Saturninus obtained the renewal of his tribunate. He had carried matters with a high hand: on the occasion of his first election he had daringly murdered an opponent; he had thwarted the nobles, and even risked his popularity with the commons by proclaiming himself the patron of the Italians. It was now requisite, perhaps, to recover his ground with his supporters in the city; and for this purpose he imposed one of his freedmen upon the citizens, as a son of their favourite Tiberius Gracchus. This intrigue, indeed, seems to have had little success; Sempronia, the widow of Scipio Æmilianus, and sister of the murdered tribunes, vehemently denounced it, and the people laughed at the imposture, if they did not resent it. But force, after all, was more familiar to Saturninus than fraud. When C. Memmius, one of his adversaries, was about to be elected consul, he caused him to be poniarded in the Forum by the bandits who surrounded his own person.[86] But he had now gone too far. To save himself he rushed into open revolt. He climbed the Capitol, with his companion Glaucia and his band of ruffians and assassins, seized the citadel, in virtue perhaps of his official dignity, and defied the republic to arms. The nobles retorted upon him with the fatal cry, that he aspired to royalty; and the people, already perplexed at his leaning to the Italians, and shocked, perhaps, at the frantic violence of his proceedings, were not indisposed to listen to it. They acquiesced without a murmur in the decree of the senate, by which the state was declared in danger and Marius charged as consul to provide for its safety.
The city was placed in what in modern times is called a state of siege; that is, the consul, whose ordinary functions within the walls were purely judicial and administrative, received the power of the sword as fully as if he were in the camp. He proceeded to invest the fortress, which was considered impregnable to an attack, and could only be reduced by blockade. By cutting some leaden pipes, upon which, in the security of the times, the citadel of the republic had been allowed to become dependent for water, the insurgents were deprived of the first necessary of life. Saturninus offered to capitulate on the promise of personal safety. Marius guaranteed his life; and in order to preserve him from the fury of the populace, placed him, in the first instance, with his followers, in the Curia Hostilia, a large public building at the foot of the hill. But when the people scaled the walls, tore off the roof, and poured missiles upon the wretched captives, the consul made no effort to save them, and they all perished miserably—a deed of blood which was long remembered, and afforded at a later period the handle for a persecution of the nobles themselves.
No event, perhaps, in Roman history is so sudden, so unconnected, and accordingly so obscure in its origin and causes, as this revolt or conspiracy of Saturninus. The facility with which a favourite champion of the people is abandoned and slain by his own clients, seems to point to some unseen motive, with which history has forgotten to acquaint us. The Roman demagogues were well aware of the inveterate horror with which the people regarded the name of king; and none of them, it may be safely said, notwithstanding the oft-repeated calumnies of their opponents, ever ventured to aspire to it. If it be true then (as the historians represent) that Saturninus was hailed as king by his adherents, and accepted the invidious designation with joy, it is highly probable that his adherents were foreigners and Italians rather than citizens. We have already seen the use which leaders of all parties were making at this time of the claims of the Italians to emancipation from the state of conquered subjects in which they were still held. All in turn pressed these claims, when it suited their particular purpose, nor did most of them scruple to abandon them when their convenience required it. Sometimes the nobles, sometimes the commons, were cajoled into supporting them, as a counterpoise to the aggressions of their immediate opponents; but both the one class and the other were at heart bitterly opposed to them, and the hope of obtaining favour or justice from the republic seems to have gradually disappeared from the minds of the claimants themselves. They hated Rome, and with Rome they identified, perhaps, republican government itself. They could only hope for redress of their grievances from a revolution which should overthrow the supremacy of the senate house and the Forum. This was the menace from which even the licentious rabble of the city recoiled, and which determined Marius to allow the violation of his plighted faith, and the sacrifice of his friend and ally.[87] Even if entirely devoid of patriotic feeling, which we may well believe, Marius was deeply interested in preventing any demagogue from attaining a monarchical ascendency superior to his own.
CLAIMS OF THE LATINS AND ITALIANS TO THE CIVITAS
[100-90 B.C.]
The citizen of Rome, in complete possession of that illustrious title, combined the enjoyment of two classes of rights, civil and political. The civil law regulated the forms and effects of marriage, the exercise of paternal authority, the holding of property, the capacity of willing and inheriting; it secured, further, the inviolability of the citizen’s person. The political law, on the other hand, gave the right of suffrage in the election of magistrates, and in voting upon projects of law; it conferred eligibility to public office; it permitted initiation in certain religious rites, and, finally, it conceded the honour and advantage of military service in the legions. The combination of these rights and capacities constituted the complete title to the Roman franchise. It was sometimes thus conferred upon individuals, in reward for special services; in a few cases the inhabitants of a favoured city were invested with it in the mass.
The admission, however, of a foreign city, in alliance with the republic, to the full right of citizenship, required it, in the first place, to renounce its own ancient institutions. The favoured community adopted at once the civil law of Rome, and organised itself internally upon the Roman model, with an assembly of the people, a curia, representing the senate, and superior elective magistrates, generally two in number, corresponding with the consuls. A city thus constituted took the name of a municipium, that is, an office-bearing community. The inhabitants, when they presented themselves in Rome, might exercise the right of suffrage there, and were rendered capable of filling any of its magistracies.
It seems, however, that the petty states of Italy, attached to their own domestic institutions, were frequently unwilling to sacrifice them for these advantages, and rejected the concession of political rights, contenting themselves with the acquisition of the civil; which, while they placed them upon a footing of equality with the inhabitants of the city in respect to marriage, family authority, property, and person, did not require the surrender of their own political customs. Rome herself was not unwilling to recognise this distinction, and was wont to dispense the favour of her franchise with affected coyness, conferring her civil rights upon various states in succession, but reserving her political franchise as a special boon for the most meritorious.
Thus were formed within the bosom of the great Roman Empire various classes of communities, of different grades of civil and political condition; but every one among them, which acquired any portion of Roman rights, obtained the common designation of a municipium. Each municipium retained entire authority over everything relating to (1) the exercise of its religion; (2) the administration of its local finances, the election of its magistrates, the maintenance of its edifices and public works; (3) its internal police. The regulation of these matters appertained generally to the curies or governing bodies, sometimes to the mass of the people. Accordingly, the municipes, or citizens of such a community, possessed, as Cicero proclaims, two countries, the one natural, the other political—the one actual, the other privilegial. Thus, he continues, we regard as our fatherland both the spot where we were born, and that which has adopted us; but that one of the two has the strongest claims upon our affection which, under the name of “commonwealth,” constitutes our own country pre-eminently; it is for that fatherland that we ought to be ready to die. “I shall never deny,” he says, “Arpinum, as my country; but Rome will be always more peculiarly such; for Rome comprehends Arpinum.”
While such were the distinctions introduced by the republic among those whom she adopted as her own citizens, she did not omit to classify also the condition and privileges of the various nations of Latium and Italy which fell successively under her sway.