Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

All these three ways in which the relation of patron and client might be created tended even in the purest days of the Roman Republic to make an election a struggle between big families and groups of big families rather than a political struggle in which each elector formed an opinion upon a question of policy and gave his vote independently. The Senate, that is to say, the assembly of heads of houses, divided into parties or groups, and each head of a house could bring so many electors to vote at the polling booths with tolerable certainty. The ultimate political unit for practical purposes was not the individual but the group formed by a patron and his clients, who in their different degrees voted as the patron directed.

A free Government controlled by an electorate, in which each individual elector votes according to his own judgment, is a dream of political theorists. It may have existed for a short time in some of the small city states of antiquity, but in practice the individual elector is too lazy to exert his own judgment; he votes, if it is made worth his while to vote, either by the pressure of some extra constitutional association to which he belongs, or by direct bribery, or by the more insidious indirect bribery of party leaders who promise pecuniary or sentimental satisfaction.

In political life the letter of the statute book is always in process of modification by custom and convenience. No state which is expanding can hope to keep the letter of its constitution up to date; the changes are too rapid, too subtle. Constitution makers are thus commonly disappointed in the results of their labours, partly because they are not in possession of all the facts, and partly because the conditions have changed even in the time required to frame a constitution. At Rome the letter of the constitution was but slightly changed during the two centuries preceding the Empire; there were the same magistrates, the same Senate, the same electoral and legislative bodies, very nearly the same methods of voting, and the same qualifications of an elector, but the working of the constitution changed; the admission of large numbers of fresh citizens expanding the mass of voters beyond manageable numbers, the changed responsibilities of the magistrates, the widened career open to successful politicians rendered the old terminology almost meaningless in reference to the actual working of the constitution.

There was a time when the extra constitutional organization of the electors was entirely in the hands of the great families; this arrangement broke down gradually before the influx of new citizens; direct bribery took its place alongside of personal influence. Up to the year 180 B.C. Rome had pursued a policy in relation to her allies which, judged by the standards of antiquity, was liberal; she admitted her immediate neighbours to a modified form of citizenship, she gave the citizens of certain towns the right of voting in some of the Roman elections, and she even gave those citizens of these towns who had held the highest offices in their own towns, the right of standing for the magistracies at Rome; she pursued a policy of expansion; at that date her policy changed; she began to check the admission to citizenship, which was afterwards only wrung from her by war, till the city constitution was all but lost in the building of the Empire.

On the one hand, the great families discovered that they had entered upon the possession of a magnificent property, which they were not disposed to share with an indefinite number of partners; on the other hand, they felt that owing to the influx of numbers they had lost their grip of the electorate, for the men who came to vote from outlying towns were often sheep without a shepherd. It proved, however, impossible to keep the electorate restricted. Rome herself could not supply the armies necessary to carry on the career of conquest upon which she had embarked; she was forced to depend upon allies to supply the men whom she organized, and she was forced in various ways to pay the price. One form of payment was the citizenship, which enabled the Samnite or other Italian soldier to come to Rome for the elections, and extort extra payment for his military services; whether he was feasted, or amused, or actually paid for his vote, he shared with his Roman fellow-soldier in the spoil of the provinces which he had helped to conquer. Every fresh concession of citizenship rendered the electorate more unwieldy, till the Roman people of whose favours Cicero so often boasts had become little better than a mob.

While the Roman Electorate was thus outgrowing all possible organization, and the constitution of a city state was breaking down in every direction under the weight of burdens which it was not constructed to carry, the minds of liberal statesmen at Rome were unhappily occupied largely with city constitutions. The enlightened circle of the Roman nobility, which was represented by such men as Scipio Æmilianus, studied the Greek political writers rather than the events which were going on around them, and were tempted to see in the creation of a really democratic constitution the remedy for the disorders which were only too obvious. They were liberal in one sense, but it was in terms of the city state, which no longer existed.

We have had an analogous process in our own history. The expansion of England for a long time escaped the notice of men, who, frightened by the French Revolution, were concerned in demonstrating the incomparable merit of representative government, and of establishing the fact that the English constitution had always contained in it the democratic principle. One of these men rewrote for us the history of Greece in terms of the praise of democracy; another proclaimed the merits of liberty and representative government; a whole school of historians is interested in showing the popular share in such events as the extortion of Magna Charta from an unwilling King, and in the constitution of the Parliament summoned in the King’s name by Simon de Montfort; as the result of the labours of these and other men our attention was drawn for many years exclusively to problems of domestic government; the far greater problem, the relations of England to her colonies and dependencies, and the necessary modifications in her internal constitution, escaped notice.

At Rome the first important act of the new Liberal school was the attempted agrarian legislation of Tiberius Gracchus; Rome was to deal with her conquered territory in the terms of a city state; conquered land was public land; in such states it had always belonged to the whole people, and had been shared between them; Rome had neglected this salutary arrangement; her public land had passed into the possession of the wealthy few; it must be resumed, and redivided. The proposal was about as practical as an attempt to restore all the common lands to the English peasantry would be at present; it failed; the originator was assassinated.

Ten years later his brother proposed further liberal schemes; he was less of a dreamer; he looked forward rather than back; he saw that Rome must provide for her time-expired soldiers, and must give non-Roman Italians who had fought under her standards a larger share in her conquests; but he was before his time, and was in his turn assassinated; a similar fate befell a leader from the ranks of the Conservative nobility, a Livius Drusus, who a few years later advanced the same political programme. The expansion of Rome to include Italy had thus become part of the policy of a definite party at Rome; but this party was not always a popular party, for the men who idled about the streets of Rome, living on the profits of citizenship, were no more disposed than the great families to add to the number of the partners.

During the second century before the Christian era, the forms of popular government were maintained at Rome ready to become more than forms when an organization was also ready to use them. The most important effect of the political work of the Gracchi was to breathe fresh life into the popular assembly; but this was no sooner done than the constitution proved to be unworkable; then followed a period of anarchy in Rome itself, which lasted for seventy years; during this period one party, the party of Greater Rome, steadily grew, and eventually left the constitution so modified that the local politics of the capital no longer had a predominant weight in the Empire. The first great step towards this end was made in the period during which C. Marius had an overpowering influence in Roman politics. Marius is represented to us by the historians from an unfriendly point of view; it is not easy to get at the real man through the mass of legend which obscures his real story. We see him a capable general who reorganized the Roman Army; we also see him incapable as a politician; he figures as the rough brutal demagogue whose violence stands in unpleasing contrast to the suave manners of Sulla; but whatever he may have been personally he represented definite political tendencies. The Marian party survived Marius, and found its most distinguished representative in the great Cæsar, who was a nephew of Marius.