A History of Rome During the Later Republic and Early Principate

by A. H. J. Greenidge

The scope of his proposal[670] was more moderate than that which had been put forward by Flaccus. He suggested the grant of the full rights of citizenship to the Latins, and of Latin rights to the other Italian allies.[671] Italy was thus, from the point of view of private law, to be Romanised almost up to the Alps;[672] while the cities already in enjoyment of some or all of the private privileges of the Roman, were to see the one anomaly removed, which created an invidious distinction between them and the burgess towns, hampered their commerce, and imperilled their landed possessions. The proposal had the further advantage that it took account of the possible unwillingness of many of the federate cities to accept the Roman franchise; such a refusal was not likely to be made to the offer of Latin rights: for the Latin community was itself a federate city with its own laws, magistrates and courts, and the sense of autonomy would be satisfied while many of the positive benefits of Roman citizenship would be gained. Grades of privilege would still exist in Italy, and a healthy discontent might in time be fostered, which would lead all Italian communities to seek absorption into the great city. Past methods of incorporation might be held to furnish a precedent; the scheme proposed by Gracchus was hardly more revolutionary than that which had, in the third and at the beginning of the second centuries, resulted in the conferment of full citizenship on the municipalities of half-burgesses. It differed from it only in extending the principle to federate towns; but the rights of the members of the Latin cities bore a close resemblance to those of the old municipes, and they might easily be regarded as already enjoying the partial citizenship of Rome. The conferment of this partial citizenship on the other Italians, while in no way destroying local institutions or impairing local privileges, would lead to the possibility of a common law for the whole of Italy, would enable every Italian to share in the benefits of Roman business life, and appear in the court of the urban praetor to defend such rights as he had acquired, by the use of the forms of Roman law. The tentativeness of the character of Gracchus's proposal, while recommending it as in harmony with the cautious spirit of Roman development which had worked the great changes of the past, may also have been dictated by the feeling that the more moderate scheme stood a better chance of acceptance by the mob of Rome. All he asked was that the grievances which had led to the revolt of Fregellae, and the dangers revealed by that revolt, should be removed. The numbers of the added citizens would not be overwhelming; for the majority of Italians all that was asked was the possession of certain private rights, which had been so ungrudgingly granted to communities in the past. Throughout the campaign he probably laid more stress on the duty of protecting the individual than on the right of the individual to power. And the fact that the protection was demanded, not against the Roman State, but against an oppressive nobility that disgraced it by a misuse of its powers, gave a democratic colouring to the demand, and suggested a community of suffering, and therefore of sympathy, between the donors and recipients of the gift. Even before his franchise law was before the world, he seems to have been engaged in educating his auditors up to this view of the case; for it was probably in the speeches with which he introduced his law for the better protection of the life of the Roman citizen, that he illustrated the cruel caprice of the nobility by grisly stories of the sufferings of the Italians. He had told of the youthful legate who had had a cow-herd of Venusia scourged to death, as an answer to the rustic's jesting query whether the bearers of the litter were carrying a corpse: and of the consul who had scourged the quaestor of Teanum Sidicinum, the man of noblest lineage in his state, because the men's baths, in which the consul's wife had elected to bathe, were not adequately prepared for her reception.[673] Since the objections of the populace to the extension of the franchise were the result of prejudice rather than of reason, they might be weakened if the sense of jealousy and distrust could be diverted from the people's possible rivals to the common oppressors of Rome and Italy.

The appeal to sentiment might have been successful, had not the most sordid passions of the mob been immediately inflamed by the oratory of the opponents of the measure. The most formidable of these opponents was drawn from the ranks of Gracchus's own supporters; for the franchise question had again proved a rock which could make shipwreck of the unity of the democratic party. His protégé, the consul Fannius, was not ashamed to appeal to the most selfish instincts of the populace. "Do you suppose," he said, "that, when you have given citizenship to the Latins, there will be any room left for you at public gatherings, or that you will find a place at the games or festivals? Will they not swamp everything with their numbers?" [674]

Fannius, as a moderate, was an excellent exponent of senatorial views, and it was believed that many noble hands had collaborated in the crushing speech which inflicted one of its death-blows on the Gracchan proposal.[675]

The opportunity for active opposition had at last arrived, and the senate was emboldened to repeat the measure which four years earlier had swept the aliens out of Rome. Perhaps in consequence of powers given by the law of Pennus, the consul Fannius was empowered to issue an edict that no Italian, who did not possess a vote in the Roman assemblies, should be permitted within five miles of Rome at the time when the proposal about the franchise was to be submitted to the Comitia.[676] Caius answered this announcement with a fiery edict of his own, in which he inveighed against the consul and promised his tribunician help to any of the allies who chose to remain in the city.[677] The power which he threatened to exercise was probably legal, since there is no reason to suppose that the tribunician auxilium could be interposed solely for the assistance of members of the citizen body;[678] but he must have known that the execution of this promise was impracticable, since the injured party could be aided only by the personal interposition of the tribune, and it was clear that a single magistrate, burdened with many cares, and living a life of the most varied and strenuous activity, could not be present in every quarter of Rome and in a considerable portion of the surrounding territory. Even the cooperation of his ardent colleague Flaccus could not have availed for the protection of many of his Italian friends, and the course of events so soon taught him the futility of this means of struggling for Italian rights that when, somewhat later in the year, one of his Italian friends was seized by a creature of Fannius before his eyes, he passed by without an attempt at aid. His enemies, he knew, were at the time eager for a struggle in which, when they had isolated him from his Italian supporters, physical violence would decide the day: and he remarked that he did not wish to give them the pretext for the hand-to-hand combat which they desired.[679] One motive, indeed, of the invidious edict issued by the consul seems to have been to leave Gracchus to face the new position which his latest proposal had created, without any external help; but as external help, if successfully asserted, could only have taken the form of physical violence, there was reasonable ground for holding that the decree excluding the Italians was the only means of preventing a serious riot or even a civil war. The senate could scarcely have feared the moral influence of the Italians on the voting populace of Rome, and they knew that, in the present state of public sentiment, the constitutional means of resistance which had failed against Tiberius Gracchus might be successfully employed against his brother. The whole history of the first tribunate of Caius Gracchus proves the frank recognition of the fact that the tribunician veto could no longer be employed against a measure which enlisted anything like the united support of the people; but, like all other devices for suspending legislation, its employment was still possible for opponents, and welcome even to lukewarm supporters, when the body politic was divided on an important measure and even the allies of its advocate felt their gratitude and their loyalty submitted to an unwelcome strain. Resistance by means of the intercession did not now require the stolid courage of an Octavius, and when Livius Drusus threatened the veto,[680] there was no question of his deposition. Some nerve might have been required, had he made this announcement in the midst of an excited crowd of Italian postulants for the franchise; but from this experience he was saved by the precautionary measure taken by the senate. It is probable that Drusus's announcement caused an entire suspension of the legal machinery connected with the franchise bill, and that its author never ventured to bring it to the vote.

It is possible that to this stage of Gracchus's career belongs a proposal which he promulgated for a change in the order of voting at the Comitia Centuriata. The alteration in the structure of this assembly, which had taken place about the middle of the third century, had indeed done much to equalise the voting power of the upper and lower classes; but the first class and the knights of the eighteen centuries were still called on to give their suffrage first, and the other classes doubtless voted in the order determined by the property qualification at which they were rated. As the votes of each century were separately taken and proclaimed, the absolute majority required for the decisions of the assembly might be attained without the inferior orders being called on to express their judgment, and it was notorious that the opinion of later voters was profoundly influenced by the results already announced. Gracchus proposed that the votes of all the classes should be taken in an order determined solely by the lot.[681] His interest in the Comitia Centuriata was probably due to the fact that it controlled the consular elections, and a democratic consulship, which he had vainly tried to secure by his support of Fannius, might be rendered more attainable by the adoption of the change which he advocated. The great danger of the coming year was the election of a consul strongly identified with the senatorial interest—of a man like Popillius who would be keen to seize some moment of reaction and attempt to ruin the leaders of the reform movement, even if he could not undo their work. It is practically certain that this proposal of Gracchus never passed into law, it is questionable whether it was ever brought before the Comitia. The reformer was immediately plunged into a struggle to maintain some of his existing enactments, and to keep the favour of the populace in the face of insidious attempts which were being made to undermine their confidence in himself.

The senate had struck out a new line of opposition, and they had found a willing, because a convinced, instrument for their schemes. It is inconceivable that a council, which reckoned within itself representatives of all the noblest houses at Rome, should not have possessed a considerable number of members who were influenced by the political views of a Cato or a Scipio, or by the lessons of that humanism which had carried the Gracchi beyond the bounds of Roman caution, but which might suffuse a more conservative mind with just sufficient enlightenment to see that much was wrong, and that moderate remedies were not altogether beyond the limits of practicability. But this section of senatorial opinion could find no voice and take no independent action. It was crushed by the reactionary spirit of the majority of the peers, and frightened at the results to which its theories seem to lead, when their cautious qualifications, never likely to find acceptance with the masses, were swept away by more thorough-going advocates. But the voice, which the senate kept stifled during the security of its rule, might prove valuable in a crisis. The moderate might be put forward to outbid the extremist; for his moderation would certainly lead him to respect the prejudices of the mob, while any excesses, which he was encouraged or instructed to commit, need not touch the points essential to political salvation, and might be corrected, or left to a natural dissolution, when the crisis had been passed and the demagogue overthrown. The instrument chosen by the senate was Marcus Livius Drusus,[682] the tribune who had threatened to interpose his veto on the franchise bill. There is no reason why the historian should not treat the political attitude of this rival of Gracchus as seriously as it seems to have been treated by Drusus's illustrious son, who reproduced, and perhaps borrowed from his father's career, the combination of a democratic propaganda, which threw specious unessentials to the people, with the design of maintaining and strengthening the rule of the nobility. The younger Drusus was, it is true, a convert to the Italian claims which his father had resisted; but even this advocacy shows development rather than change, for the party represented by the elder Drusus was by no means blind to the necessity for a better security of Italian rights. The difference between the father and the son was that the one was an instrument and the other an agent. But a man who is being consciously employed as an instrument, may not only be thoroughly honest, but may reap a harvest of moral and mental satisfaction at the opportunities of self-fulfilment which chance has thrown in his way. The position may argue a certain lack of the sense of humour, but is not necessarily accompanied by any conscious sacrifice of dignity. Certainly the public of Rome was not in the secret of the comedy that was being played. It saw only a man of high birth and aristocratic culture, gifted with all the authority which great wealth and a command of dignified oratory can give,[683] approaching them with bounties greater in appearance than those which Gracchus had recently been willing to impart, attaching no conditions to the gift and, though speaking in the name of the senate, conveying no hint of the deprivation of any of the privileges that had so recently been won. And the new largess was for the Roman people alone; it was not depreciated by the knowledge that the blessings, which it conferred or to which it was added, would be shared by rivals from every part of Italy.

An aspirant for favour, who wished to enter on a race with the recent type of popular leader, must inevitably think of provision for the poor; but a mere copy or extension of the Gracchan proposals was impossible. No measure that had been fiercely opposed by the senate could be defended with decency by the representative, and, as Drusus came in after time to be styled, the "advocate" of that body.[684] Such a scheme as an extension of the system of corn distribution would besides have shocked the political sense both of the patron and his clients, and would not have served the political purposes of the latter, since such a concession could not easily have been rescinded. The system of agrarian assignation, in the form in which it had been carried through by the hands of the Gracchi, had at the moment a complete machinery for its execution, and there was no plausible ground for extending this measure of benevolence. The older system of colonisation was the device which naturally occurred to Drusus and his advisers, and the choice was the more attractive in that it might be employed in a manner which would accentuate certain elements in the Gracchan scheme of settlement that had not commended themselves to public favour. The masses of Rome desired the monopoly of every prize which the favourite of the moment had to bestow; but Gracchus's colonies were meant for the middle class, not for the very poor, and the preliminary to membership of the settlements was an uncomfortable scrutiny into means, habits and character.[685] The masses desired comfort. Capua may have pleased them, but they had little liking for a journey across the sea to the site of desolated Carthage. The very modesty of Gracchus's scheme, as shown in the number of the settlements projected and of the colonists who were to find a home in each, proved that it was not intended as a benefit to the proletariate as a whole. Drusus came forward with a proposal for twelve colonies, all of which were probably to be settled on Italian and Sicilian soil;[686] each of these foundations was to provide for three thousand settlers, and emigrants were not excluded on the ground of poverty. An oblique reflection on the disinterestedness of Gracchus's efforts was further given in the clause which created the commissioners for the foundation of these new colonies, Drusus's name did not appear in the list. He asked nothing for himself, nor would he touch the large sums of money which must flow through the hands of the commissioners for the execution of so vast a scheme.[687] The suspicion of self-seeking or corruption was easily aroused at Rome, as it must have been in any state where such large powers were possessed by the executive, and where no control of the details of execution or expenditure had ever been exercised by the people; and Gracchus's all-embracing energy had betrayed him into a position, which had been accepted in a moment of enthusiasm, but which, disallowed as it was by current sentiment and perhaps by the law, might easily be shaken by the first suggestion of mistrust. The scheme of Drusus, although it proved a phantom and perhaps already possessed this elusive character when the senate pledged its credit to the propounder of the measure, was of value as initiating a new departure in the history of Roman colonisation. Even Gracchus had not proposed to provide in this manner for the dregs of the city, and the first suggestion for forming new foundations simply for the object of depleting the plethora of Rome—the purpose real or professed of many later advocates of colonisation—was due to the senate as an accident in a political game, to Drusus perhaps as the result of mature reflection. Since his proposal, which was really one for agrarian assignation on an enormous scale, was meant to compete with Gracchus's plan for the founding of colonies, it was felt to be impossible to burden the new settlers with the payment of dues for the enjoyment of their land. Gracchus's colonists were to have full ownership of the soil allotted to them, and Drusus's could not be placed in an inferior position. But the existence of thirty-six thousand settlers with free allotments would immediately suggest a grievance to those citizens who, under the Gracchan scheme of land-assignment, had received their lots subject to the condition of the payment of annual dues to the State. If the new allotments were to be declared free, the burden must be removed from those which had already been distributed.[688] Drusus and the senate thus had a logical ground for the step which seems to have been taken, of relieving all the land which had been distributed since the tribunate of the elder Gracchus from the payment of vectigal. It was a popular move, but it is strange that the senate, which was for the most part playing with promises, should have made up its mind to a definite step, the taking of which must have seriously injured the revenues of the State. But perhaps they regarded even this concession as not beyond recall, and they may have been already revolving in their minds those tortuous schemes of land-legislation, which in the near future were to go far to undo the work of the reformers.

The senate also permitted Drusus to propose a law for the protection of the Latins, which should prove that the worst abuses on which Gracchus dwelt might be removed without the gift of the franchise. The enactment provided that no Latin should be scourged by a Roman magistrate, even on military service.[689] Such summary punishment must always have been illegal when inflicted on a Latin who was not serving as a soldier under Roman command and was within the bounds of the jurisdiction of his own state; the only conceivable case in which he could have been legally exposed to punishment at the hands of Roman officials in times of peace, was that of his committing a crime when resident or domiciled in Rome. In such circumstances the penalty may have been summarily inflicted, for the Latins as a whole did not possess the right of appeal to the Roman Comitia.[690] The extension of the magisterial right of coercion over the inhabitants of Latin towns, and its application in a form from which the Roman citizen could appeal, were mere abuses of custom, which violated the treaties of the Latin states and were not first forbidden by the Livian law. But the declaration that the Latin might not be scourged by a Roman commander even on military service, was a novelty, and must have seemed a somewhat startling concession at a time when the Roman citizen was himself subject to the fullest rigour of martial law. It was, however, one that would appeal readily to the legal mind of Rome, for it was a different matter for a Roman to be subject to the martial law of his own state, and for the member of a federate community to be subjected to the code of this foreign power. It was intended that henceforth the Latin should suffer at least the degrading punishment of scourging only after the jurisdiction and on the bidding of his own native commander; but it cannot be determined whether he was completely exempted from the military jurisdiction of the Roman commander-in-chief —an exemption which might under many circumstances have proved fatal to military discipline and efficiency. There is every reason to suppose that this law of Drusus was passed, and some reason to believe that it continued valid until the close of the Social War destroyed the distinctions between the rights of the Latin and the Roman. Its enactment was one of the cleverest strokes of policy effected by Drusus and the senate; for it must have satisfied many of the Latins, who were eager for protection but not for incorporation, while it illustrated the weakness, and as it may have seemed to many, the dishonesty, of Gracchus's seeming contention that abuses could only be remedied by the conferment of full political rights. The whole enterprise of Drusus fully attained the immediate effect desired by the senate. The people were too habituated to the rule of the nobility to remember grievances when approached as friends; the advances of the senate were received in good faith, and Drusus might congratulate himself that a representative of the Moderates had fulfilled the appropriate task of a mediator between opposing factions.[691]

We might have expected that Gracchus, in the face of such formidable competition, would have stood his ground in Rome and would have exhausted every effort of his resistless oratory in exhibiting the dishonesty of his opponents and in seeking to reclaim the allegiance of the people. But perhaps he held that the effective accomplishment of another great design would be a better object-lesson of his power as a benefactor and a surer proof of the reality of his intentions, as contrasted with the shadowy promises of Drusus. He availed himself of his position of triumvir for the foundation of the colony of Junonia—an office which the senate gladly allowed him to accept—and set sail for Africa to superintend in person the initial steps in the creation of his great transmarine settlement.[692] His original plan was soon modified by the opposition which it encountered; the promised number of allotments was raised to six thousand, and Italians were now invited to share in the foundation.[693] Both of these steps were doubtless the result of the senate's dalliance with colonial schemes and with the Latins, but the latter may also be interpreted as a desperate effort to get the colony under weigh at any cost. Fulvius Flaccus, who was also one of the colonial commissioners, either stayed at Rome during the entire period of his colleague's absence or paid but the briefest visit to Africa; for he is mentioned as the representative of the party's interests in Rome during Gracchus's residence in the province. The choice of the delegate was a bad one. Not only was Flaccus hated by the senate, but he was suspected by the people. These in electing him to the tribunate had forgiven his Italian leanings when the Italian cause was held to be extinct; but now the odium of the franchise movement clung to him afresh, and suspicion was rife that the secret dealings with the allies, which were believed to have led to the outbreak of Fregellae, had never been interrupted or had lately been renewed. The difficulties of his position were aggravated by faults of manner. He possessed immense courage and was an excellent fighter; but, like many men of combative disposition, he was tactless and turbulent. His reckless utterances increased the distrust with which he was regarded, and Gracchus's popularity necessarily waned with that of his lieutenant.[694]

Meanwhile the effort was being made to reawaken Carthage and to defy the curse in which Scipio had declared that the soil of the fallen city should be trodden only by the feet of beasts. No scruple could be aroused by the division of the surrounding lands; the site where Carthage had stood was alone under the ban,[695] and had Gracchus been content with mere agrarian assignment or had he established Junonia at some neighbouring spot, his opponents would have been disarmed of the potent weapon which superstition invariably supplied at Rome. As it was, alarming rumours soon began to spread of dreadful signs which had accompanied the inauguration of the colony.[696] When the colonists according to ancient custom were marching to their destined home in military order with standards flying, the ensign which headed the column was caught by a furious wind, torn from the grip of its resisting bearer, and shattered on the ground. When the altars had been raised and the victims laid upon them, a sudden storm-blast caught the offerings and hurled them beyond the boundaries of the projected city which had recently been cut by the share. The boundary-stones themselves were visited by wolves, who seized them in their teeth and carried them off in headlong flight. The reality of the last alarming phenomenon, perhaps of all these omens, was vehemently denied by Gracchus and by Flaccus;[697] but, even if the reports now flying abroad in Rome had any basis in fact, the circumstances of the foundation did not deter the leader nor frighten away his colonists. Gracchus proceeded with his work in an orderly and methodical manner, and when he deemed his personal supervision no longer essential, returned to Rome after an absence of seventy days. He was recalled by the news of the unequal contest that was being waged between the passionate Fulvius and the adroit Drusus. Clearly the circumstances required a cooler head than that possessed by Flaccus; and there was the threat of a still further danger which rendered Gracchus's presence a necessity. The consulship for the following year was likely to be gained by one of the most stalwart champions of ultra-aristocratic views. Lucius Opimius had been defeated when seeking that office in the preceding year, chiefly through the support which Gracchus's advocacy had secured to Fannius. Now there was every chance of his success;[698] for Opimius's chief claim to distinction was the prompt action which he had shown in the conquest of Fregellae, and the large numbers of the populace who detested the Italian cause were likely to aid his senatorial partisans in elevating him to the consulship. The consular elections might exercise a reactionary influence on the tribunician; and, if Gracchus's candidature was a failure, he might be at the mercy of a resolute opponent, who would regard his destruction as the justifiable act of a saviour of society.