The Roman assemblies from their origin to the end of the Republic

by George Willis Botsford

(5) Land given and assigned by the three commissioners after 133.[2384]

(6) Land which has been occupied after 133 (not assigned by the commissioners) to the extent of not more than thirty iugera to the occupier.[2385]

(7) Land which by the provision of this law is to be sold, granted, or restored.[2386]

All the lands above enumerated are declared private and free from vectigal and scriptura.[2387]

II. The lands which the law declares public are those reserved from distribution by the law of Ti. Gracchus.[2388] It retains further as public all lands along public roads which have been granted by the commissioners on condition that the recipients (viasieis vicaneis) in return for the use of the land undertake the duty of keeping the roads in repair. Though heritable and alienable, they remain subject to the burden here described.[2389]

III. In the regulation of the agrarian conditions of Africa the statute deals with three kinds of land, (1) private ex iure quiritium,[2390] (2) private ex iure peregrino,[2391] (3) public domain of the Roman people of various sub-classes.[2392] Lastly the statute aims to settle the status of the lands of Corinth.[2393] As regards the Latins and aliens, whatever has already been permitted them by treaty or law is allowed them by this statute, provided the same thing is allowed a Roman citizen; but it is forbidden them if forbidden a citizen. Rights granted the citizens which up to this time are not enjoyed by aliens are not by this law communicated to aliens.[2394]

Through this series of reactionary laws, from the Minucian (121) to the Thorian (111), the optimates succeeded in nullifying the good results of the Sempronian agrarian reforms. It was while the Minucian rogation[2395] was under discussion that the senate took advantage of a disturbance in the concilium to arm the consul Opimius with absolute power for putting down C. Gracchus and his followers.[2396] The failure of an attempt in the following year (120) to call Opimius to account for these proceedings established the right of the senate to the appointment of special commissions and to the decretum ultimum[2397]—a right on which the optimates continued to insist to the end of the republic. Through the plebiscite of L. Calpurnius Bestia (also 120)[2398] they put the stamp of legitimacy upon the murder of the followers of Ti. Gracchus by recalling from exile P. Popillius Laenas, who as consul in 132 and head of a special court was chiefly responsible for that judicial crime.[2399] An attempt was made by Q. Servilius Caepio, consul in 106, to restore the courts to the senate,[2400] or possibly to compromise by providing for an album composed of both senators and equites.[2401] The sources imply that the measure was accepted by the comitia; but if so, it must have been immediately annulled, as it was not carried into effect.[2402] Within this period of reaction, and perhaps as a part of it, falls the lex de libertinorum suffragiis of the consul M. Aemilius Scaurus, 115. Although nothing certain is known of it, we may suppose that it attempted again[2403] to restrict the libertini to the four city tribes.[2404] About this time, too, several acts seem to have been passed for diminishing the pay of soldiers, probably undoing the Sempronian law on the subject.[2405]

A glance at these reactionary measures alone would leave the impression that the senate was recovering its entire supremacy. This result might have been reached had it not been on the one hand for the lasting inspiration of the Gracchan spirit in the plebs and their leaders, and on the other the new position of the equites. In 119 C. Marius, at once a representative of the knights[2406] and of the peasants, opposed as tribune of the plebs the senatorial aristocracy, which now had to depend for immediate support upon the populace.[2407] The optimates had greatly impaired the value of the secret ballot through the custodes tabellarum, who stood on the pontes as well as by the boxes (cistae) to keep watch over the voting. They were often influential men[2408]—in elections selected by the candidates[2409]—who used their influence with the voters, especially of the principium or of the prerogative century,[2410] thereby maintaining for the aristocrats a high degree of control over the comitia in spite of the ballot laws.[2411] For this reason C. Marius when tribune of the plebs carried an act for making the pontes narrower that there might be room on them for the voters only.[2412] The politicians, however, soon found means of circumventing this law as well as the use of the ballot.[2413] The populares could expect little therefore from the plebiscite of C. Caelius, 107, which by extending the ballot to trials of perduellio, completed the abolition of oral voting in the comitia.[2414]

We find another sign of popular recovery in the assembly’s resumption of the appointment of special judiciary commissions.[2415] One of the most remarkable courts of the kind was that created in 113 for the trial of three Vestal virgins on a charge of incest. The pontifex maximus, who possessed absolute authority over the Vestals, had already pronounced judgment, condemning one and acquitting the other two, when a plebiscite of Sex. Peducaeus, taking the case out of his hands, transferred it to a quaestio extraordinaria.[2416] To such an extent did the tribune apply the theory of popular sovereignty.[2417] The plebiscite of C. Mamilius, 109, ordered the appointment of a court for the detection and punishment of those who had accepted money from Jugurtha for aid rendered him against the decrees of the senate and the interests of Rome. As it was a blow aimed at the nobility, the people in the hatred they then cherished against the governing class voted it with great spirit.[2418] In 105 the tribal comitia abrogated the proconsular imperium of Q. Servilius Caepio,[2419] and in the following year, they not only appointed a special court to try him for embezzlement of the gold found at Tolosa,[2420] but through the plebiscite of L. Cassius Longinus, they disqualified for membership of the senate any person whom the people had judicially condemned or whose imperium they had abrogated.[2421] These acts confirmed and applied the principles underlying the deposition of Octavius and the rogation of C. Gracchus concerning persons deposed from office (abacti). In theory the people indirectly chose the senators through their function of electing magistrates; and they were only claiming this right when they insisted that he should be prohibited from membership whom they had condemned in either of the two ways described by the statute. It must have seemed to the people, on the other hand, that the tribunes, who were once more their true representatives, had as good a right as any other magistrates to seats in the senate. This feeling found expression in the Atinian plebiscite, enacted between 122 and 102,[2422] which gave the tribunes the ius sententiae dicendae in the senate with the same right to censorial enrolment as that enjoyed by the curule magistrates.[2423]