A History of Rome During the Later Republic and Early Principate

by A. H. J. Greenidge

The death of Crassus created hardly a pause in the conduct of the campaign; for Marcus Perperna, the consul for the year, was soon in the field and organising vigorous measures against Aristonicus. The details of the campaign have not been preserved, but we are told that the first serious encounter resulted in a decisive victory for the Roman arms.[529] The pretender fled, and was finally hunted down to the southern part of his dominions. His last stand was made at Stratonicea in Caria. The town was blockaded and reduced by famine, and Aristonicus surrendered unconditionally to the Roman power.[530] Perperna reserved the captive for his triumph, he visited Pergamon and placed on shipboard the treasures of Attalus for transport to Rome;[531] by these decisive acts he was proving that the war was over, for yet a third eager consul was straining every nerve to get his share of glory and of gain. Manius Aquillius was hastening to Asia to assume a command which might still be interpreted as a reality;[532] the longer he allowed his predecessor to remain, the more unsubstantial would his own share in the enterprise become. A triumph would be the prize of the man who had finished the war, and perhaps even Aristonicus's capture need not be interpreted as its close. A scene of angry recrimination might have been the result of an encounter between the rival commanders; but this was avoided by Perperna's sudden death at Pergamon.[533] It is possible that Aristonicus was saved the shame of a Roman triumph, although one tradition affirms that he was reserved for the pageant which three years later commemorated Aquillius's success in Asia.[534] But he did not escape the doom which the State pronounced on rebel princes, and was strangled in the Tullianum by the orders of the senate.[535]

Aquillius found in his province sufficient material for the prolongation of the war. Although the fall of Aristonicus had doubtless brought with it the dissolution of the regular armies of the rebels, yet isolated cities, probably terrorised by revolted slaves who could expect no mercy from the conqueror, still offered a desperate resistance. In his eagerness to end the struggle the Roman commander is said to have shed the last vestiges of international morality, and the reduction of towns by the poisoning of the streams which provided them with water,[536] while it inflicted an indelible stain on Roman honour, was perhaps defended as an inevitable accompaniment of an irregular servile war. The work of organisation had been begun even before that of pacification had been completed. The State had taken Perperna's success seriously enough to send with Aquillius ten commissioners for the regulation of the affairs of the new province,[537] and they seem to have entered on their task from the date of their arrival.[538] There was no reason for delay, since the kingdom of Pergamon had technically become a province with the death of Attalus the Third.[539] The Ephesians indeed even antedated this event, and adopted an era which commenced with the September of the year 134,[540] the reason for this anticipation being the usual Asiatic custom of beginning the civil year with the autumnal equinox. The real point of departure of this new era of Ephesus was either the death of Attalus or the victory of the city over the fleet of Aristonicus. But, though the work of organisation could be entered on at once, its completion was a long and laborious task, and Aquillius himself seems to have spent three years in Asia.[541] The limits of the province, which, like that of Africa, received the name of the continent to which it belonged, required to be defined with reference to future possibilities and the rights of neighbouring kingdoms; the taxation of the country had to be adjusted; and the privileges of the different cities proportioned to their capacity or merits. The law of Aquillius remained in essence the charter of the province of Asia down to imperial times, although subsequent modifications were introduced by Sulla and Pompeius. The new inheritance of the Romans comprised almost all the portion of Asia Minor lying north of the Taurus and west of Bithynia, Galatia and Cappadocia. Even Caria, which had been declared free after the war with Perseus, seems to have again fallen under the sway of the Attalid kings. The monarchy also included the Thracian Chersonese and most of the Aegean islands.[542] But the whole of this territory was not included in the new province of Asia. The Chersonese was annexed to the province of Macedonia,[543] a small district of Caria known as the Peraea and situated opposite the island of Rhodes, became or remained the property of the latter state; in the same neighbourhood the port and town of Telmissus, which had been given to Eumenes after the defeat of Antiochus, were restored to the Lycian confederation.[544] With characteristic caution Rome did not care to retain direct dominion over the eastern portions of her new possessions, some of which, such as Isauria, Pisidia and perhaps the eastern portion of Cilicia, may have rendered a very nominal obedience to the throne of the Attalids. She kept the rich, civilised and easily governed Hellenic lands for her own, but the barbarian interior, as too great and distant a burden for the home government, was destined to enrich her loyal client states. Aquillius and his commissioners must have received definite instructions not to claim for Rome any territory lying east of Mysia, Lydia and Caria; but they seem to have had no instructions as to how the discarded territories were to be disposed of. The consequence was that the kings of the East were soon begging for territory from a Roman commander and his assistants. Lycaonia was the reward of proved service; it was given to the sons of Ariarathes the Fifth, King of Cappadocia, who had fallen in the war.[545] Cilicia is also said to have accompanied this gift, but this no man's land must have been regarded both by donor and recipient as but a nominal boon. For Phrygia proper, or the Greater Phrygia as this country south of Bithynia and west of Galatia was called,[546] there were two claimants.[547] The kings of Pontus and Bithynia competed for the prize, and each supported his petition by a reference to the history of the past. Nicomedes of Bithynia could urge that his grandsire Prusias had maintained an attitude of friendly neutrality during Rome's struggle with Antiochus. The Pontic king, Mithradates Euergetes, advanced a more specious pretext of hereditary right. Phrygia, he alleged, had been his mother's dowry, and had been given her by her brother, Seleucus Callinicus, King of Syria.[548] We do not know what considerations influenced the judgment of Aquillius in preferring the claim of Mithradates. He may have considered that the Pontic kingdom, as the more distant, was the less dangerous, and he may have sought to attract the loyalty of its monarch by benefits such as had already been heaped on Nicomedes of Bithynia. His political enemies and all who in subsequent times resisted the claim of the Pontic kings, alleged that he had put Phrygia up to auction and that Mithradates had paid the higher price; this transaction doubtless figured in the charges of corruption, on which he was accused and acquitted: and, doubtful as the verdict which absolved him seemed to his contemporaries and successors, we have no proof that the desire for gain was the sole or even the main cause of his decision. Had he considered that the investiture of Nicomedes would have been more acceptable to the home government, the King of Bithynia would probably have been willing to pay an adequate sum for his advocacy. He may have been guilty of a wilful blunder in alienating Phrygia at all. The senate soon discovered his and its own mistake. The disputed territory was soon seen to be worthy of Roman occupation. Strategically it was of the utmost importance for the security of the Asiatic coast, as commanding the heads of the river valleys which stretched westward to the Aegean, while its thickly strewn townships, which opened up possibilities of inland trade, placed it on a different plane to the desolate Lycaonia and Cilicia. It is possible that the capitalist class, on whose support the senate was now relying for the maintenance of the political equilibrium in the capital, may have joined in the protest against Aquillius's mistaken generosity. But, though the government rapidly decided to rescind the decision of its commissioners, it had not the strength to settle the matter once for all by taking Phrygia for itself. A decree of the people was still technically superior to a resolution of the senate; it was always possible for dissentients to urge that the people must be consulted on these great questions of international interest; and Phrygia became, like Pergamon a short time before, the sport of party politics. The rival kings transferred their claims, and possibly their pecuniary offers, from the province to the capital, and the network of intrigue which soon shrouded the question was brutally exhibited by Caius Gracchus when, in his first or second tribunate, he urged the people to reject an Aufeian law, which bore on the dispute. "You will find, citizens," he urged, "that each one of us has his price. Even I am not disinterested, although it happens that the particular object which I have in view is not money, but good repute and honour. But the advocates on both sides of this question are looking to something else. Those who urge you to reject this bill are expecting hard cash from Nicomedes; those who urge its acceptance are looking for the price which Mithradates will pay for what he calls his own; this will be their reward. And, as for the members of the government who maintain a studious reserve on this question, they are the keenest bargainers of all; their silence simply means that they are being paid by every one and cheating every one." This cynical description of the political situation was pointed by a quotation of the retort of Demades to the successful tragedian "Are you so proud of having got a talent for speaking? why, I got ten talents from the king for holding my peace".[549] This sketch was probably more witty than true; condemnation, when it becomes universal, ceases to be convincing, and cynicism, when it exceeds a certain degree, is merely the revelation of a diseased or affected mental attitude. Gracchus was too good a pleader to be a fair observer. But the suspicion revealed by the diatribe may have been based on fact; the envoys of the kings may have brought something weightier than words or documents, only to find that the balance of their gilded arguments was so perfect that the original objection to Phrygia being given to any Eastern potentate was the only issue which could still be supported with conviction. Yet the government still declined to annex. Its hesitancy was probably due to its unwillingness to see a new Eastern province handed over to the equestrian tax-farmers, to whom Caius Gracchus had just given the province of Asia. The fall of Gracchus made an independent judgment by the people impossible, and, even had it been practicable for the Comitia to decide, their judgment must have been so perplexed by rival interests and arguments that they would probably have acquiesced in the equivocal decision of the senate. This decision was that Phrygia should be free.[550] It was to be open to the Roman capitalist as a trader, but not as a collector; it was not to be the scene of official corruption or regal aggrandisement. It was to be an aggregate of protected states possessing no central government of its own. Yet some central control was essential; and this was perhaps secured by attaching Phrygia to the province of Asia in the same loose condition of dependence in which Achaea had been attached to Macedonia. In one other particular the settlement of Aquillius was not final. We shall find that motives of maritime security soon forced Rome to create a province of Cilicia, and it seems that for this purpose a portion of the gift which had been just made to the kings of Cappadocia was subsequently resumed by Rome. The old Pergamene possessions in Western Cilicia were probably joined to some towns of Pamphylia to form the kernel of the new province. When Rome had divested herself of the superfluous accessories of her bequest, a noble residue still remained. Mysia, Lydia and Caria with their magnificent coast cities, rich in art, and inexhaustible in wealth, formed, with most of the islands off the coast,[551] that "corrupting" province which became the Favourite resort of the refined and the desperate resource of the needy. Its treasures were to add a new word to the Roman vocabulary of wealth;[552] its luxury was to give a new stimulus to the art of living and to add a new craving or two to the insatiable appetite for enjoyment; while the servility of its population was to create a new type of Roman ruler in the man who for one glorious year wielded the power of a Pergamene despot, without the restraint of kingly traditions or the continence induced by an assured tenure of rule.

The western world witnessed the beginning of an equally remarkable change. On both sides of Italy accident was laying the foundation for a steady advance to the North, and forcing the Romans into contact with peoples, whose subjection would never have been sought except from purely defensive motives. The Iapudes and Histri at the head of the Adriatic were the objects of a campaign of the consul Tuditanus,[553] while four years later Fulvius Flaccus commenced operations amongst the Gauls and Ligurians beyond the Alps,[554] which were to find their completion seventy-five years later in the conquests of Caesar. But neither of these enterprises can be intelligently considered in isolation; their significance lies in the necessity of their renewal, and even the proximate results to which they led would carry us far beyond the limits of the period which we are considering. The events completely enclosed within these limits are of subordinate importance. They are a war in Sardinia and the conquest of the Balearic isles. The former engaged the attention of Lucius Aurelius Orestes as consul in 126 and as proconsul in the following year.[555] It is perhaps only the facts that a consul was deemed necessary for the administration of the island, and that he attained a triumph for his deeds,[556] that justify us in calling this Sardinian enterprise a war. It was a punitive expedition undertaken against some restless tribes, but it was rendered arduous by the unhealthiness of the climate and the difficulty of procuring adequate supplies for the suffering Roman troops.[557] The annexation of the Balearic islands with their thirty thousand inhabitants[558] may have been regarded as a geographical necessity, and certainly resulted in a military advantage. Although the Carthaginians had had frequent intercourse with these islands and a Port of the smaller of the two still bears a Punic name,[559] they had done little to civilise the native inhabitants. Perhaps the value attached to the military gifts of the islanders contributed to preserve them in a state of nature; for culture might have diminished that marvellous skill with the sling,[560] which was once at the service of the Carthaginian, and afterwards of the Roman, armies. But, in spite of their prowess, the Baliares were not a fierce people. They would allow no gold or silver to enter their country,[561] probably in order that no temptation might be offered to pirates or rapacious traders.[562] Their civilisation represented the matriarchal stage; their marriage customs expressed the survival of polyandric union; they were tenacious of the lives of their women, and even invested the money which they gained on military service in the purchase of female captives.[563] They made excellent mercenaries, but shunned either war or commerce with the neighbouring peoples, and the only excuse for Roman aggression was that a small proportion of the peaceful inhabitants had lent themselves to piratical pursuits.[564] The expedition was led by the consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus and resulted in a facile conquest. The ships of the invaders were protected by hides stretched above the decks to guard against the cloud of well-directed missiles;[565] but, once a landing had been effected, the natives, clad only in skins, with small shields and light javelins as their sole defensive weapons, could offer no effective resistance at close quarters and were easily put to rout. For the security of the new possessions Metellus adopted the device, still rare in the case of transmarine dependencies, of planting colonies on the conquered land. Palma and Pollentia were founded, as townships of Roman citizens, on the larger island; the new settlers being drawn from Romans who were induced to leave their homes in the south of Spain.[566] This unusual effort in the direction of Romanisation was rendered necessary by the wholly barbarous character of the country; and the introduction into the Balearic isles of the Latin language and culture was a better justification than the easy victory for Metellus's triumph and his assumption of the surname of "Baliaricus".[567] The islands flourished under Roman rule. They produced wine and wheat in abundance and were famed for the excellence of their mules. But their chief value to Rome must have lain in their excellent harbours, and in the welcome addition to the light-armed forces of the empire which was found in their warlike inhabitants.

CHAPTER IV

Rome had lived for nine years in a feverish atmosphere of projected reform; yet not a single question raised by her bolder spirits had received its final answer. The agrarian legislation had indeed run a successful course; yet the very hindrance to its operation at a critical moment had, in the eyes of the discontented, turned success into failure and left behind a bitter feeling of resentment at the treacherous dexterity of the government. The men, in whose imagined interests the people had been defrauded of their coveted land, had by a singular irony of fortune been driven ignominiously from Rome and were now the victims of graver suspicions on the part of the government than on that of the Roman mob. The effect of the late senatorial diplomacy had been to create two hostile classes instead of one. From both these classes the aristocrats drew their soldiers for the constant campaigns that the needs of Empire involved: and both were equally resentful of the burdens and abuses of military service, for which no one was officially directed to suggest a cure. The poorest classes had been given the ballot when they wanted food and craved a less precarious sustenance than that afforded by the capricious benevolence of the rich. The friction between the senatorial government and the upper middle class was probably increasing. The equites must have been casting hungry eyes at the new province of Asia and asking themselves whether commercial interests were always to be at the mercy of the nobility as represented by the senate, the provincial administrators and the courts of justice. It was believed that governors, commissioners and senators were being bought by the gold of kings, and that mines of wealth were being lost to the honest capitalist through the utter corruption of the governing few. The final threats of Tiberius Gracchus were still in the air, and a vast unworked material lay ready to the hand of the aspiring agitator. In an ancient monarchy or aristocracy of the feudal type, where abuses have become sanctified by tradition, or in a modern nation or state with its splendid capacity for inertia due to the habitual somnolence of the majority of its electors, such questions may vaguely suggest themselves for half a century without ever receiving an answer. But Rome could only avoid a revolution by discarding her constitution. The sovereignty of the people was a thesis which the senate dared not attack; and this sovereignty had for the first time in Roman history become a stern reality. The city in its vastness now dominated the country districts: and the sovereign, now large, now small, now wild, now sober, but ever the sovereign in spite of his kaleidoscopic changes, could be summoned at any moment to the Forum. Democratic agitation was becoming habitual. It is true that it was also becoming unsafe. But a man who could hold the wolf by the ears for a year or two might work a revolution in Rome and perhaps be her virtual master.

It was no difficult task to find the man, for there was one who was marked out by birth, traditions, temperament and genius as the fittest exponent of a cause which, in spite of its intricate complications that baffled the analysis of the ordinary mind, could still in its essential features be described as the cause of the people. It is indeed singular that, in a political civilisation so unkind as the Roman to the merits of youth, hopes should be roused and fear inspired by a man so young and inexperienced as Caius Gracchus. But the popular fancy is often caught by the immaturity that is as yet unhampered by caution and undimmed by disillusion, and by the fresh young voice that has not yet been attuned to the poor half-truths which are the stock-in-trade of the worldly wise. And those who were about Gracchus must soon have seen that the traces of youth were to be found only in his passion, his frankness, his impetuous vigour; no discerning eye could fail to be aware of the cool, calculating, intellect which unconsciously used emotion as its mask, of a mind that could map and plan a political campaign in perfect self-confident security, view the country as a whole and yet master every detail, and then leave the issue of the fight to burning words and passionate appeals. This supreme combination of emotional and artistic gifts, which made Gracchus so irresistible as a leader, was strikingly manifested in his oratory. We are told of the intensity of his mien, the violence of his gestures, the restlessness that forced him to pace the Rostra and pluck the toga from his shoulder, of the language that roused his hearers to an almost intolerable tension of pity or indignation.[568] Nature had made him the sublimest, because the most unconscious of actors; eyes, tone, gesture all answered the bidding of the magic words.[569] Sometimes the emotion was too highly strung; the words would become coarser, the voice harsher, the faultless sentences would grow confused, until the soft tone of a flute blown by an attendant slave would recall his mind to reason and his voice to the accustomed pitch.[570] Men contrasted him with his gentle and stately brother Tiberius, endowed with all the quiet dignity of the Roman orator, and diverging only from the pure and polished exposition of his cause to awake a feeling of commiseration for the wrongs which he unfolded.[571] Tiberius played but on a single chord; Caius on many. Tiberius appealed to noble instincts, Caius appealed to all and his Protean manifestations were a symbol of a more complex creed, a wider knowledge of humanity, a greater recklessness as to his means, and of that burning consciousness, which Tiberius had not, that there were personal wrongs to be avenged as well as political ideas to be realised. To a narrow mind the vendetta is simply an act of justice; to an intellectual hater such as Gracchus it is also a work of reason. The folly of crime but exaggerates its grossness, and the hatred for the criminal is merged in an exalting and inspiring contempt. Yet the man thus attuned to passion was, what every great orator must be, a painful student of the most delicate of arts. The language of the successful demagogue seldom becomes the study of the schools; yet so it was with Gracchus. The orators of a later age, whose critical appreciation was purer than their practice, could find no better guide to the aspirant for forensic fame than the speeches of the turbulent tribune. Cicero dwells on the fulness and richness of his flow of words, the grandeur and dignity of the expression, the acuteness of the thought.[572] They seemed to some to lack the finishing touch;[573] which is equivalent to saying that with him oratory had not degenerated into rhetoric. The few fragments that survive awaken our wonder, first for their marvellous simplicity and clearness: then, for the dexterous perfection of their form. The balance of the rhythmic clauses never obscures or overloads the sense. Gracchus could tell a tale, like that of the cruel wrongs inflicted on the allies, which could arouse a thrill of horror without also awakening the reflection that the speaker was a man of great sensibility and had a wonderful command of commiserative terminology. He could ask the crowd where he should fly, whether to the Capitol dripping with a brother's blood, or to the home where the widowed mother sat in misery and tears;[574] and no one thought that this was a mere figure of speech. It all seemed real, because Gracchus was a true artist as well as a true man, and knew by an unerring instinct when to pause. This type of objective oratory, with its simple and vivid pictures, its brilliant but never laboured wit, its capacity for producing the illusion that the man is revealed in the utterance, its suggestion of something deeper than that which the mere words convey—a suggestion which all feel but only the learned understand—is equally pleasing to the trained and the unlettered mind. The polished weapon, which dazzled the eyes of the crowd, was viewed with respect even by the cultured nobles against whom it was directed.

Caius's qualities had been tested for some years before he attained the tribunate, and the promise given by his name, his attitude and his eloquence was strengthened by the fact that he had no rival in the popular favour. Carbo was probably on his way to the Optimates, and Flaccus's failure was too recent to make him valuable in any other quality than that of an assistant. But Caius had risen through the opportunities given by the agitation which these men had sustained, although his advance to the foremost place seemed more like the work of destiny than of design. When a youth of twenty-one, he had found himself elevated to the rank of a land commissioner;[575] but this accidental identification with Tiberius's policy was not immediately followed by any action which betrayed a craving for an active political career. He is said to have shunned the Forum, that training school and advertising arena where the aspiring youth of Rome practised their litigious eloquence, and to have lived a life of calm retirement which some attributed to fear and others to resentment. It was even believed by a few that he doubted the wisdom of his brother's career.[576] But It was soon found that the leisure which he cultivated was not that of easy enjoyment and did not promise prolonged repose. He was grappling with the mysteries of language, and learning by patient study the art of finding the words that would give to thought both form and wings. The thought, too, must have been taking a clearer shape: for Tiberius had left a heritage of crude ideas, and men were trying to introduce some of these into the region of practical politics. The first call to arms was Carbo's proposal for legalising re-election to the tribunate. It drew from Gracchus a speech in its support, which contained a bitter indictment of those who had been the cause of the "human sacrifice" fulfilled in his brother's murder.[577] Five years later he was amongst the foremost of the opponents of the alien-act of Pennus, and exposed the dangerous folly involved in a jealous policy of exclusion. But the courts of law are said to have given him the first great opportunity of revealing his extraordinary powers to the world. As an advocate for a friend called Vettius, he delivered a speech which seemed to lift him to a plane unapproachable by the other orators of the day. The spectacle of the crowd almost raving with joy and frantically applauding the new-found hero, showed that a man had appeared who could really touch the hearts of the people, and is said to have suggested to men of affairs that every means must be used to hinder Gracchus's accession to the tribunate.[578] The chance of the lot sent him as quaestor with the consul Orestes to Sardinia. It was with joyful hearts that his enemies saw him depart to that unhealthy clime,[579] and to Caius himself the change to the active life of the camp was not unpleasing. He is said still to have dreaded the plunge into the stormy sea of politics, and in Sardinia he was safe from the appeals of the people and the entreaties of his friends.[580] Yet already he had received a warning that there was no escape. While wrestling with himself as to whether he should seek the quaestorship, his fevered mind had conjured up a vision. The phantom of his brother had appeared and addressed him in these words "Why dost thou linger, Caius? It is not given thee to draw back. One life, one death is fated for us both, as defenders of the people's rights." His belief in the reality of this warning is amply attested;[581] but the sense that he was predestined and foredoomed, though it may have given an added seriousness to his life, left him as calm and vigorous as before. Like Tiberius he was within a sphere of his father's influence, and this memory must have stimulated his devotion to his military and provincial duties. He won distinction in the field and a repute for justice in his dealings with the subject tribes, while his simplicity of life and capacity for toil suggested the veteran campaigner, not the tyro from the most luxurious of cities.[582] The extent of the services in Sardinia and neighbouring lands which his name and character enabled him to render to the State, has been perhaps exaggerated, or at least faultily stated, by our authority; but, in view of the unquestioned confidence shown by the Numantines in his brother when as young a man, there is no reason to doubt their reality. It is said that, when the treacherous winter of Sardinia had shaken the troops with chills, the commander sent to the cities asking for a supply of clothing. These towns, which were probably federate communities and exempt by treaty from the requisitions of Rome, appealed to the senate. They feared no doubt the easy lapse of an act of kindness into a burden fixed by precedent. The senate, as in duty bound, upheld their contention; and suffering and disease would have reigned in the Roman camp, had not Gracchus visited the cities in person and prevailed on them to send the necessary help.[583] On another occasion envoys from Micipsa of Numidia are said to have appeared at Rome and offered a supply of corn for the Sardinian army. The request had perhaps been made by Gracchus. To the Numidian king he was simply the grandson of the elder Africanus: And the envoys in their simplicity mentioned his name as the Intermediary of the royal bounty. The senate, we are told, rejected the Proffered help. The curious parallelism between the present career of Caius and the early activities of his brother must have struck many; to the senate these proofs of energy and devotion seemed but the prelude to similar ingenious attempts to capture public favour at home: and their fears are said to have helped them to the decision to keep Orestes for a further year as proconsul in Sardinia.[584] It is possible that the resolution was partly due to military exigencies; the fact that the troops were relieved was natural in consideration of the sufferings which they had undergone, but the retention of the general to complete a desultory campaign which chiefly demanded knowledge of the country, was a wise and not unusual proceeding. It was, however, an advantage that, as custom dictated, the quaestor must remain in the company of his commander. Gracchus's reappearance in Rome was postponed for a year. It was a slight grace, but much might happen in the time.

It was in this latter sense that the move was interpreted by the quaestor. A trivial wrong inflamed the impetuous and resentful nature which expectation and entreaty had failed to move. Stung by the belief that he was the victim of a disgraceful subterfuge, Gracchus immediately took ship to Rome. His appearance in the capital was something of a shock even to his friends.[585] Public sentiment regarded a quaestor as holding an almost filial relation to his superior; the ties produced by their joint activity were held to be indissoluble,[586] and the voluntary departure of the subordinate was deemed a breach of official duty. Lapses in conduct on the part of citizens engaged in the public service, which fell short of being criminal, might be visited with varying degrees of ignominy by the censorship: and it happened that this court of morals was now in existence in the persons of the censors Cn. Servilius Caepio and L. Cassius Longinus, who had entered office in the previous year. The censorian judgments, although arbitrary and as a rule spontaneous, were sometimes elicited by prosecution: and an accuser was found to bring the conduct of Gracchus formally before the notice of the magistrates. Had the review of the knights been in progress after his arrival, his case would have been heard during the performance of this ceremony; for he was as yet but a member of the equestrian order, and the slightest disability pronounced against him, had he been found guilty, would have assumed the form of the deprivation of his public horse and his exclusion from the eighteen centuries. But it is possible that, at this stage of the history of the censorship, penalties could be inflicted upon the members of all classes at any date preceding the lustral sacrifice, that the usual examination of the citizen body had been completed, and that Gracchus appeared alone before the tribunal of the censors. His defence became famous;[587] its result is unknown. The trial probably ended in his acquittal,[588] although condemnation would have exercised little influence on his subsequent career, for the ignominy pronounced by the censors entailed no disability for holding a magistracy. But, whatever may have been the issue, Gracchus improved the occasion by an harangue to the people,[589] in which he defended his conduct as one of their representatives in Sardinia. The speech was important for its caustic descriptions of the habits of the nobility when freed from the moral atmosphere of Rome. With extreme ingenuity he worked into the description of the habits of his own official life a scathing indictment, expressed in the frankest terms, of the self-seeking, the luxury, the unnatural vices, the rampant robbery of the average provincial despot. His auditors learnt the details of a commander's environment—the elaborate cooking apparatus, the throng of handsome favourites, the jars of wine which, when emptied, returned to Rome as receptacles of gold and silver mysteriously acquired. Gracchus must have delighted his audience with a subject on which the masses love to dwell, the vices of their superiors. The luridness of the picture must have given it a false appearance of universal truth. It seemed to be the indictment of a class, and suggested that the speaker stood aloof from his own order and looked only to the pure judgment of the people. His enemies tried a new device. They knew that one flaw in his armour was his sympathy with the claims of the allies. Could he be compromised as an agent in that dark conspiracy which had prompted the impudent Italian claims and ended in open rebellion, his credit would be gone, even if his career were not closed by exile. He was accordingly threatened with an impeachment for complicity in the movement which had issued in the outbreak at Fregellae. It is uncertain whether he was forced to submit to the judgment of a court; but we are told that he dissipated every suspicion, and surmounted the last and most dangerous of the obstacles with which his path was blocked.[590] Straightway he offered himself for the tribunate, and, as the day of the election approached, every effort was made by the nobility to secure his defeat. Old differences were forgotten; a common panic produced harmony amongst the cliques; it even seems as if his opponents agreed that no man of extreme views should be advanced against him, for Gracchus in his tribunate had to contend with no such hostile colleague as Octavius. The candidature of an extremist might mean votes for Gracchus: and it was preferable to concentrate support on neutral men, or even on men of liberal views who were known to be in favour with the crowd. The great clientèle of the country districts was doubtless beaten up; and we know that, on the other side, the hopes of the needy agriculturist, and the gratitude of the newly established peasant farmer, brought many a supporter to Gracchus from distant Italian homesteads. The city was so flooded by the inrush of the country folk that many an elector found himself without a roof to shelter him, and the place of voting could accommodate only a portion of the crowd. The rest climbed on roofs and tiles, and filled the air with discordant party cries until space was given for a descent to the voting enclosures. When the poll was declared, it was found that the electoral manoeuvres of the nobility had been so far successful that Gracchus occupied but the fourth place on the list.[591] But, from the moment of his entrance on office, his predominance was assured. We hear nothing of the colleagues whom he overshadowed. Some may have been caught in the stream of Gracchus's eloquence; others have found it useless or dangerous to oppose the enthusiasm which his proposals aroused, and the formidable combination which he created by the alluring prospects that he held out to the members of the equestrian order. The collegiate character of the magistracy practically sank into abeyance, and his rule was that of a single man. First he gave vent to the passions of the mob by dwelling, as no one had yet dared to do, on the gloomy tragedy of his brother's fall and the cruel persecution which had followed the catastrophe. The blood of a murdered tribune was wholly unavenged in a state which had once waged war with Falerii to punish a mere insult to the holy office, and had condemned a citizen to death because he had not risen from his place while a tribune walked through the Forum. "Before your very eyes," he said, "they beat Tiberius to death with cudgels; they dragged his dead body from the Capitol through the midst of the city to cast it into the river; those of his friends whom they seized, they put to death untried. And yet think how your constitution guards the citizen's life! If a man is accused on a capital charge and does not immediately obey the summons, it is ordained that a trumpeter come at dawn before his door and summon him by sound of trumpet; until this is done, no vote may be pronounced against him. So carefully and watchfully did our ancestors regulate the course of justice." [592] A cry for vengeance is here merged in a great constitutional principle; and these utterances paved the way for the measure immediately formulated that no court should be established to try a citizen on a capital charge, unless such a court had received the sanction of the people.[593] The power of the Comitia to delegate its jurisdiction without appeal is here affirmed; the right of the senate to institute an inquisition without appeal is here denied. The measure was a development of a suggestion which had been made by Tiberius Gracchus, who had himself probably called attention to the fact that the establishment of capital commissions by the senate was a violation of the principle of the provocatio Caius Gracchus, however, did not attempt to ordain that an appeal should be possible from the judgment of the standing commissions (quaestiones perpetuae); for, though the initiative in the creation of these courts had been taken by the senate, they had long received the sanction of law, and their self-sufficiency was perhaps covered by the principle that the people, in creating a commission, waived its own powers of final jurisdiction. But there were other technical as well as practical disadvantages in instituting an appeal from these commissions. The provocatio had always been the challenge to the decision of a magistrate; but in these standing courts the actions of the president and of the judices who sat with him were practically indistinguishable, and the sentence pronounced was in no sense a magisterial decision. The courts had also been instituted to avoid the clumsiness of popular jurisdiction; but this clumsiness would be restored, if their decision was to be shaken by a further appeal to the Comitia. Gracchus, in fact, when he proposed this law, was not thinking of the ordinary course of jurisdiction at all. He had before his mind the summary measures by which the senate took on itself to visit such epidemics of crime as were held to be beyond the strength of the regular courts, and more especially the manner in which this body had lately dealt with alleged cases of sedition or treason. The investigation directed against the supporters of his brother was the crucial instance which he brought before the people, and it is possible that, at a still later date, the inquiry which followed the fall of Fregellae had been instituted on the sole authority of the senate and had found a certain number of victims in the citizen body. Practically, therefore, Gracchus in this law wholly denied, either as the result of experience or by anticipation, the legality of the summary jurisdiction which followed a declaration of martial law.

In the creation of these extraordinary commissions the senate never took upon itself the office of judge, nor was the commission itself composed of senators appointed by the house. The jurisdiction was exercised by a magistrate at the bidding of the senate, and the court thus constituted selected its assessors, who formed a mere council for advice, at its own discretion. It was plain that, if the law was to be effective, its chief sanction must be directed, not against the corporation which appointed, but against the judge. The responsibility of the individual is the easiest to secure, and no precautions against martial law can be effective if a division of authority, or even obedience to authority, is once admitted. Gracchus, therefore, pronounced that criminal proceedings should be possible against the magistrate who had exercised the jurisdiction now pronounced illegal.[594] The common law of Rome went even further, and pronounced every individual responsible for illegal acts done at the bidding of a magistrate. The crime which the magistrate had committed by the exercise of this forbidden jurisdiction was probably declared to be treason: and, as there was no standing court at Rome which took cognisance of this offence, the jurisdiction of the Comitia was ordained. The penalty for the crime was doubtless a capital one, and by ancient prescription such a punishment necessitated a trial before the Assembly of the Centuries. It is, however, possible that Gracchus rendered the plebeian assembly of the Tribes competent to pronounce the capital sentence against the magistrate who had violated the prescriptions of his law. But, although the magistrate was the chief, he appears not to have been the sole offender under the provisions of this bill. In spite of the fact that the senate as a whole was incapable of being punished for the advice which had prompted the magistrate to an illegal course of action, it seems that the individual senator who moved, or perhaps supported, the decree which led to the forbidden jurisdiction, was made liable to the penalties of the law.[595] The operation of the enactment was made retrospective, or was perhaps conceived by its very nature to cover the past abuses which had called it into being; for in a sense it created no new crime, but simply restated the principle of the appeal in a form suited to the proceedings against which it wished to guard. It might have been argued that customary law protected the consul who directed the proceedings of the court which doomed the supporters of Tiberius Gracchus; but the argument, if used, was of no avail. Popillius was to be the witness to all men of the reality of this reassertion of the palladium of Roman liberty. An impeachment was framed against him, and either before or after his withdrawal from Rome, Caius Gracchus himself formulated and carried through the Plebs the bill of interdiction which doomed him to exile.[596] It was in vain that Popillius's young sons and numerous relatives besought the people for mercy.[597] The memory of the outrage was too recent, the joyful sense of the power of retaliation too novel and too strong. All that was possible was a counter demonstration which should emphasise the sympathy of loyalists with the illustrious victim, and Popillius was escorted to the gates by a weeping crowd.[598] We know that condemnation also overtook his colleague Rupilius,[599] and it is probable that he too fell a victim to the sense of vengeance or of justice aroused by the Gracchan law.

A less justifiable spirit of retaliation is exhibited by another enactment with which Gracchus inaugurated his tribunate, although in this, as in ail his other acts, the blow levelled at his enemies was not devoid of a deep political significance. He introduced a proposal that a magistrate who had been deposed by the people should not be allowed to hold any further office.[600] Octavius was the obvious victim, and the mere personal significance of the measure does not necessarily imply that Gracchus was burning with resentment against a man, whose opposition to his brother had rapidly been forgotten in the degradation which he had experienced at that brother's hands. Hatred to the injured may be a sentiment natural to the wrongdoer, but is not likely to be imparted even to the most ardent supporter of the author of the mischief. It were better to forget Octavius, if Octavius would allow himself to be forgotten; but the sturdy champion of the senate, still in the middle of his career, may have been a future danger and a present eyesore to the people: Gracchus's invectives probably carried him and his auditors further than he intended, and the rehabilitation of his brother's tribunate in its integrity may have seemed to demand this strong assertion of the justice of his act. But the legality of deposition by the people was a still more important point. Merely to assert it would be to imply that Tiberius had been wrong. How could it be more emphatically proclaimed than by making its consequences perpetual and giving it a kind of penal character? But the personal aspect of the measure proved too invidious even for its proposer. A voice that commanded his respect was raised against it: and Gracchus in withdrawing the bill confessed that Octavius was spared through the intercession of Cornelia.[601]