Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

by Baker, Simon

  The new office would prove crucial to the history of the republic. It would radically change the balance of power between the political élite of the Senate and the people. Ten tribunes were elected annually by the plebs alone, and it was their responsibility to protect the plebs from abuse of power at the hands of the office holders, especially the consuls and praetors in possession of imperium. If need be, a tribune was empowered to intervene physically to defend a citizen who was being wrongfully punished or oppressed, and to bring help. It is important to stress, however, that whereas today the roles and jobs of figures in a modern state are highly stratified and specialized, in ancient Rome they were entwined in one person. A consul was at once a military commander, a prime minister, a chancellor and a bishop, while a tribune combined the roles of a Member of Parliament or a US senator with defence lawyer, policeman and trade union representative. Although the new office was radical in origin, later in the history of republic it would come to be held by the lackeys of the noble élite. Nonetheless, by the mid-fourth century BC the political voice of the plebs had found its teeth. Now its bark was recognized too.

  The second crucial consequence of the plebs’ great strike was the strengthening of their tribal assemblies. Before the secession the dominant assembly of the people was called the Assembly of the Centuries, but it was not very democratic. It was organized around military units known as ‘centuries’, and because military obligations were dictated by a citizen’s wealth, the assembly was dominated by the rich. A relatively small number of citizens from the highest class of soldier controlled over half of the 193 centuries, while the mass of the poorest citizens held only one. Considering that each century had one vote, the political voice of the poorer citizens amounted to a whisper.

  After the conflict of the orders, however, the tribal assemblies became more powerful. They were classified according to regional districts, known as ‘tribes’. Each tribe thus contained both rich and poor. Thanks to the electoral college system of ‘one tribe, one vote’, these assemblies were altogether more representative. As Rome increased its rural territory throughout Italy, the city’s original four tribes expanded accordingly to thirty-five. A new assembly, the Assembly of the Tribes, was called by a high-ranking magistrate from the élite (a consul, for example) and could be attended by patricians as well as plebeians. The Plebeian Assembly, however, was convened by a tribune of the people, attended only by plebs and became a standard place for passing laws. At first the votes of these popular assemblies were nothing more than plebiscites – a way for the élite to gauge the majority opinion of the Roman citizens. By 287 BC, however, the decisions of both tribal assemblies, whether expressed in elections or in the passage of bills, had the force of law and were binding on the entire Roman people.

  In both the office of tribune and the newly empowered popular assemblies the Roman republic had grown the great paradox of its ‘two heads’: those of the Senate (the collective voice of the aristocratic and moneyed political élite) and the Roman people. A system that mixed an aristocratic élite with the fundamental principle that power also lies in the hands of the people seems puzzling today. In the ancient world, however, the partnership was potent. It was the concept hammered into the initials ‘SPQR’ (Senatus Populusque Romanus – the Senate and Roman People), the logo emblazoned on the Roman military standards and the slogan that would, in time, authorize Rome’s march into the domains of its future empire. That march had begun before the conflict of the orders, in the fifth century BC. It was the start of an extraordinarily aggressive period of expansion. One of the greatest problems of ancient history is explaining exactly why it happened.

  WINNING ITALY

  Where that expansion was aimed is certainly clear. Between 500 and 275 BC, in piecemeal fashion and through a combination of war and diplomacy, the citizen armies of the Roman republic brought first Latium and then the rest of the Italian peninsula under its control. The original motivation for war was perhaps land. With the peasant holdings of most Roman citizens too small to sustain a large family, the Romans of the early republic were on the lookout for new territory. But the first concerted military campaigns were driven perhaps more by the defence of land rather than its acquisition. In 493 BC Rome joined an alliance of Latin communities, known as the Latin League, to defend their cherished region of Latium. It was being invaded by the hill tribes of central Italy: the Volsci, the Sabines and the Aequi. This war, provoked by aggression from outside Rome, would provide the republic with a very convenient and useful theme for all future wars in Italy and beyond. To ensure the favour of the gods in their military campaigns, the Romans would look for instances to justify taking action in ‘self-defence’. Indeed, the legitimating mythology of the ‘just war’ was fostered by the elaborate religious ceremonies with which Romans declared hostilities. These eccentric demonstrations of their attentiveness to justice were rituals with which Rome’s Italian neighbours would become very familiar.

  Once the assaults of the hill tribes had been checked, Rome and its Latin allies turned their attention to the region of Etruria to the north. Perhaps because the family trees of the leading Romans had Etruscan roots, there was no shortage of old friendships and feuds with which to justify both alliances and declarations of war. Some Etruscan cities promptly came to terms with Rome; others were defeated in battle and annexed. Accused of arrogance by its Latin partners for claiming to have carried the lion’s share of the fighting, Rome turned on them next. The increasingly powerful city-state went to war with the Latin League in 340 BC, defeated it, and then dismantled the league two years later. Next in line were the Samnites. Perhaps Rome’s greatest Italian adversaries, the Samnites were a powerful and organized confederation to the south of Latium. They proved so hardy that the name ‘Samnite’ would later be accorded to one of the four types of gladiator in the Roman arena. In three wars that endured until 290 BC, and in which Rome had mixed success, huge swathes of Samnite territory eventually came under its control. The once diminutive city-state was now pushing at the borders of the Greek colonies at the foot of Italy.

  The fruits of all these wars of conquest were varied. Sometimes the territory won became a Roman colony: the land was annexed, divided up and allotted to Roman citizens. Sometimes Rome came to an alliance with autonomous Italian communities, its basis being the agreement to come to each other’s military aid. Sometimes Rome conferred the privilege of citizenship (either with or without the right to vote), and in this instance, while these communities had two citizenships at once, they had also become absorbed into the Roman commonwealth. The language, customs and culture of the Romans were thus slowly spread throughout Italy.

  All these forms of conquest demanded one thing: loyalty to Rome. That loyalty would create Rome’s greatest asset in building an empire beyond the perimeters of Italy – an endless supply of citizens and allies, and hence an endless supply of military manpower. In analysing the superior power of the Roman citizen militia over other armies of the Mediterranean, the Greek historian Polybius wrote: ‘. . . even if the Romans have suffered a defeat at first, they renew the war with undiminished forces. . . Since the Romans are fighting for country and children, it is impossible for them to relax the fury of their struggle; they resist with obstinate resolution until they have overcome their enemies.’4

  In the fire of these wars of conquest, the military mindset and culture of the resilient Roman peasant-soldier was forged. The Roman consuls who wielded the power of imperium and led the campaigns were on a quest for glory, seeking to bring honour to the ancient family names of their more humble ancestors, the shepherds and farmers of Etruria and Latium. Above all, the character of the tough, unwavering peasant, in whose work there was no quarter for comfort or self-indulgence, was reflected in the Roman attitude to these wars. As they liked to see it, the conflicts were undertaken with pious respect for the gods, with integrity, honour and, above all, justice.

  The war that completed Roman control of Italy in the s
outh was sparked in 280 BC. The Greek city of Tarentum, on the heel of Italy, had sent out messages of defiance towards Rome. Indeed, fearing Roman expansion into their territory, the Greeks of Tarentum had called for military aid from overseas, and Pyrrhus, the Greek king of Epirus (in northern Greece) had agreed to help them. He had ideas for a western Greek empire of his own.

  Furious at this impertinent show of disrespect from Tarentum, Rome wanted reparation for the so-called ‘insults’ levelled at it. Here was another opportunity to act in ‘self-defence’ and to requite what Rome considered its due. A new and very real Trojan War was beckoning. It was not now between the mythical Trojan hero Aeneas and the legendary Greek kings Agamemnon and Menelaus. This time it pitted their descendants, the ‘Trojan’ Romans against the Greek army of King Pyrrhus.

  Tarentum was too far away from Rome for the meticulous rituals with which Roman priests now traditionally initiated hostilities. There was, for example, no time for the arrival of a herald-priest on the enemy’s frontier. Here such a man would bind his head with wool, call upon Jupiter as his witness that he came lawfully and piously, and announce that the ‘guilty’ party had thirty-three days to surrender.5 Neither was there time to ensure the favour of the gods by throwing a spear into the designated enemy’s territory. The Romans found an expedient solution to this problem, however. They forced a prisoner seized from Pyrrhus’s army to buy a small plot of land in Rome and the priests threw their symbolic spear into that.

  Pyrrhus invaded Italy at the start of the campaigning season in 280 BC. In two brutal and bloody battles he successfully defeated the Romans. The Greek king, though, having seen so many of his soldiers slaughtered in achieving this success, was said to have remarked, ‘With another victory like this, we will be finished!’ (Hence our modern phrase ‘pyrrhic victory’.) By 275 BC, however, the Romans had turned their fortunes around. They defeated Pyrrhus at Beneventum near Naples, expelled his invading army, and were now free to consolidate their grasp over the rest of southern Italy.

  With the ambitious Greek king Pyrrhus defeated, however, the Mediterranean world outside Italy had been forced to sit up and take notice. There was a new player in the region. Breaking over their seven hills, the waves of Aeneas’s Romans were now lapping at foreign shores. The power of Rome had arrived.

  I

  REVOLUTION

  In 154 BC the grand public funeral of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, a hero of the Roman republic, took place. His corpse was carried into the Forum dressed in the clothes of a triumphant general: the purple toga was covered in silver stars and accompanied by the rods and axes of office that befitted his exceptional career. The noblemen in the procession, unshaven as a mark of respect, wore black and their heads were veiled; the women beat their breasts, tore at their dishevelled hair and cut their cheeks with their fingernails in grief. There were also professional mourners in attendance, as well as dancers and mime artists imitating the dead man with exaggerated gestures. The most haunting feature of many men in the procession, however, was the funeral mask they wore, each one moulded from beeswax to an eerie likeness of Gracchus and his ancestors, each one faithful in colour and shape. In this way the men who wore them bore a striking family resemblance to the dead man now propped up on the speaker’s platform of the Forum before the onlooking rich and poor of Rome.

  As the ancestral representatives of the family took their ivory seats on the platform, one of them delivered an oration celebrating the dead man’s achievements in life. There was much to commemorate. Gracchus had twice achieved the office of consul, the highest post in the republic, as well as the distinguished and influential office of former consuls, that of censor. As a soldier, he had led successful campaigns on behalf of the republic in Spain and Sardinia. For both of these he had been awarded a triumph, the name given to the famous procession in which a conquering general crossed the sacred limits of the city and returned to civilian life in Rome. Yet despite the achievements that had covered his name in glory, Gracchus was not reputed to be someone who looked to personal success. His funeral was a public celebration of one virtue above all. The Romans liked to think of him as having put the service of the republic before his own ambitions, for making the welfare of the Roman people his first and foremost guide. The funeral speech would therefore have had the same effect as the wax masks. It reminded the onlookers that ‘the glorious memory of brave men is continually renewed; the fame of those who have performed any noble deed is never allowed to die; and the renown of those who have done good service to their country becomes a matter of common knowledge to the multitude and part of the heritage of posterity’.1

  But the renewing of Gracchus’s achievements, both through the masks of his family and the speech in his memory, had another, more specific function. It served as a reminder for his sons, grandsons and subsequent descendants to live up to those achievements. The desire to honour the glory of one’s father by emulating his success in the service of the republic, whether in war, empire-building or politics, was among the key motivations of the Roman aristocratic élite. It is easy to imagine that nowhere did this desire burn more brightly than in the heart of a nine-year-old boy, Gracchus’s son, also named Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus.

  The boy would have stood alongside his mother and the leading aristocratic senators before the blazing pyre outside Rome; it was here that, after the public funeral orations, his father’s body would have been cremated. As he watched the ceremonies come to an end, the boy would have been instilled with the desire to endure hardship and even death to earn a eulogy similar to that accorded his father. He now carried the responsibility of upholding the paternal name and glory. It was a burden outstripped only by the obligation to uphold the prestige of another family: his mother Cornelia’s.

  Through both his mother and father, the young Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus was related to three of the great aristocratic dynasties of the Roman republic. Together, in the space of less than a hundred and fifty years, these families had led the way in turning the republic from its position as master of Italy to master of the entire Mediterranean. By the time of Gracchus the elder’s funeral, the Romans referred to that expanse of sea as mare nostrum (our sea) because of their undisputed dominion over it and the lands surrounding it.

  And yet this boy’s path in life would radically diverge from the pattern established in his family. The young Tiberius himself would have no grand funeral like his father’s: just twenty-two years later his mutilated corpse would be slung unceremoniously into the river Tiber. The men who would carry out his murder would not be foreign enemies of Rome on the battlefield, but the same aristocratic senators who had lined up behind him watching his father’s funeral pyre burn. For Tiberius’s short, controversial life intersected with a key turning point – a crisis – in the history of the Roman republic. This crisis centred on the question of who would benefit from the empire Rome had so quickly acquired – the rich or the poor? The aristocratic architects of Rome’s empire or the ordinary citizen-soldiers who had built it? It was a question that would lead to a soul-searching investigation into the nature of Rome’s empire and what the process of acquiring it had done to the moral character and values of Romans. Extraordinarily, this crisis would see the young Tiberius take not the side of his own family and the aristocratic élite, but the side of the poor.

  After the funeral the wax masks of the elder Gracchus and his ancestors were laid in a shrine in the family home. They would serve as an ‘inspiring spectacle for a young man of noble ambitions and virtuous aspirations. For can we conceive anyone to be unmoved by the sight of all the likenesses collected together of the men who have earned glory, all, as it were, living and breathing? What could be a more glorious spectacle?’2 Yet in 154 BC no one would have imagined what a revolutionary path the young Tiberius, in seeking to match the example represented by those masks, would take, or how it would change Rome for ever.

  The great convulsion in Roman history epitomized by Tiberius’s car
eer is a morality tale. In becoming a superpower, Rome, so it was said, abandoned the very values with which it had won its supremacy. At the pinnacle of its achievement, the virtues that had made the Roman republic so successful failed it and were lost for ever. To understand the significance of this turning point, however, one must begin with an account of how Rome reached it.

  CONQUEST OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

  The Greek historian Polybius, detained as a prisoner in Rome between 163 and 150 BC, wrote a history aimed at helping Romans to answer one question: how did Rome achieve supremacy over the Mediterranean in the space of just fifty-two years (219–167 BC)?3 Although Polybius’s work fed Roman myths and legends about this period in their history, this should not diminish the extraordinary success of Rome. The Romans’ mastery of the Mediterranean was so complete that by 167 BC the Senate was able to abolish direct taxation in Italy, replacing it with the riches that the republic received in revenue from its provinces abroad.

  The leading politicians in Rome who had achieved this feat were a small clique of aristocratic families. Although access to these families – through the practice of adoption, for example – was more open than the Romans liked to think, between 509 and 133 BC just twenty-six families were said to have provided three-quarters of those elected to the consulship, the highest annual office in the republic. A mere ten had provided half of them. The young Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus was related to the three interconnected families who had blazed a trail during the great period of Roman expansion: the Sempronii Gracchi through his father, and both the Cornelii Scipiones and the Aemilii Paulli through his mother (see family tree, page 48). By tracing a brief history of Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean, we can see how all the young Tiberius’s relatives spearheaded Rome’s empire-building abroad. This extraordinary story begins in North Africa and with the challenge posed by a rival.