Tiberius only sought a reform, and, unknowingly, he had commenced a revolution. But to accomplish this he did not possess all the necessary qualities. A singular mixture of gentleness and audacity, he unchained the tempest, but dared not launch the thunderbolt. Surrounded by his adherents, he walked to the comitia with more appearance of resignation than assurance. The tribes, assembled in the Capitol, were beginning to give their votes, when the senator Fulvius Flaccus came to warn Tiberius that, in the meeting of the Senate, the rich, surrounded by their slaves, had resolved on his destruction. This information produced a considerable agitation round the tribune, and those at a distance demanding the cause of the tumult, Tiberius raised his hand to his head to explain by signs the danger which threatened him.[657] Then his enemies hurried to the Senate, and, giving their own interpretation to his gesture, denounced him as aiming at the kingly power. The Senate, preceded by the sovereign pontiff, Scipio Nasica, repaired to the Capitol. The mob of Tiberius was dispersed, and he himself was slain, with three hundred of his friends, near the gate of the sacred inclosure. All his partisans were hunted out, and underwent the same fate, and among others Diophanes the rhetorician.
The man had succumbed, but the cause remained standing, and public opinion forced the Senate to discontinue its opposition to the execution of the agrarian law, to substitute for Tiberius, as commissioner for the partition of lands, Publius Crassus, an ally of the Gracchi; the people commiserated the fate of the victims and cursed the murderers. Scipio Nasica gained nothing by his triumph; to withdraw him from the general resentment he was sent to Asia, where he died miserably.
The execution of the law encountered, nevertheless, many obstacles. The limits of the ager publicus had never been well defined; few title-deeds existed, and those which could be produced were often unintelligible. The value of this property, too, had changed prodigiously. It was necessary to indemnify those who had cleared uncultivated grounds or made improvements. Most of the lots contained religious buildings and sepulchres. According to the antique notions, it was a sacrilege to give them any other destination. The possessors of the ager publicus, supported by the Senate and the equestrian order, made the most of all these difficulties. The Italiotes showed no less ardour in protesting against the partition of the lands, knowing well that it would be less favourable to them than to the Romans.
The struggles which had preceded had so excited men’s passions, that each party, as the opportunity occurred, presented laws the most opposite to each other. At one time, on the motion of the tribune Junius Pennus, it is a question of expelling all foreigners from Rome (628), in order to deprive the party of the people of auxiliaries; at another, on that of M. Fulvius, the right of city is claimed in favour of the Italiotes (629). This demand leads to disturbances: it is rejected, and the Senate, to rid itself of Fulvius, sends him against the Salluvii, who were threatening Massilia. But already the allies themselves, impatient at seeing their rights incessantly despised, were attempting to secure them by force, and the Latin colony of Fregellæ revolts first; but it is soon destroyed utterly by the prætor M. Opimius (629). The rigour of this act of repression was calculated to intimidate the other towns; but there are questions which must be resolved, and cannot be put down. The cause which has been vanquished ten years is on the point of finding in the brother of Tiberius Gracchus a new champion.
Caius Gracchus (631).
III. Caius Gracchus, indeed, nourished in his heart, as a sacred deposit, the ideas of his brother and the desire to revenge him. After serving in twelve campaigns, he returned to Rome to solicit the tribuneship. On his arrival, the nobles trembled, and, to combat his ascendency, they accused him of being concerned in the insurrection of Fregellæ; but his name brought him numerous sympathies. On the day of his election, a vast crowd of citizens arrived in Rome from all parts of Italy, and so great was the confluence that the Campus Martius could not hold them; and many gave their votes even from the roofs.[658] Invested with the tribunitian power, Gracchus made use of it to submit to the sanction of the people several laws; some directed merely against the enemies of his brother;[659] others, of great political meaning, which require more particular notice.
First, the importance of the tribunes was increased by the faculty of being re-elected indefinitely,[660] which tended to give a character of permanence to functions which were already so preponderant. Next, the law frumentaria, by turn carried into effect and abandoned,[661] gained him adherents by his granting without distinction, to all the poor citizens, the monthly distribution of a certain quantity of wheat; and for this purpose vast public granaries were constructed.[662] The shortening of the time of service of the soldiers,[663] the prohibition to enrol them under seventeen years of age, and the payment by the treasury of their equipment, which was previously deducted from their pay, gained him the favour of the army. The establishment of new tolls (portoria) augmented the resources of the State; new colonies were founded,[664] not only in Italy, but in the possessions out of the peninsula.[665] The agrarian law, which was connected with the establishment of these colonies, was confirmed, probably with the view of restoring to the commissioners charged with its execution their judicial powers, which had fallen into disuse.[666] Long and wide roads, starting from Rome, placed the metropolis in easy communication with the different countries of Italy.[667]
Down to this time, the appointments to the provinces had taken place after the consular elections, which allowed the Senate to distribute the great commands nearly according to its own convenience; it was now arranged, in order to defeat the calculations of ambition and cupidity, that the Senate should assign, before the election of the consuls, the provinces which they should administrate.[668] To elevate the title of Roman citizen, the dispositions of the law Porcia were put in force again, and it was forbidden not only to pronounce capital punishment[669] on a Roman citizen, except in case of high treason (perduellio), but even for this offence to apply it without the ratification of the people. It was equivalent to repealing the law of provocation, the principle of which had been inscribed in the laws of the Twelve Tables.
C. Gracchus attempted still more in the cause of equality. He proposed to confer the right of city on the allies who enjoyed the Latin law, and even to extend this benefit to all the inhabitants of Italy.[670] He wished that in the comitia all classes should be admitted without distinction to draw lots for the century called prærogativa, or which had precedency in voting;[671] this “prerogative” had in fact a great influence, because the suffrage of the first voters was regarded as a divine presage; but these propositions were rejected. Desirous of diminishing the power of the Senate, Gracchus resolved to oppose to it the knights, whose importance he increased by new attributes. He caused a law to be passed which authorised the censor to let to farm, in Asia, the lands taken from the inhabitants of the conquered towns.[672] The knights then took in farm the rents and tithes of those countries, of which the soil belonged of right to the Roman people;[673] the old proprietors were reduced to the condition of simple tenants. Finally, Caius gave the knights a share in the judiciary powers, exercised exclusively by the Senate, the venality of which had excited public contempt.[674] Three hundred knights were joined with three hundred senators, and the cognisance of all actions at law thus devolved upon six hundred judges.[675] These measures gained for him the good-will of an order which, hostile hitherto to the popular party, had contributed to the failure of the projects of Tiberius Gracchus.
The tribune’s success was immense; his popularity became so great that the people surrendered to him the right of naming the three hundred knights among whom the judges were to be chosen, and his simple recommendation was enough to secure the election of Fannius, one of his partisans, to the consulship. Desiring further to show his spirit of justice towards the provinces, he sent back to Spain the wheat arbitrarily carried away from the inhabitants by the proprætor Fabius. The tribunes had thus, at that epoch, a veritable omnipotence: they had charge of the great works; disposed of the public revenues; dictated, so to say, the election of the consuls; controlled the acts of the governors of provinces; proposed the laws, and saw to their execution.