was the identification of the permanent and temporary character of an institution, the assumption that a meeting of the people was the people, that a tribune was the tribune. How far the speech was convincing we do not know; it certainly did not relieve Tiberius of his embarrassments, which were now thickening around him.

Tiberius's success had been mainly due to the country voters. It is true that he had a large following in the city; but this was numerically inferior to a mass of urban folk, whose attitude was either indifferent or hostile. They were indifferent in so far as they did not want agrarian assignments, and hostile in so far as they were clients of the noble houses which opposed Tiberius's policy. This urban party was now in the ascendant, for the country voters had scattered to their homes.[390] The situation demanded that he should work steadily for two objects, re-election to the tribunate and the support of the city voters. If, in addition to this support, he could hold out hopes that would attract the great capitalists to his side, his position would be impregnable. Hence in his speeches he began to throw out hints of a new and wide programme of legislation.[391] There was first the military grievance. Recent regulations, by the large decrease which they made in the property qualifications required for service,[392] had increased the liability to the conscription of the manufacturing and trading classes of Rome. Gracchus proposed that the period of service should be shortened—his suggestion probably being, not that the years of liability to service (the seventeenth to the forty-sixth) should be lessened, but that within these years a limited number of campaigns should be agreed on, which should form the maximum amount of active service for every citizen.[393] Two other proposals dealt with the question of criminal jurisdiction. The first allowed an appeal to the people from the decision of judices. The form in which this proposal is stated by our authority, would lead us to suppose that the courts to be rendered appellable were those constituted under standing laws. The chief of these quaestiones or judicia publica was the court which tried cases for extortion, established in the first instance by a Lex Calpurnia, and possibly reconstituted before this epoch by a Junian law.[394] A permanent court for the trial of murder may also have existed at this time.[395] The judges of these standing commissions were drawn from the senatorial order; and Gracchus, therefore, by suggesting an appeal from their judgment to the people, was attacking a senatorial monopoly of the most important jurisdiction, and perhaps reflecting on the conduct of senatorial judices, as displayed especially in relation to the grievances of distressed provincials. But it is probable that he also meant to strike a blow at a more extraordinary prerogative claimed by the senate, and to deny the right of that body to establish special commissions which could decide without appeal on the life and fortunes of Roman citizens.[396] So far his proposals, whether based on a conviction of their general utility or not, were a bid for the support of the average citizen. But when he declared that the qualification for the criminal judges of the time could not be allowed to stand, and that these judges should be taken either from a joint panel of senators and knights, or from the senate increased by the addition of a number of members of the equestrian order equal to its present strength, he was holding out a bait to the wealthy middle class, who were perhaps already beginning to feel senatorial jurisdiction in provincial matters irksome and disadvantageous to their interests. We are told by one authority that Gracchus's eyes even ranged beyond the citizen body and that he contemplated the possibility of the gift of citizenship to the whole of Italy.[397] This was not in itself a measure likely to aid in his salvation by the people; if it was not a disinterested effort of far-sighted genius, it may have been due to the gathering storm which his experience showed him the agrarian commission would soon be forced to meet.[398] Certainly, if all these schemes are rightly attributed to Tiberius Gracchus, it was he more than any man who projected the great programme of reform that the future had in store.

Unfortunately for Gracchus the time was short for nursing a new constituency or spreading a new ideal. The time for the tribunician elections was approaching, an active canvass was being carried on by the candidates, and the aggrieved landowners were throwing the whole weight of their influence into the opposite scale.[399] Wild rumours of his plans were being circulated. The family clique that filled the agrarian commission was to snatch at other offices; Gracchus's brother, a youth still unqualified even for the quaestorship,[400] was to be thrust into the tribunate, and his father-in-law Appius was destined for the consulate.[401] Rome was to be ruled by a dynasty, and the tyranny of the commission was to extend to every department of the State. Gracchus felt that the city-combination against him was too strong, and sent an earnest summons to his supporters in the country. But practical needs were stronger than gratitude; the farmers were busy with their harvest; and it was plain that on this occasion the man of the street was to have the decisive voice. The result showed that even he was not unmoved by Gracchus's services, and by his last appeal that a life risked on behalf of the people should be protected by a renewed investiture with the tribunate.[402]

The day of the election arrived and the votes were taken. When they came to be read out, it was found that the two first tribes had given their voice for Gracchus. Then there was a sudden uproar. The votes were going against the landlords; a legal protest must be made. Men rose in the assembly, and shouted out that immediate re-election to the tribunate was forbidden by the law. They were probably both right and wrong in their protest, as men so often were who ventured to make a definite assertion about the fluid public law of Rome. There was apparently no enactment forbidding the iteration of this office, and appointment to the tribunate must have been governed by custom. But recent custom seems to have been emphatically opposed to immediate re-election, and the appeal was justified on grounds of public practice.[403] It would probably have been disregarded, had the Gracchan supporters been in an overwhelming majority, or Gracchus's colleagues unanimous in their support. But the people were divided, and the president was not enthusiastic enough in the cause to risk his future impeachment. Rubrius, to whom the lot had assigned the conduct of the proceedings on that day, hesitated as to the course which he ought to follow. A bolder spirit Mummius, the man who had been made by the deposition of Octavius, asked that the conduct of the assembly should be handed over to him. Rubrius, glad to escape the difficulty, willingly yielded his place; but now the other members of the college interposed. The forms of the Comitia were being violated; a president could not be chosen without the use of the lot. The resignation of Rubrius must be followed by another appeal to sortition. The point of order raised, as usual, a heated discussion; the tribunes gathered on the Rostra to argue the matter out. Nothing could be gained by keeping the people as the spectators of such a scene, and Gracchus succeeded in getting the proceedings adjourned to the following day.[404]

The situation was becoming more desperate; for each delay was a triumph for the opposition, and could only strengthen the belief in the illegality of Gracchus's claim. He now resorted to the last device of the Roman; he ceased to be a protector and became a suppliant. Although still a magistrate, he assumed the garb of mourning, and with humbled and tearful mien begged the help of individuals in the market place.[405]

He led his son by the hand; his children and their mother were to be wards of the people, for he had despaired of his own life. Many were touched; to some the tribunate of Gracchus seemed like a rift in a dark cloud of oppression which would close around them at his fall, and their hearts sank at the thought of a renewed triumph of the nobility. Others were moved chiefly by the fears and sufferings of Gracchus. Cries of sympathy and defiance were raised in answer to his tears, and a large crowd escorted him to his house at nightfall and bade him be confident of their support on the following day. During his appeals he had hinted at the fear of a nocturnal attack by his foes: and this led many to form an encampment round his house and to remain as its vigilant defenders throughout the night.[406]

Before day-break he was up and engaged in hasty colloquy with his friends. The fear of force was certainly present; and definite plans may have been now made for its repulsion. Some even believed that a signal for battle was agreed on by Gracchus, if matters should come to that extreme.[407] With a true Roman's scruples he took the omens before he left his house. They presaged ill. The keeper of the sacred chickens, which Gracchus's Imperium now permitted him to consult, could get nothing from the birds, even though he shook the cage. Only one of the fowls advanced, and even that would not touch the food. And the unsought omens were as evil as those invited. Snakes were found to have hatched a brood in his helmet, his foot stumbled on the threshold with such violence that blood flowed from his sandal; he had hardly advanced on his way when crows were seen struggling on his left, and the true object of the sign was pointed when a stone, dislodged by one of them from a roof, fell at his own feet. This concourse of ill-luck frightened his boldest comrades; but his old teacher, Blossius of Cumae, vehemently urged the prosecution of the task. Was a son of Gracchus, the grandson of Africanus, chief minister of the Roman people,[408] to be deterred by a crow from listening to the summons of the citizens? If the disgrace of his absence amused his enemies, they would keep their laughter to themselves. They would use that absence seriously, to denounce him to the people as a king who was already aping the luxury of the tyrant. As Blossius spoke, men were seen running from the direction of the Capitol; they came up, they bade him press on, as all was going well. And, in fact, it seemed as if all might turn out brightly. The Capitoline temple, and the level area before it, which was to be the scene of the voting, were filled with his supporters. A hearty cheer greeted him as he appeared, and a phalanx closed round him to prevent the approach of any hostile element. Shortly after the proceedings began, the senate was summoned by the consul to meet in the temple of Fides.[409] A few yards of sloping ground was all that now separated the two hostile camps.[410]