SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  Tiberius Gracchus

  In 137 BCE Tiberius Gracchus – a grandson of Scipio Africanus, a brother-in-law of Aemilianus, and a war hero at the siege of Carthage, where he had been the first to scale the enemy wall – was travelling north from Rome to join the legions in Spain. As he rode through Etruria, he was shocked at the state of the countryside, for the land was being worked and the flocks tended by foreign slaves on industrial-scale estates; the small, peasant farmers, the traditional backbone of Italian agriculture, had disappeared. According to a pamphlet written by his younger brother Gaius, quoted in a much later biography, this was the moment when Tiberius first became committed to reform. As he later put it to the Roman people, many of the men who fought Rome’s wars ‘are called masters of the world but have not a patch of earth to call their own’. To him, that was not fair.

  How far the smallholders really had disappeared from the land has puzzled modern historians much more than it did their ancient counterparts. It is not difficult to see how an agricultural revolution of that kind might have been a logical consequence of Roman warfare and expansion. During the war against Hannibal, at the end of the third century BCE, rival armies had tramped up and down the Italian peninsula for a couple of decades, with devastating effects on the farmland. The demands of service with the army overseas removed manpower from the agricultural workforce for years on end, leaving family farms without essential labour. Both of these factors could have made small-holders particularly vulnerable to failure, bankruptcy or buy-outs by the rich, who used the wealth they acquired from overseas conquest to build up vast land holdings, worked as agricultural ranches by the glut of slave labour. One modern historian echoed the sentiments of Tiberius when he grimly summed this up: whatever booty they came home with, many ordinary soldiers had been in effect ‘fighting for their own displacement’. A good proportion of them would have drifted to Rome or other towns in search of a living, so swelling the urban underclass.

  It is a plausible scenario. But there is not much hard evidence to back it up. Leaving aside the propagandist tone of Tiberius’ eye-opening journey through Etruria (had he not travelled 40 miles north before?), there are few archaeological traces of the new-style ranches he reported and considerable evidence, on the contrary, for the widespread survival of small-scale farms. It is not even certain that either war damage or the absence of young unmarried men abroad would have had the devastating, long-term effect that is often imagined. Most agricultural land recovers quickly from that kind of trauma, and there would have been plenty of other family members to recruit to the workforce; and even if not, a few slave labourers would have been within the means of even relatively humble farmers. In fact, many historians now think that, if his motives were sincere, Tiberius seriously misread the situation.

  Whatever the economic truth, however, he certainly saw the problem in terms of the displacement of the poor from farming land. So did the poor themselves, if the story of their graffiti campaign in Rome urging him to restore ‘land to the poor’ is true. And it was this problem that Tiberius determined to solve when he was elected a tribune of the people for 133 BCE. He straight away introduced a law to the Plebeian Assembly to reinstate smallholders by distributing plots of Roman ‘public land’ to the poor. This was part of the territory that Romans had seized in their takeover of Italy. In theory it was open to a wide range of users, but in practice rich Romans and rich Italians had grabbed much of it and turned it, to all intents and purposes, into their private property. Tiberius proposed to restrict their holdings to a maximum of 500 iugera (roughly 120 hectares) each, claiming that this was the old legal limit, and to parcel out the rest in small units to the dispossessed. It was a typical style of Roman reform, justifying radical action as a return to past practice.

  The proposal prompted a series of increasingly bitter controversies. First, when one of his fellow tribunes, Marcus Octavius, repeatedly tried to veto it (some right of veto had been given to these ‘people’s representatives’ centuries earlier), Tiberius rode roughshod over the objection and had the people vote his opponent out of office. This enabled the law to pass, and a board of three commissioners was established, a rather cosy group comprising Tiberius, his brother and his father-in-law, to oversee the reassigning of land. Next, when the senate, whose interests generally lay with the rich, refused to make anything more than a nugatory grant of cash to fund the operation (a blocking device well known in modern political disputes), Tiberius again turned to the people and persuaded them to vote to divert a recent state windfall to finance the commission.

  By a convenient coincidence, King Attalus III of Pergamum had died in 133 BCE, and – combining a realistic assessment of Roman power in the eastern Mediterranean with a shrewd defence against assassination by rivals at home – he had made ‘the Roman people’ the heir to his property and large kingdom in what is now Turkey. This inheritance provided all the money needed for the commission’s complex job of investigating, measuring and surveying, selecting new tenants, and setting them up with the basic tools of the farming trade. Finally, when Tiberius found himself increasingly attacked, and even accused of aiming at kingship (one nasty rumour hinted that he had been eyeing up the royal diadem and purple robes of Attalus), he decided to defend his position by standing for election as tribune again the following year; for as an officeholder he would be immune from prosecution. This was too much for some of his anxious opponents, and a posse of them, senators and assorted thugs, with improvised weapons and no official authority whatsoever, interrupted the elections.

  Roman elections were time-consuming affairs. In the Plebeian Assembly, which chose the tribunes, the electorate came together in a single place, and the tribal groups voted in turn, each man – of many thousands – casting his vote individually, one after the other. Sometimes more than a day was needed to complete the process. In 133 BCE, the votes for the next year’s tribunes were slowly being delivered on the Capitoline Hill when the posse invaded. A battle followed, in which Tiberius was bludgeoned to death with a chair leg. The man behind the lynch mob was his cousin Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio, an ex-consul and the head of one of the main groups of Roman priests, the pontifices. He is said to have entered this deadly brawl having drawn his toga over his head, as Roman priests usually did when sacrificing animals to the gods. He was trying, presumably, to make the murder look like a religious act.

  The death of Tiberius did not stop the work of redistributing the land. A replacement was found for him on the commission, and its activity over the next few years can still be traced in a series of boundary stones marking the intersections of the new property units, each one blazoning the names of the commissioners responsible. But there were more casualties too, on both sides. Some of the Gracchan supporters were put on trial in a special court established by the senate (on what charge is not clear), and at least one was put to death by being tied up in a sack with poisonous snakes – most likely an ingenious piece of invented tradition masquerading as a horrible, archaic Roman punishment. Scipio Nasica was quickly packed off on a convenient delegation to Pergamum, where he died the next year. Scipio Aemilianus, whose reaction to the news of the murder of Tiberius had been to quote another line of Homer, to the effect that he had brought it on himself, returned to Italy from fighting in Spain to take up the cause of those rich Italian allies who were being ejected from public land. He was found dead in his bed in 129 BCE, on the very morning when he was due to give a speech on their behalf. Unexplained deaths – and there were many of them – provoked Roman suspicion. In both these cases there were rumours of foul play. Some Romans, as they often did when no evidence was available, alleged malign female influence behind the scenes: the triumphant conqueror of Carthage, they claimed, had been the victim of a tawdry domestic murder by his wife and mother-in-law, who were determined that he should not undo the work of Tiberius Gracchus, their brother and son.

  36. This Roman silver coin of the late second century BCE shows the pr
ocedures at the time for voting in the assemblies, by secret ballot. The man on the right is putting his voting tablet in the ballot box, from a raised plank, or ‘bridge’ (pons). On the left, another man is stepping up to the bridge, and taking his tablet from the assistant underneath. ‘Nerva’ written above the scene is the name of the man responsible for minting the coin.

  Why was Tiberius’ land reform so bitterly contested? All kinds of self-interest were no doubt at work. Some observers at the time, and since, claimed that far from being genuinely concerned with the plight of the poor, Tiberius was driven by a grudge against the senate, which had humiliatingly refused to ratify a treaty he had negotiated when he was serving in Spain. Many of the wealthy must have resented losing land that they had long treated as part of their private estates, while those who were set to benefit from the distribution eagerly supported the reform. In fact, many flooded into the city from outlying areas of Roman territory specially to vote for it. But there was more to the conflict than that.

  The clash in 133 BCE revealed dramatically different views of the power of the people. When Tiberius persuaded them to vote out of office the tribune who opposed him, his argument went along the lines of ‘if the people’s tribune no longer does what the people want, then he should be deposed’. That raised an issue still familiar in modern electoral systems. Are Members of Parliament, for example, to be seen as delegates of the voters, bound to follow the will of their electorate? Or are they representatives, elected to exercise their own judgement in the changing circumstances of government? This was the first time, so far as we know, that this question had been explicitly raised in Rome, and it was no more easily answered then than it is now. For some, Tiberius’ actions vindicated the rights of the people; for others they undermined the rights of a properly elected official.

  Similar dilemmas were at the bottom of the dispute over whether Tiberius should be re-elected as a tribune. Holding an office for two consecutive years, back to back, was not unprecedented, but some certainly thought it signalled a dangerous build-up of individual power and was another hint of monarchical ambitions. Others claimed that the Roman people had the right to elect whomsoever they wanted, no matter what the electoral conventions were. What is more, if Attalus had left his kingdom to ‘the Roman people’ (populus Romanus), was it not up to them, rather than the senate, to determine how the bequest was used? Should not the profits of empire benefit the poor as well as the rich?

  Scipio Nasica, with his thugs, cudgels and chair legs, does not come across as an attractive character, and the surname Vespillo (or ‘Undertaker’) given to the senator who saw to the disposal of the bodies in the Tiber is an uncomfortable joke by any standards, ancient or modern. But their argument with Tiberius was a fundamental one, which framed Roman political debate for the rest of the Republic. Cicero, looking back from the middle of the next century, could present 133 BCE as a decisive year precisely because it opened up a major fault line in Roman politics and society that was not closed again during his lifetime: ‘The death of Tiberius Gracchus,’ he wrote, ‘and even before that the whole rationale behind his tribunate, divided a united people into two distinct groups [partes].’

  This is a rhetorical oversimplification. The idea that there had been a calm consensus at Rome between rich and poor until Tiberius Gracchus shattered it is at best a nostalgic fiction. It seems likely, from what is known of the political debates in the decade or so before 133 BCE (which is not much), that others had already asserted the rights of the people along much the same lines. In 139 BCE, for example, one radical tribune had introduced a law to ensure that Roman elections were conducted by secret ballot. There is little evidence to help flesh out the man behind this or to throw light on the opposition it must have aroused – though Cicero gives a hint when he says that ‘everyone knows that the ballot law robbed the aristocrats of all their influence’ and describes the proposer as ‘a filthy nobody’. But it was a milestone reform and a fundamental guarantee of political freedom for all citizens, and one that was unknown in elections in the classical Greek world, democratic or not.

  Nevertheless, it was the events of 133 BCE that crystallised the opposition between those who championed the rights, liberty and benefits of the people and those who, to put it in their own terms, thought it prudent for the state to be guided by the experience and wisdom of the ‘best men’ (optimi), who in practice were more or less synonymous with the rich. Cicero uses the word partes for these two groups (populares and optimates, as they were sometimes called), but they were not parties in the modern sense: they had no members, official leaders or agreed manifestos. They represented two sharply divergent views of the aims and methods of government, which were repeatedly to clash for almost a hundred years.

  Gaius Gracchus

  In one of the Roman world’s most quoted jibes, the satirist Juvenal, writing at the end of the first century CE, turned his scorn on the ‘mob of Remus’, which – he claimed – wanted just two things: ‘bread and circuses’ (panem et circenses). As the currency of that phrase even now shows, it was a brilliant dismissal of the limited horizons of the urban rabble, presented here as if they were the descendants of the murdered twin: they cared for nothing but the chariot racing and food handouts with which the emperors had bribed, and effectively depoliticised, them. It was also a cynical misrepresentation of the Roman tradition of providing staple food for the people at state expense, which originated with Tiberius’ younger brother Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, a tribune of the people in two consecutive years, 123 and 122 BCE.

  Gaius did not introduce a ‘corn dole’. To be precise, he successfully proposed a law to the Plebeian Assembly establishing that the state should sell a certain quantity of grain each month at a subsidised, fixed price to individual citizens in the city. Even so, the scale and ambition of this initiative were enormous. And Gaius seems to have planned the considerable infrastructure needed to support it: the public purchasing, distribution facilities and some form of identity checking (how otherwise did you restrict it to citizens?), as well as storage in new public warehouses built by the Tiber and rented lock-up space in others. How the whole operation was staffed and organised day to day is not known for certain. Public officials at Rome were given only the skeletal support of a few scribes, messengers and bodyguards. So, as with most of the state’s responsibilities – right down to such tiny specialist jobs as repainting the face of the statue of the god Jupiter in his temple overlooking the city from the Capitoline Hill – much of the work of managing and distributing the grain was presumably in the hands of private contractors, who made money out of delivering public services.

  Gaius’ initiative came partly out of concern for the poor in the city. In good years the crops of Sicily and Sardinia would have been more or less sufficient to feed a quarter of a million people – a reasonable, though slightly conservative, estimate for the population of Rome in the later second century BCE. But ancient Mediterranean harvests fluctuated dramatically, and prices sometimes went far beyond what many ordinary Romans – shopkeepers, craftsmen, day labourers – could afford. Even before Gaius, the state had sometimes taken preemptive measures to avoid famine in the city. One revealing inscription found in Thessaly in northern Greece records the visit of a Roman official in 129 BCE. He had come, cap in hand, ‘because the situation in his country at the present time is one of dearth’, and he went away with the promise of more than 3,000 tonnes of wheat and some very complicated transportation arrangements in place.

  Charitable aims, however, were not the only thing in Gaius’ mind, nor even the hard-headed logic, sometimes in evidence at Rome, that a hungry populace was a dangerous one. His plan also had an underlying political agenda about the sharing of the state’s resources. That certainly is the point of a reported exchange between Gaius and one of his most implacable opponents, the wealthy ex-consul Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi (his last name, appropriately enough, means ‘stingy’). After the law had been passed, Gaius spotted Fru
gi standing in line for his allocation of grain and asked him why he was there, since he so disapproved of the measure. ‘I’m not keen, Gracchus,’ he replied, ‘on you getting the idea of sharing out my property man by man, but if that’s what you’re going to do, I’ll take my cut.’ He was presumably turning Gaius’ rhetoric back on him. The debate was about who had a claim on the property of the state and where the boundary lay between private and public wealth.

  The distribution of cheap grain was Gaius’ most influential reform. Though it was amended and occasionally suspended over the decades that followed, its basic principle lasted for centuries: Rome was the only place in the ancient Mediterranean where the state took responsibility for the regular basic food supplies of its citizens. The Greek world, by contrast, had usually relied on occasional handouts in times of shortage, or sporadic displays of generosity on the part of the rich. But food distributions were only one of Gaius’ many innovations.

  Unlike all earlier Roman reformers, Gaius sponsored not just a single initiative but a dozen or so. He was the first politician in the city, leaving aside the mythical founding fathers, to have an extensive and coherent programme, with measures that covered such things as the right of appeal against the death penalty, the outlawing of bribery and a much more ambitious scheme of land distribution than Tiberius had ever proposed. This involved exporting surplus citizens en masse to ‘colonies’ not only in Italy but also, for the first time, overseas. Just a couple of decades after it had been razed and cursed, Carthage was earmarked as a new town to be resettled. But Roman memory was not so short, and this particular project was soon cancelled, even though some settlers had already emigrated there. It is impossible now to list all the legislation that Gaius proposed in just two years, still less to determine precisely what its terms and aims were. Apart from a substantial section of the text of a law governing the behaviour of Roman officials abroad and providing means of redress to those whom they abused (which we shall explore in the next chapter), the surviving evidence comes largely in the form of passing asides or much later reconstructions. But it is the range that is the key. To Gaius’ opponents, that smacked dangerously of a bid for personal power. The programme overall certainly seems to have added up to a systematic attempt to reconfigure the relationship between the people and the senate.