SPQR

by Mary Beard

  How effectively this worked in practice is hard to know. Just over thirty prosecutions are recorded between the passage of the law in the 120s BCE and the case against Verres in 70 BCE, and almost half of those resulted in convictions. But these incomplete statistics are only part of the story. Realistically, even the promised assistance with a prosecution might not have encouraged victims to travel halfway across the Mediterranean to try to get redress, in an unfamiliar language and in the unfamiliar legal system of the ruling power. Besides, compensation was to be made only for financial loss, not for other forms of maltreatment (there was nothing for cruelty, abuse or rape, for example). Nonetheless, the law leaves no doubt that radical politicians such as Gaius were starting to be concerned with the wider world, and with the plight of the disadvantaged and disempowered not only among Roman citizens but also among the subjects of Rome’s empire.

  Senators under fire

  There were, however, more than purely humanitarian issues behind this compensation law. In line with much of the rest of his programme in the 120s BCE, Gaius was also attempting to police the activities of senators. His reform had as much to do with the internal politics of Rome as with the suffering of provincials abroad. According to the regulations, it was only senators and their sons who were liable for prosecution under the law, even though many other Romans overseas were in a position to enrich themselves at the expense of the locals. And the juries who tried them were to be drawn exclusively and specifically from a class of those who were not senators, from the ranks of the Roman ‘equestrians’, or ‘knights’ (equites).

  This was a technical but crucial distinction. The equites stood at the top of the Roman hierarchy of wealth, substantial property owners on a scale that set them apart from the vast majority of ordinary citizens, and they were often closely connected with senators, socially, culturally and by birth. They were a much larger group than the senators, many thousands by the end of the second century BCE, as against a few hundred senators. In fact, in strictly legal terms, senators were simply that subgroup of knights who had been elected to political office and so had entered the senate. But the interests of the two did not always coincide, and the equestrians were a far more diverse category. Among them were many wealthy men from the towns of Italy – their number increasing dramatically after the Social War – who would never have dreamt of standing for election at Rome, or men like Cicero’s influential friend Atticus, who chose to stay on the sidelines of politics. There were also many who were involved in the kind of financial and commercial activities from which senators were formally debarred. Although there were, as usual, several ways to circumvent it, a law of the late third century BCE prohibited senators from owning large trading ships, defined as those that held more than 300 amphorae.

  Some equestrians were involved in the potentially lucrative business of provincial taxation, thanks to another law of Gaius Gracchus. For it was he who first arranged that tax collecting in the new province of Asia should, like many other state responsibilities, be contracted out to private companies, often owned by equestrians. These contractors were known as publicani – ‘public service providers’ or ‘publicans’, as tax collectors are called in old translations of the New Testament, confusingly to modern readers. The system was simple, demanded little manpower on the part of the Roman state and provided a model for the tax arrangements in other provinces over the following decades (and was common in other early tax raising regimes). Periodic auctions of specific taxation rights in individual provinces took place at Rome. The company that bid the highest then collected the taxes, and anything it managed to rake in beyond the bid was its profit. To put it another way, the more the publicani could screw out of the provincials, the bigger their own take – and they were not liable to prosecution under Gaius’ compensation law. Romans had always made money out of their conquests and their empire, but increasingly there were explicitly, and even organised, commercial interests at stake.

  The compensation law drove a wedge between senators and equites. The original initiative combined the protection of Rome’s subjects with the control of senatorial (mis)conduct. By specifying a wholly equestrian jury, it aimed to ensure that there was no collusion possible between a senatorial defendant and a jury of his friends, and – just to be on the safe side – equestrians with senators in their close family were also forbidden to participate in these trials. But the upshot was to bring senators and equites into conflict and sometimes to catch in the crossfire the very provincials whom the law had been passed to protect. It was often alleged, for example, that far from acting as impartial assessors of senatorial corruption, the equestrian jurors were such partisan supporters of the tax contractors that they would routinely return a guilty verdict on any innocent provincial governor who had tried to confront the contractors’ depredations. One notorious case concerned a senator, convicted of extortion by a biased equestrian jury, who was so confident of his honourable record, reputation and popularity that he went into exile in the very province that was supposedly the scene of his crimes. There is a whiff of senatorial special pleading here. But even so, such stories point to a long-running controversy about who could be trusted to sit in judgement on Roman behaviour abroad: senators or equites? Over the decades following the passage of Gaius’ law, reformers of different political persuasions reassigned the juries back and forth between the two groups.

  This was still a live issue when Cicero prosecuted Verres in 70 BCE, and it gave that trial an extra political edge. Ten years earlier, Sulla, predictably, had handed over to senatorial jurors not only the compensation court but also a range of other criminal courts that had been established later to deal with such charges as treason, embezzlement and poisoning. By the time of the prosecution of Verres, the backlash against this was growing, and – in the written text at least – Cicero repeatedly urged the jury to convict the defendant partly to demonstrate that senators could be trusted with passing fair judgement on their peers. The plea came too late. Soon after the trial ended, new legislation, which set the pattern for the future, shared the juries between knights and senators. Verres’ trial was the last occasion in this extortion court when a jury of senators tried a fellow senator: another of its claims to fame.

  Rome for sale

  The alleged corruption, incompetence and snobbish exclusivity of leading senators were important topics in wide political debates throughout the last century of the Republic. These were the central theme of Sallust’s essay The War against Jugurtha, a devastating analysis of Rome’s long failure to deal with the North African ruler who from about 118 BCE – by a combination of dynastic murder, intrigue and indiscriminate massacre – had begun to extend his control along the Mediterranean coast of Africa. The essay is a virulently partisan account, written some seventy years after the war, hugely moralising, highly dramatised and, in modern terms, a partly fictionalised reconstruction. It is a loaded assault on senatorial privilege, venality and disdain from the pen of a ‘new man’ in the senate.

  Roman territory in North Africa in the late second century BCE was divided between the province of Africa (the area around the site of Carthage, directly administered in the new style by a Roman governor) and other regions that were still part of the old-style empire of obedience, including the nearby kingdom of Numidia. After one compliant Numidian king died in 118 BCE, there was a long power struggle between his nephew Jugurtha and a rival heir, which ended in 112 BCE with Jugurtha killing the rival, along with a large number of Roman and Italian traders who had the misfortune to be in the same town at the same time; they have usually been assumed to be entirely innocent victims, though Sallust’s account hints that they may have been acting more like an armed militia. It was a lesson in the instability of that old style of control, which was always vulnerable to disobedience from those assumed to be obedient and to the inside knowledge that allies acquired through long contact with Rome. In Jugurtha’s case, previous service with the army of Scipio Aemilianus in Spain, a
s the commander of an allied detachment of Numidian archers, gave him useful experience of Roman military tactics and useful connections on the Roman side.

  For years, Roman responses to Jugurtha’s activities ranged from cautious to ineffectual. The senate sent various deputations to Africa and tried in a rather desultory way to broker a deal between him and his rival. It was only after the massacre of the traders that Rome declared war, in 111 BCE, and dispatched an army, whose commander quickly stitched up a peace deal. Jugurtha was summoned to Rome but was promptly sent back home when it came to light that he had engineered the murder of a cousin in Italy for fear that he too might become a rival. Roman armies once again pursued him in Africa, with mixed success. By 107 BCE Jugurtha had been somewhat contained but was still on the loose.

  This lamentable record in North Africa raised big questions. Was the senate capable of running the empire and of protecting Rome’s interests overseas? If not, what kind of talent was required, and where could it be found? For several Roman observers, senatorial weakness for bribery was one major factor lying behind their failure: ‘Rome’s a city for sale and bound to fall as soon as it finds a buyer’, as Jugurtha was supposed to have quipped when he left the city. The general incompetence of the governing class was another. For Sallust, that incompetence was a consequence of their narrow elitism and their refusal to recognise talent outside their own small group. The exclusion of the plebeians from political office had long ago been broken down, but two hundred years later – so this argument went – the new mixed aristocracy of patricians and plebeians had become in practice almost as exclusive. The same families monopolised the highest offices and the most prestigious commands, for generation after generation, and were not keen to let competent ‘new men’ in. The senate was dominated by the ancient equivalent of the old boy network.

  Sallust’s essay highlights the story of Gaius Marius, a ‘new man’ and experienced soldier who served in Africa in the war against Jugurtha as the second in command to one of those aristocrats, Quintus Caecilius Metellus. When Marius, who had reached the office of praetor, decided in 108 BCE to go back to Rome to stand for election to the consulship, with his eye on a big military command, he asked Metellus for support. Metellus’ response, at least as Sallust scripted it, was a classic example of patronising snobbery. To become a praetor was quite good enough for a man of Marius’ background, he sneered; let him not think of overreaching himself. Sallust sums it up even more sharply in his War against Catiline: ‘Most of the aristocracy believed that the consulship had been almost polluted if some “new man” obtained it, however excellent he might be.’ Marius was angry but not put off. He returned to the city to stand for the consulship. Once he had been elected, to the post he would hold for an unprecedented seven times, a vote in the popular assembly transferred the command against Jugurtha to him.

  Sallust’s account cannot be taken entirely at face value. Jugurtha may have been adept at slipping money into senatorial purses – it was a conviction in the Roman courts for accepting bribes on a delegation to Africa that finally forced Gaius Gracchus’ murderer, Opimius, to retreat into exile. But Romans had a tendency to use bribery as a convenient excuse whenever war, elections or court verdicts did not go the way they hoped. Outright corruption of that kind was probably less common than they alleged. And, whatever the snobbery at the heart of the governing class, there was in practice more room for new, or newish, talent than Sallust’s angry assertions allow. Surviving lists of names, which by this period are largely accurate, suggest that about 20 per cent of consuls in the late second century BCE came from families whose extended network of relations had not produced a consul in the previous fifty years, if ever.

  Marius’ career had an enormous impact on the rest of Republican history, in ways he can hardly have planned. First, when he returned to Africa to take command against Jugurtha, he enrolled in his army any citizen who was prepared to volunteer. Up to then, except in emergencies, Roman soldiers had officially been recruited only from families with some property. On that basis, recruitment problems had been evident for some time and may have lain behind Tiberius Gracchus’ anxieties about the landless poor; for, if they had no land, they could not serve in the legions.

  By enrolling all comers, Marius cut through that, but in the process he created a dependent, quasi-professional Roman army, which destabilised domestic politics for eighty years or so. These new-style legions increasingly relied on their commanders not only for a share of the booty but also for a settlement package, preferably of land, at the end of their military service, which would give them some guarantee of making a living in the future. The effects of this were felt in many ways. The conflicts in the small town of Pompeii after Sulla foisted his veterans on the place in 80 BCE were only one of many cases of local clashes, exploitation and resentment. Where the land for these soldiers was to come from, and at whose expense, became a perennial problem. But it was the relationship created between individual generals and their troops that had the most drastic consequences. In essence, the soldiers exchanged absolute loyalty to their commander for the promise of a retirement package – in a trade-off that at best bypassed the interests of the state and at worst turned the legions into a new style of private militia focused entirely on the interests of their general. When the soldiers of Sulla, and later of Julius Caesar, followed their leader and invaded the city of Rome, it was partly because of the relationship between legions and commanders forged by Marius.

  Equally significant for the future was the role of the people in granting Marius his military commands. It was a vote of the assembly, proposed by a tribune and overturning the nomination of the senate, that put Marius in charge of the war against Jugurtha. This procedure had been used in one or two emergencies before. But in 108 BCE it came as a powerful assertion of the right of the people as a whole, rather than the senate, to decide who was to command Rome’s armies. No sooner had Marius secured Roman victory in Africa and returned to Rome with Jugurtha in chains than another general was sacked by popular vote, after suffering a terrible defeat at the hands of German invaders from across the Alps. In an atmosphere of panic, which included a rare repetition of state-sponsored human sacrifice in Rome, his command too was assigned to Marius – who proceeded to justify the people’s hopes and send the invaders packing.

  Marius came to a sad end. He was already almost seventy years old when a tribune tried to use a vote of the popular assembly to transfer one last military command to him; this time it was without success. For this was 88 BCE, the command was against King Mithradates, and the rival commander was Sulla, who marched on Rome to prevent any such transfer (see pp. 241–2). While Sulla was away in the East, Marius died, a few weeks into his seventh consulship, to which he had been elected as an ‘anti-Sullan’ candidate. Some claimed that in his deathbed hallucinations, he acted as if he had won the command against Mithradates and issued instructions to his carers as if they were soldiers going to battle. It was a pitiful story of a deluded old man, but the principle of popular control of appointments abroad that he had championed was often reasserted over the following decades. Assemblies of the people repeatedly voted vast resources to those they were persuaded could best undertake the defence, or expansion, of Rome’s empire. In effect, they voted autocrats into power, as the case of Pompey shows: Pompey the Great, as he called himself, but the Butcher to others.

  Pompey the Great

  Just four years after his prosecution of Verres, in 66 BCE Cicero addressed the Roman people in a public meeting on the security of the empire. Now a praetor, and with his eyes on the consulship, he was speaking in support of a proposal by a tribune to put Pompey in command of the long-running, on-and-off war against the same King Mithradates whom the Romans had been fighting, with mixed success, for more than twenty years. Pompey’s powers were to include almost complete control over a large swathe of the eastern Mediterranean for an unlimited period, with more than 40,000 troops at his disposal, and the right to
make peace or war and to arrange treaties more or less independently.

  43. The head of Mithradates VI on one of his silver coins. The sweeping hair, tossed back, is reminiscent – no doubt intentionally – of the distinctive hairstyle of Alexander the Great. In Mithradates’ conflict with Pompey ‘the Great’, two new, would-be Alexanders were fighting each other.

  Cicero may have been genuinely convinced that Mithradates was a real threat to Rome’s security and that Pompey was the only man for the job. From the heartland of his kingdom on the Black Sea the king had certainly scored occasional terrifying victories over Roman interests across the eastern Mediterranean, including in 88 BCE a notorious, and highly mythologised, massacre of tens of thousands of Romans and Italians on a single day. Exploiting what must have been a widespread hatred of Roman presence and offering added incentives (any slave who murdered a Roman master was to be freed), he coordinated simultaneous attacks on Roman residents in towns on the west coast of what is now Turkey, from Pergamum in the north to Caunos, the ‘fig capital’ of the Aegean, in the south, killing – in highly inflated Roman estimates – somewhere between 80,000 and 150,000 men, women and children. If even nearly on that scale, this was a cold, calculating and genocidal massacre, but it is hard to resist the feeling that by the 60s BCE, after the campaigns of Sulla in the 80s BCE, Mithradates might have been disruptive rather than dangerous and that he had become a convenient enemy in Roman political circles: a bogeyman to justify potentially lucrative campaigns and a stick with which to beat one’s rivals for their inactivity. Cicero also more or less admitted to having been leaned on by commercial interests in Rome, anxious about the effect of prolonged instability, real or imaginary, in the East on their private profits as much as on the finances of the state. The boundary between the two was carefully blurred.