A History of Rome During the Later Republic and Early Principate

by A. H. J. Greenidge

So far his legislation had but given an outlet to the justifiable resentment of the people, and a guarantee for the security of their most primitive rights. This was to be followed by an appeal to their interests and a measure for securing their permanent comfort. The wonderful solidarity of Gracchus and his supporters, the crowning triumph of the demagogue which is to make each man feel that he is an agent in his own salvation, have been traced to this constructive legislation for the benefit of classes, which ancient authors, writing under aristocratic prepossessions, have described by the ugly name of bribery.[602] The poor of Rome, if we include in this designation those who lived on the margin as well as those who were sunk in the depths of destitution, probably included the majority of the inhabitants of the town. The city had practically no organised industries. The retail trader and the purveyor of luxuries doubtless flourished; but, in the scanty manufactures which the capital still provided, the army of free labour must have been always worsted by the cruel competition of the cheaper and more skilful slave or freedman. But the poor of Rome did not form the cowed and shivering class that are seen on the streets of a northern capital. They were the merry and vivacious lazzaroni of the pavement and the portico, composite products of many climes, with all the lively endurance of the southerner and intellects sharpened by the ingenious devices requisite for procuring the minimum sustenance of life. Could they secure this by the desultory labour which alone was provided by the economic conditions of Rome, their lot was far from unhappy. As in most ancient civilisations, the poor were better provided with the amenities than with the bare necessities of existence. Although the vast provision for the pleasures of the people, by which the Caesars maintained their popularity, was yet lacking, and even the erection of a permanent theatre was frowned on by the senate,[603] yet the capital provided endless excitement for the leisured mind and the observant eye. It was for their benefit that the gladiatorial show was provided by the rich, and the gorgeous triumph by the State; but it was the antics of the nobility in the law courts and at the hustings that afforded the more constant and pleasing spectacle. Attendance at the Contiones and the Comitia not only delighted the eye and ear, but filled the heart with pride, and sometimes the purse with money. For here the units, inconsiderable in themselves, had become a collective power; they could shout down the most dignified of the senators, exalt the favourite of the moment, reward a service or revenge a slight in the perfect security given by the secrecy of the ballot. Large numbers of the poorer class were attached to the great houses by ancestral ties; for the descendants of freedmen, although they could make no legal claim on the house which represented the patron of their ancestors, were too valuable as voting units to be neglected by its representatives, even when the sense of the obligations of wealth, which was one of the best features of Roman civilisation, failed to provide an occasional alleviation for the misery of dependants. From a political point of view, this dependence was utterly demoralising; for it made the recipients of benefits either blind supporters of, or traitors to, the personal cause which they professed. It was on the whole preferable that, if patronage was essential, the State should take over this duty; the large body of the unattached proletariate would be placed on a level with their more fortunate brethren, and the latter would be freed from a dependence which merely served private and selfish interests. A semi-destitute proletariate can only be dealt with in three ways. They may be forced to work, encouraged to emigrate, or partially supported by the State. The first device was impossible, for it was not a submerged fraction with which Rome had to deal, but the better part of the resident sovereign body; the second, although discredited by the senate, had been tried in one form by Tiberius Gracchus and was to be attempted in another shape by Caius; but it is a remedy that can never be perfect, for it does not touch the class, more highly strung, more intelligent, and at the same time more capable of degradation, which the luxury of the capital enthrals. The last device had not yet been attempted. It remained for Gracchus to try it. We have no analysis of his motives; but many provocatives to his modest attempt at state socialism may be suggested. There was first the Hellenic ideal of the leisured and independent citizen, as exemplified by the state payments and the "distributions" which the great leaders of the old world had thought necessary for the fulfilment of democracy. There was secondly the very obvious fact that the government was reaping a golden harvest from the provinces and merely scattering a few stray grains amongst its subjects. There was thirdly the consideration that much had been done for the landed class and nothing for the city proletariate. Other considerations of a more immediate and economic character were doubtless present. The area of corn production was now small. Sicily was still perhaps beggared by its servile war, and the granary of Rome was practically to be found in Africa. The import of corn from this quarter, dependent as it was on the weather and controlled purely by considerations of the money-market, was probably fitful, and the price must have been subject to great variations. But, at this particular time, the supply must have been diminished to an alarming extent, and the price proportionately raised, by the swarm of locusts which had lately made havoc of the crops of Africa.[604] Lastly, the purely personal advantage of securing a subsidised class for the political support of the demagogue of the moment—a consideration which is but a baser interpretation of the Hellenic ideal—must have appealed to the practical politician in Gracchus as the more impersonal view appealed to the statesman. He would secure a permanent and stable constituency, and guard against the danger, which had proved fatal to his brother, of the absence from Rome of the majority of his supporters at some critical moment.

From the imperfect records of Gracchus's proposal we gather that a certain amount of corn was to be sold monthly at a reduced price to any citizen who offered himself as a purchaser.[605] The rate was fixed at 6-1/3 asses the modius, which is calculated to have been about half the market-price.[606] The monthly distribution would practically have excluded all but the urban proletariate, and would thus have both limited the operation of the relief to the poor of the city and invited an increase in its numbers. But the details of the measure, which would be decisive as to its economic character, are unknown to us. We are not told what proportion the monthly quantity of grain sold at this cheap rate bore to the total amount required for the support of a family; whether the relief was granted only to the head of a house or also to his adult sons; whether any one who claimed the rights of citizenship could appear at the monthly sale, or only those who had registered their names at some given time. The fact of registration, if it existed, might have been regarded as a stigma and might thus have limited the number of recipients. Some of the economic objections to his scheme were not unknown to Gracchus; indeed they were pressed home vigorously by his opponents. It was pointed out that he was enervating the labourer and exhausting the treasury, The validity of the first objection depends to a large extent on the unknown "data" which we have just mentioned. Gracchus may have maintained that a greater standard of comfort would be secured for the same amount of work. The second objection he was so far from admitting that he asserted that his proposal would really lighten the burdens of the Aerarium.[607] He may have taken the view that a moderate, steady and calculable loss on corn purchased in large quantities, and therefore presumably at a reduced price, would be cheaper in the end than the cost entailed by the spasmodic attempts which the State had to make in times of crisis to put grain upon the market; and there may have been some truth in the idea that, when the State became for the first time a steady purchaser, competition between the publicans of Sicily or the proprietors of Africa might greatly reduce the normal market price. He does not seem to have been disturbed by the consideration that the sale of corn below the market price at Rome was hardly the best way of helping the Italian farmer. The State would certainly buy in the cheapest market, and this was not to be found in Italy. But it is probable that under no circumstances could Rome have become the usual market for the produce of the recently established proprietors, and that, except at times of unusual scarcity in the transmarine provinces, imported corn could always have undersold that which was grown in Italy. Under the new system the Italian husbandman would find a purchaser in the State, if Sicily and Africa were visited by some injury to their crops. A vulnerable point in the Gracchan system of sale was exhibited in the fact that no inquiry was instituted as to the means of the applicants. This blemish was vigorously brought home to the legislator when the aged noble, Calpurnius Piso surnamed "the Frugal," the author of the first law that gave redress to the provincials, and a vigorous opponent of Gracchus's scheme, gravely advanced on the occasion of the first distribution and demanded his appropriate share.[608] The object lesson would be wasted on those who hold that the honourable acceptance of relief implies the universality of the gift: that the restraining influences, if they exist, should be moral and not the result of inquisition. But neither the possibility nor the necessity of discrimination would probably have been allowed by Gracchus. It would have been resented by the people, and did not appeal to the statesmanship, widely spread in the Greek and not unknown in the Roman world, which regarded it as one of the duties of a State to provide cheap food for its citizens. The lamentations of a later day over a pauperised proletariate and an exhausted treasury[609] cannot strictly be laid to the account of the original scheme, Except in so far as it served as a precedent; they were the consequence of the action of later demagogues who, instructed by Gracchus as to the mode in which an easy popularity might be secured, introduced laws which sanctioned an almost gratuitous distribution of grain. The Gracchan law contained a provision for the building of additional store-houses for the accumulation of the great reserve of corn, which was demanded by the new system of regular public sales, and the Sempronian granaries thus created remained as a witness of the originality and completeness of the tribune's work.[610]

The Roman citizen was still frequently summoned from his work, or roused from his lethargy, by the call of military service; and the practice of the conscription fostered a series of grievances, one of which had already attracted the attention of Tiberius Gracchus. Caius was bound to deal with the question: and the two provisions of his enactment which are known to us, show a spirit of moderation which neither justifies the belief that the demagogue was playing to the army, nor accredits the view that his interference relaxed the bonds of discipline amongst the legions.[611] The most scandalous anomaly in the Roman army-system was the miserable pittance earned by the conscript when the legal deductions had been made from his nominal rate of pay. His daily wage was but one-third of the denarius, or five and one-third asses a day, as it had remained unaltered from the times of the Second Punic War, in spite of the fact that the conditions of service were now wholly different and that garrison duty in the provinces for long periods of years had replaced the temporary call-to-arms which the average Italian campaign alone demanded; and from this quota was deducted the cost of the clothing which he wore and, as there is every reason to believe, of the whole of the rations which he consumed. We should have expected a radical reformer to have raised his pay or at least to have given him free food. But Gracchus contented himself with enacting that the soldier's clothing should be given him free of charge by the State.[612] Another military abuse was due to the difficulty which commanders experienced in finding efficient recruits. The young and adventurous supplied better and more willing material than those already habituated to the careless life of the streets, or already engaged in some settled occupation: and, although it is scarcely credible that boys under the age of eighteen were forced to enlist, they were certainly permitted and perhaps encouraged to join the ranks. The law of Gracchus forbade the enlistment of a recruit at an age earlier than the completion of the seventeenth year.[613] These military measures, slight in themselves, were of importance as marking the beginning of the movement by which the whole question of army reform, utterly neglected by the government, was taken up and carried out by independent representatives of the people. But a Roman army was to a large extent the creation of the executive power; and it required a military commander, not a tribune, to produce the radical alterations which alone could make the mighty instrument, which had won the empire, capable of defending it.

The last boon of Gracchus to the citizen body as a whole was a new agrarian law.[614] The necessity of such a measure was chiefly due to the suspension of the work of the agrarian commission, which had proved an obstacle to the continued execution of his brother's scheme; and there is every reason for believing that the new Sempronian law restored their judicial powers to the commissioners. But experience may have shown that the substance of Tiberius's enactment required to be supplemented or modified; and Caius adopted the procedure usually followed by a Roman legislator when he renewed a measure which had already been in operation. His law was not a brief series of amendments, but a comprehensive statute, so completely covering the ground of the earlier Sempronian law that later legislation cites the law of Caius, and not that of Tiberius Gracchus, as the authority for the regulations which had revolutionised the tenure of the public land.[615] The new provisions seem to have dealt with details rather than with principles, and there is no indication that they aimed at the acquisition of territory which had been exempted from the operation of the previous measure, or even touched the hazardous question of the rights of Rome to the land claimed by the Italian allies. We cannot attempt to define the extent to which the executive power granted by the new agrarian law was either necessary or effective. Certainly the returns of the census during the next ten years show no increase in the number of registered citizens;[616] but this circumstance may be due to the steps which were soon to be taken by the opponents of the Gracchi to nullify the results of their legislation. It is possible, however, that the new corn law may have somewhat damped the ardour of the proletariate for a life of agriculture which would have deprived them of its benefits.

The first tribunate of Caius Gracchus doubtless witnessed the completion of these four acts of legislation, by which the debt to his supporters was lavishly paid and their aid was enlisted for causes which could only indirectly be interpreted as their own. But this year probably witnessed as well the promulgation of the enactments which were to find their fulfilment in a second tribunate.[617] Foremost amongst these was one which dealt with the tenure of the judicial power as exercised, not by the magistrate, but by the panels of jurors who were interpreters both of law and fact on the standing commissions which had recently been created by statute. The interest of the masses in this question was remote. A permanent murder court seems indeed to have had its place amongst the commissions; but, even though the corruption of its president had on one occasion been clearly proved,[618] it is not likely that senatorial judges would have troubled to expose themselves to undue influences when pronouncing on the caput of a citizen of the lower class. The fact that this justice was administered by the nobility may have excited a certain degree of popular interest; but the question of the transference of the courts from the hands of the senatorial judices would probably never have been heard of, had not the largest item in this judicial competence had a decisively political bearing. The Roman State had been as unsuccessful as others of the ancient world in keeping its judicial machinery free from the taint of party influences. It had been accounted one of the surest signs of popular sovereignty that the people alone could give judgment on the gravest crimes and pronounce the capital penalty,[619] and recent political thought had perhaps wholly adapted itself to the Hellenic view that the government of a state must be swayed by the body of men that enforces criminal responsibility in political matters. This vital power was still retained by the Comitia when criminal justice was concerned with those elemental facts which are the condition of the existence of a state. The people still took cognisance of treason in all its degrees—a conception which to the Roman mind embraced almost every possible form of official maladministration—and the gloomy record of trials before the Comitia, from this time onward to the close of the Republic, shows that the weapon was exercised as the most forcible implement of political chastisement. But chance had lately presented the opportunity of making the interesting experiment of assimilating criminal jurisdiction in some of its branches to that of the civil courts. The president and jurors of one of the newly established quaestiones formed as isolated a group as the judex of civil justice with his assessors, or the greater panels of Centumvirs and Decemvirs. They possessed no authority but that of jurisdiction within their special department; there seemed no reason why they should be influenced by considerations arising from issues whether legislative or administrative. But this appearance of detachment was wholly illusory, and the well-intentioned experiment was as vain as that of Solon, when he carefully separated the administrative and judicial boards in the Athenian commonwealth and composed both bodies of practically identical individuals. The new court for the trial of extortion, constituted by the Calpurnian and renewed later by a Junian law, was controlled by a detachment of the governing body which saw in each impeachment a libel on its own system of administration, and in each condemnation a new precedent for hampering the uncontrolled power exercised in the past or coveted for the future by the individual juror. This class spirit may have been more powerful than bribery in its production of suspicious acquittals; and the fact that prosecution was frankly recognised as the commonest of party weapons, and that speeches for the prosecution and defence teemed with irrelevant political allusions, reduced the question of the guilt of the accused to subordinate proportions in the eyes of all the participants in this judicial warfare. Charges of corruption were so recklessly hurled at Rome that we can seldom estimate their validity; but the strong suspicion of bribery is almost as bad for a government as the proved offence; and it was certain that senatorial judges did not yield to the evidence which would have supplied conviction to the ordinary man. Some recent acquittals furnished an excellent text to the reformer. L. Aurelius Cotta had emerged successfully from a trial, which had been a mere duel between Scipio Aemilianus for the prosecution and Metellus Macedonicus for the defence. The judges had shown their resentment of Scipio's influence by acquitting Cotta; and few of the spectators of the struggle seem even to have pretended to believe in the innocence of the accused.[620] The whole settlement of Asia had been so tainted with the suspicion of pecuniary influences that, when Manius Aquillius successfully ran the gauntlet of the courts,[621] it was difficult to believe that the treasures of the East had not co-operated towards the result, especially as the senate itself by no means favoured some of the features of Aquillius's organisation of the province. The legates of some of the plundered dependencies were still in Rome, bemoaning the verdict and appealing for sympathy with their helpless fellow subjects[622] Circumstances favoured the reformer; it was possible to bring a definite case and to produce actual sufferers before the people; while the senate, perhaps in consequence of the attitude of some honest dissentients, was unable to make any effectual resistance to the scandal and its consequences.

Had Gracchus thought of restoring this jurisdiction to the Comitia, he would have taken a step which had the theoretical justification that, of all the powers at Rome, the people was the one which had least interest in provincial misgovernment. But it would have been a retrograde movement from the point of view of procedure; it would not necessarily have abolished senatorial influence, and it would not have attained his object of holding the government permanently in check by the political recognition of a class which rivalled the senate in the definiteness of its organisation and surpassed it in the homogeneity of its interests. The body of capitalists who had assumed the titular designation of knights, had long been chafing at the complete subjection of their commercial interests to the caprice of the provincial governor and the arbitrary dispositions of the home government. Tiberius Gracchus, when he revealed the way to the promised land, had probably reflected rather than suggested the ambition of the great business men to have a more definite place in the administration assigned them. His appeal had come too late, or seemed too hopeless of success, to win their support for a reformer who had outraged their feelings as capitalists; but since his death ten years for reflection had elapsed, and they were years which witnessed a vast extension of their potential activity, and aroused an agonised feeling of helplessness at the subordinate part which they played both to senate and people when the disposal of kingdoms was in question. The suggestions for giving them a share in the control of the provincial world may have been numerous, and their variety is reflected in the different plans which Caius Gracchus himself advanced. The system at which his brother had hinted was that of a joint board composed of the existing senators with the addition of an equal number of equites; and we have already suggested the possibility that this House of Six Hundred was intended to be the senate of the future, efficient for all purposes and not exclusively devoted to the work of criminal jurisdiction. The same significance may attach to the scheme, which seems to have been propounded by Caius Gracchus during, or perhaps even before, his first tenure of the tribunate, and appears at intervals in proposals made by reformers down to the time of Sulla. Gracchus is said to have suggested the increase of the senate by the addition of three, or, as one authority states, six hundred members of the equestrian order.[623] The proposal, if it was one for an enlarged senate, and not for a joint panel of judices, in which a changing body of equites would act as a check on the permanent senatorial jurors, must soon have been seen to be utterly unsuited to its purpose. It is a scheme characteristic of the aristocrat who is posing as a friend of the mercantile class and hopes to deceive the vigilance of that keen-sighted fraternity. To give the senate a permanent infusion of new blood would be simply to strengthen its authority, while completely cutting away the links which bound the new members to their original class. Even the swamping of the existing body by a two-thirds majority of new members would have been transitory in its effects. The new member of the Curia would soon have shed his old equestrian views and assumed the outlook of his older peers. It might indeed have been possible to devise a system by which the senate would, at the recurring intervals of the lustra, have been filled up in equal proportions from ex-magistrates and knights: and in this way a constant supply of middle-class sentiment might have been furnished to the governing body. But even this scheme would have secured to the elected a life-long tenure of power, and this was a fatal obstacle both to the intentions of the reformer and the aspirations of the equestrian order. While the former desired a balance of power, the latter wished that the interests of their class should be enforced by its genuine representatives. Both knew that a participation in the executive power was immaterial, and that all that was needed might be gained by the possession of judicial authority alone. Gracchus's final decision, therefore, was to create a wholly new panel of judices which should be made up exclusively from the members of the titular class of knights.[624]

It was not necessary or desirable that the judiciary law should make any mention of a class, or employ the courtesy title of equites to designate the new judges. The effect might be less invidiously secured by demanding qualifications which were practically identical with the social conditions requisite for the possession of titular knighthood. One of the determining factors was a property qualification, and this was possibly placed at the modest total of four hundred thousand sesterces.[625] This was the amount of capital which seems at this period to have given its possessor the right of serving on horseback in the army and therefore the claim to the title of eques, but it was a sum that did not convey alarming suggestions of government by millionaires, but rather pointed to the upper middle class as the fittest depositaries of judicial power. Not only were magistrates and ex-magistrates excluded from the Bench, but the disqualification extended to the fathers, brothers and sons of magistrates and of past or present senators. The ostensible purpose of these provisions was doubtless to ensure that the selected jurors should be bound by no tie of kindred to the individuals who would appear before their judgment seat; but they must have had the effect of excluding from the new panel many of the true knights belonging to the eighteen centuries; for this select corps was largely composed of members of the noble families. A similar effect would have been produced by the age qualification. The Gracchan jurors were to be over thirty and under sixty, while a large number of the military equites were under the former limit of age, in consequence of the practice of retiring from the corps after the attainment of the quaestorship or selection into the senate. The aristocratic element in the equestrian order, if this latter expression be used in its widest sense to include both the military and civilian knights, was thus rigorously excluded: and there remained but the men whose business interests were in no way complicated by respect for senatorial traditions. The official list of the new jurors (album judicum) was probably to be made out annually; and there is every reason to suppose that there was a considerable change of personnel at each revision, since one of the conditions of membership of the panel—residence within a mile of Rome—could hardly have been observed by business men with world-wide interests for any extended period. The conception which still prevailed that judicial service was a burden (munus), would alone have led the revising authority to free past jurors from the service: and the practice must have been welcome to the capitalists themselves, many of whom may well have desired the share of power and perhaps of profit which jurisdiction over their superiors conferred. We are told that the selection of the first panel was entrusted to the legislator himself;[626] for the future the Foreign Praetor was to draw up the annual list of four hundred and fifty who were qualified to hear cases of extortion.[627] It is not known whether this was the full number of the new jurors, or whether there were additional members selected by a different authority for the trial of other offences. It is not probable that the judiciary law of Gracchus imposed the new class of judices directly on the civil courts. The judex of private law still retained his character of an arbitrator appointed by the consent of the parties, and it would have been improper to restrict this choice to a class defined by statute. But the practical monopoly of jurisdiction in important cases, which senators seem to have acquired, was henceforth broken through, and the judex in civil suits was sometimes taken from the equestrian order.[628]

The superficial aspect of this great change seemed full of promise for the future. The ample means of the new jurors might be taken as a guarantee of their purity; their selection from the middle class, as a security of the soundness and disinterestedness of their judgments. Perhaps Gracchus himself was the victim of this hope, and believed that the scourge of the nobility which he had placed in the hands of the knights, might at least be decorously wielded. The judgment of the after-world varied as to the mode in which they exercised their power. Cicero, in advocating the claims of the order to a renewed tenure of authority, could urge that during their possession of the courts for nearly fifty years, their judgments had never been tainted by the least suspicion of corruption.[629] This was a safe assertion if suspicion is only justified by proof; for the Gracchan jurors seem to have been from the first exempted from all prosecution for bribery.[630] This legal exemption is all the more remarkable as Gracchus himself was the author of a law which permitted a criminal prosecution for a corrupt judgment.[631] It is difficult to understand the significance of this enactment, for the magistrates, against whom it was directed, were in few cases judges of fact, except in the military domain. It could not have referred to the president of a standing commission who was a mere vehicle for the judgment of the jury; but Gracchus probably contemplated the occasional revival of special commissions sanctioned by the people, and it is possible that even the two praetors who presided over the civil courts may have been subject to the operation of the law, which may not have been directed merely against corrupt sentences in criminal matters, as was subsequently the case when the law was renewed by Sulla. It is even possible that the law dates from a period anterior to the creation of the equestrian judices; but, even on this hypothesis, the exclusion of the latter from its operation was something of an anomaly; for even the civil judex of Rome, on whose analogy the jurors of the standing commissions had been created, was in early times criminally, and at a later period at least pecuniarily, liable for an unjust sentence.[632] We shall elsewhere have occasion to dwell on the value which the equestrian order attached to this immunity, and we shall see that its relief at the freedom from vexatious prosecution is of itself no sign of corruption. One of our authorities does indeed emphatically assert the ultimate prevalence of bribery in the equestrian courts:[633] and circumstances may be easily imagined which would have made this resort natural, if not inevitable. A band of capitalists eager to secure a criminal verdict, which had a purely commercial significance, would scarcely be slow to employ commercial methods with their less wealthy representatives on the Bench, and votes might have been purchased by transactions in which cash payments played no part. But the corruption of individuals was of far less moment than the solidarity of interest and collective cupidity of the mercantile order as a whole. The verdicts of the courts reflected the judgment of the Exchange. It was even possible to create a prosecution[634] simply for the purpose of damning a man who, in the exercise of his authority, had betrayed tendencies which were interpreted as hostile to capitalism.

The future war between the senate and the equites would not have been waged so furiously, had not Gracchus given his favoured class the chance of asserting a positive control, in virtue of an almost official position, over the richest domains of the Roman world. The fatal bequest of Attalus was still the plaything of parties; but the prize which Tiberius had destined for the people was used by Caius to seal his compact with the knights. The concession, which could not be openly avowed, was accomplished by means so indirect that its meaning must have escaped the majority of the voters who sanctioned it, and its consequences may not have been fully grasped by the legislator himself. The masses who applauded the new law about the province of Asia, may have seen in it but a promise of the increase of their revenues; while the desire of swelling the public finances, which he had so heavily burdened, of putting an end to the anomalous condition of a district which was neither free nor governed, neither protectorate nor province, perhaps even of meeting the wishes of some of the Asiatic provincials, who preferred regular to irregular exactions, may have been combined in the mind of Gracchus with the wish to see the equites confront the senate in yet another sphere. The change which he proposed was one concerned with the taxation of the province. It cannot be determined how far he was responsible for the infliction of new burdens on Rome's Asiatic subjects. The increase of the public revenue, of which he boasted in one of his speeches to the people,[635] the new harbour dues with which he is credited,[636] may point to certain creations of his own; but the end at which he aimed seems to have been mainly a revival of the system of taxation which had been current in the kingdom of the Attalids, accompanied by a new and, as he possibly thought, better system of collection. It could not have been he who first burdened the taxpayer with the payment of tithes; for this method of revenue was of immense antiquity in all Hellenised lands and is not likely to have been unknown to the kings of Pergamon. It is a method that, from its elastic nature, bears less heavily on the agriculturist than that of a direct impost; for the payment is conditioned by the size of the crops and is independent of the changing value of money. The chief objection to the tax, considered in itself and apart from its accompanying circumstances, was the immensity of the revenue which it yielded; the sums exacted by an Oriental despot were unnecessary for the economical administration of Rome; and the Roman administration of half a century earlier might have reduced the tithe to a twentieth as it had actually cut down the taxes of Macedonia to one-half of their original amount. Sicily, indeed, furnished an example of the tithe system; but the expenses of a government decrease in proportion to the area of administration, and Sicily could not furnish the ample harbour dues and other payments in money, which should have made the commercial wealth of Asia lighten the burden on the holder of land. The rating of the new province was, in fact, an admission of a change in the theory of imperial taxation. Asia was not merely to be self-supporting; her revenues were to yield a surplus which should supplement the deficit of other lands, or aid in the support of the proletariate of the capital.

The realisation of this principle may not have imposed heavier burdens than Asia had known in the time of her kings. But the fiction that the new dependency was to be maintained in a state of "freedom," which even after the downfall of Aristonicus seems to have exercised some influence on Roman policy, had led to a suspension of regular taxation for the purposes of the central government, which caused the Gracchan proposals to be regarded by certain political circles at Rome in the light of a novelty, and probably of a hardship.[637] They could hardly have borne either character to the Asiatic provincials themselves. The war indemnities and exactions which followed the great struggle, must have been a more grievous burden than the system of taxation to which they were inured: and it is incredible that during the six years which had elapsed since the suppression of the revolt, or even the three years that had passed since the completion of Aquillius's organisation, no revenues had been raised by Rome from her new subjects for administrative purposes. They probably had been raised, but in a manner exasperating because irregular. What was needed was a methodical system, which should abolish at once the fiction of "freedom" and the reality of the exactions meted out at the caprice of the governor of the moment. Such a system was supplied by Gracchus, and it was doubtless reached by the application of the characteristic Roman method of maintaining, whether for good or ill, the principles of organisation which were already in existence in the new dependency.