SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  That is how his Greek biographer, ‘Plutarch’ (in full, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus), understood it more than two hundred years later when he singled out what must have been a flamboyant gesture by Gaius as he addressed his audiences in the Forum. Speakers before him had faced the senate house, with the audience squashed together in the small area known as the comitium just in front of it. Gaius flouted convention by strategically turning his back on the senate house when talking to the people, who now listened in the open piazza of the Forum. It was, Plutarch concedes, just a ‘slight deviation’ in practice, but it made a revolutionary point. Not only did it allow the participation of a much larger crowd; it signalled the freedom of the people from the controlling eye of the senate. Ancient writers, in fact, credit Gaius with a particularly sharp sense of the politics of place. Another story tells how, when there was to be a display of gladiators in the Forum (a favourite location before the Colosseum was built, two hundred years later), a number of high-ranking Romans put up temporary seating to hire out for profit. During the night before the show, Gaius had it all dismantled, so that the ordinary people would have plenty of space to watch, without paying.

  37. Angelica Kauffmann’s painting of ‘Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi’, with her young sons (1785). Cornelia is one of the few mothers in Rome credited with a powerful influence on her children’s public career. She was reputed to dress less flashily than many women at the time. ‘My children are my jewels’ she used to say. Here Kauffmann imagines her presenting Tiberius and Gaius (on the left) to a female friend.

  Unlike his elder brother, Gaius somehow succeeded in being elected tribune twice. But, in murky circumstances, he failed to be elected again for 121 BCE. In that year he resisted the efforts of the consul Lucius Opimius, a diehard who became something of a hero to the conservatives, to cancel much of his legislation. In the process he was killed, or he killed himself to forestall murder, by an armed gang under Opimius’ command. The violence was not one-sided. It had broken out after one of the consul’s attendants – apparently going to and fro with the innards from some animals that had just been sacrificed, which added a macabre touch to the scene – shouted some casual abuse at Gaius’ supporters (‘Let the decent guys pass, you tossers’) and made an even ruder gesture. They turned on him and stabbed him to death with their writing styluses, a clear sign that they were not already armed, that they were a literate group, but that they were not merely innocent victims. In response, the senate passed a decree urging the consuls ‘to make sure that the state should come to no harm’, the same emergency powers act as was later passed during Cicero’s clash with Catiline in 63 BCE. Opimius took the cue, gathered together an amateur militia of his supporters and put some 3,000 Gracchans to death, either on the spot or later in an impromptu court. It established a dubious and deadly precedent.

  For this was the first occasion of several over the next hundred years when this decree was used to confront various crises, from civil disorder to alleged treason. It may have been devised as an attempt to put some kind of regulatory framework on the use of official force. Rome at this period had no police of any kind and hardly any resources for controlling violence beyond what individual powerful men could scratch together. The instruction ‘to make sure that the state should come to no harm’ could in theory have been intended to draw a line between the unauthorised actions of a Scipio Nasica and those sanctioned by the senate. In practice, it was a lynch mob’s charter, a partisan excuse to suspend civil liberties and a legal fig leaf for premeditated violence against radical reformers. It is, for example, hard to believe that the ‘Cretan archers’ who joined Opimius’ local supporters were on hand purely by chance. But the decree was always controversial and always liable to rebound, as Cicero discovered. Opimius was duly put on trial, and though he was acquitted, his reputation never entirely recovered. When he had the nerve, or naivety, to celebrate his suppression of the Gracchans by lavishly restoring the temple of the goddess Concord (‘Harmony’) in the Forum, some realist with a chisel summed up the whole murderous debacle by carving across the façade the words ‘An act of senseless Discord produces a Temple of Concord’.

  Citizens and allies at war

  Shortly before Gaius’ revolutionary reforms, in the mid 120s BCE a Roman consul was travelling through Italy with his wife and came to the small town of Teanum (modern Teano, about 100 miles south of Rome). The lady decided she wanted to use the baths there usually reserved for men, so the mayor had them prepared for her and the regular bathers thrown out. But she complained that the facilities were neither ready in time nor clean enough. ‘So a stake was set up in the forum, and Teanum’s mayor, the most distinguished man in the town, was taken and tied to it. His clothes were stripped off and he was beaten with sticks.’

  This story has come down to us because it was told in a speech by Gaius Gracchus which was quoted verbatim by a literary scholar of the second century CE interested in analysing his oratorical style. It was a shocking example of Roman abuse of power, cited in support of yet another of Gaius’ campaigns – to extend Roman citizenship more widely in Italy. He was not the first to suggest this. His proposal was part of a growing controversy about the status of Rome’s allies and the Latin communities in Italy. It ended with many of the allies going to war on Rome in the Social War, one of the deadliest and most puzzling conflicts in Roman history. The puzzle turns largely on what the aims of the allies were. Did they resort to violence to force Rome to grant them full Roman citizenship? Or were they trying to shake themselves free of Rome? Did they want in or out?

  The relations between Rome and the other Italians had developed in different directions since the third century BCE. The allies had certainly reaped handsome rewards from their joint campaigns with Rome, in the form of the booty that came with victory and the commercial opportunities that followed. One family in the little town of Fregellae, technically a Latin colony 60 miles south of Rome, was proud enough of these campaigns to decorate their house with terracotta friezes depicting the distant battles in which some of them had served. On a grander scale, the spectacular architectural development of many Italian towns provides concrete evidence of the allies’ profit. At Praeneste, for example, just over 20 miles from Rome, a vast new sanctuary of the goddess Fortune was built, a masterpiece of display architecture – with a theatre, terracing, porticoes and colonnades – to rival anything anywhere else in the Mediterranean. It is hardly a coincidence that the names of several families from this town are found among those of the Roman and Italian traders on the Aegean island of Delos, one of the biggest commercial centres at the time, and a hub of the slave trade.

  38. The huge architectural developments in late second-century BCE Praeneste were built into the later Renaissance palace, which still retains the basic shape of the ancient sanctuary. The lower ramps and terracing are still clearly visible.

  39. A reconstruction of the ancient sanctuary at Praeneste. From this it is clear that the semi-circular shape of the palace at the upper level reflects that of the underlying temple of the goddess Fortune. Interestingly, this was built more than half a century before Pompey’s Theatre (Fig. 44), when there was nothing on this grand scale in Rome itself.

  To outsiders in places such as Delos there was precious little difference between ‘Romans’ and ‘Italians’, and the terms were used more or less interchangeably to refer to both. Even in Italy the boundaries were becoming blurred or eroded. By the early second century BCE, all those who had been ‘citizens without the vote’ had gained the vote. At some point before the Social War, the Romans may have agreed that anyone who had held public office in a community with Latin status should be eligible for full Roman citizenship. In practice, a blind eye was often turned to Italians who simply claimed citizenship or got away with formally enrolling themselves at a Roman census.

  Yet this kind of closer integration was only one side of it. Gaius’ story of the Italian mayor is just one of a series of causes célèbres in
which individual Romans, on a scale from tactless to cruel, were said to have hurt or humiliated prominent members of the allied communities. Another consul reputedly had a group of local dignitaries stripped and flogged because of some slip-up with his supply arrangements. True or not (and all of them come ultimately from uncorroborated attacks by Romans on other Romans), these anecdotes suggest an atmosphere of recrimination, bitterness and poisonous gossip, which was further fuelled by some high-handed actions on the part of the Roman state and a sense of political exclusion, and second-class status, on the part of leading allies. The senate began to take it for granted that it could lay down the law for the whole of Italy. Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform, popular as it might have been to poor Romans, was a provocation to rich Italians whose ‘public land’ was removed, while excluding poor Italians from the distributions. The close personal relationships that some of the Italian elite had with leading Romans (how else did they enlist Scipio Aemilianus’ help against Tiberius’ land reform?) did not make up for the fact that they had no formal stake in Roman politics or decision-making.

  In the 120s BCE, the ‘Italian question’ became increasingly divisive and provoked bouts of violent conflict. In 125 BCE the people of Fregellae attempted to break away from Rome but were crushed by a Roman army under the same Lucius Opimius who a few years later eliminated Gaius Gracchus. The remains of the friezes that had once proudly celebrated those joint campaigns were unearthed 2,000 years later from the wreckage of Fregellae’s destruction. At the same time, in Rome, fears about outsiders flooding into the city were whipped up in a way familiar from many modern campaigns of xenophobia. One of Gaius’ opponents, addressing a contio, or public meeting, conjured up visions of Romans being swamped. ‘Once you have given citizenship to the Latins,’ he urged his audience, ‘I mean, do you think there will be any space for you, like there is now, in a contio or at games or festivals? Don’t you realise they’ll take over everything?’ There were also occasionally formal attempts to repatriate immigrants or to prevent Italians from passing themselves off as full Roman citizens. It could prove dangerous to be too prominent a supporter of the Italian cause. In the autumn of 91 BCE the proposal of one Marcus Livius Drusus to extend citizen rights more widely in Italy ended with him being murdered at home, knifed as he was saying goodbye to a crowd of visitors.

  That murder heralded full-blown war on a terrible scale. The tipping point came at the end of 91 BCE, when a Roman envoy insulted the people of Asculum in central Italy. They responded by killing him and all the other Romans in the town. This brutal piece of ethnic cleansing set the tone for what followed, which was not far short of civil war: ‘It can be called a war against socii, to lessen the odium of it; the truth is it was a civil war, against citizens,’ as one Roman historian later summed it up. And it involved fighting throughout much of the peninsula, including at Pompeii, where the marks of the battering by Roman artillery in 89 BCE can be seen even now on the city walls. The Romans invested enormous forces to defeat the Italians and won victory at the cost of heavy losses and considerable panic. After one consul was killed in battle, there was such grief in Rome when his body was brought back that the senate decreed that, in future, casualties should be buried where they fell, a decision that some modern states have also taken. But most of the conflict was over relatively quickly, within a couple of years. Peace was apparently hastened by one simple expedient: the Romans offered full citizenship to those Italians who had not taken up arms against Rome or were prepared to lay them down.

  That certainly makes it look as if the aim of many allies in going to war had been to become fully Roman, ending their political exclusion and inferior status. That is how most ancient writers explain the conflict. ‘They were seeking citizenship of the state whose power they were used to defending with their arms,’ insists one, whose great-grandfather was an Italian who fought on the Roman side. And a favourite story of the successful transformation of Italians into Romans highlights the career of a man from the northern Italian region of Picenum: as a babe in arms he had been paraded among the prisoners in one of the triumphs celebrated at Rome for victories over the allies-turned-enemies; fifty years later, now a Roman general, he celebrated his own triumph for victory over the Parthians – the only man known to have been on both sides of a triumphal procession, a victim turned victor. But Roman writers may have been too ready to equate the outcome of the war with its aims or to give the Italians a goal that fitted more comfortably the later unity of Rome and Italy.

  For the contemporary propaganda and organisation of the Italian side suggest that it was actually a breakaway movement, aiming at total independence from Rome. The allies seem to have gone some way towards establishing a rival state, under the name ‘Italia’, with a capital at a town renamed ‘Italica’ and even the word Itali (‘Italians’) stamped on their lead shots. They minted coins displaying a memorable image of a bull, the symbol of Italy, goring a wolf, the symbol of Rome. And one of the Italian leaders neatly turned the story of Romulus and Remus on its head by dubbing the Romans ‘the wolves who have ravished Italian liberty’. That does not look like a plea for integration.

  The easiest solution to the puzzle is to imagine that the allies were a loose coalition with many different aims, some determined to resist the Romans to the death, others much more prepared to make a deal. That is no doubt true. But there are more subtle considerations too, and hints that – like it or not – it was too late for Italian independence from Rome. The coinage certainly blazons some anti-Roman imagery. But it was based entirely on the weight standards of Roman coinage, and many of the other designs were directly borrowed from Roman issues. It is as if the only cultural language with which the Italians could attack Rome was now a Roman one – a clear indication of just how far integration, or Roman domination of Italy, had already progressed.

  Whatever the causes of the Social War, the effects of the legislation of 90 and 89 BCE that extended full citizenship to most of the peninsula were dramatic. Italy was now the closest thing to a nation state that the classical world ever knew, and the principle we glimpsed centuries earlier that ‘Romans’ could have dual citizenship and two civic identities, that of Rome and that of their home town, became the norm. If the figures reported by ancient writers are at all accurate, the number of Roman citizens increased at a stroke by about threefold, to something over a million. The potential impact of this, and the problems, were obvious. There was fierce debate, for example, on how to fit the new citizens into the voting tribes, including an unsuccessful proposal to restrict the influence of Italians in assemblies by enrolling them in a small number of extra tribes, which would always vote last. But the Romans never effectively adjusted their traditional political or administrative institutions to manage the new political landscape. There was never any system for registering votes outside Rome, so in practice only those Italians with the money and time to travel would have taken advantage of their new political clout. And the burden of formally enrolling that number of citizens seems to have almost defeated them, even though there was some attempt to devolve part of the work to local officials. A full census was carried out in 70 BCE (and it is from those figures that the estimate of ‘something over a million’ comes), but that was the last official enrolment until 28 BCE, at the beginning of the reign of the emperor Augustus. The gap is usually put down to political instability, but the size and difficulty of the task must surely have had something to do with it as well.

  40. The most aggressively anti-Roman coin minted by the Italian allies in the Social War. The Roman wolf is entirely overpowered by the Italian bull, and beneath the design the name of the moneyer responsible is written in the Italian language of Oscan. The other side of the silver coin blazons the head of the god Bacchus and the name, also in Oscan, of one of the leading Italian generals.

  There is a vivid snapshot of some of the tricky problems that still lingered almost thirty years after the Social War in a speech that Cicero gave in 62 BCE
in defence of the poet Archias – a man who had already celebrated in verse the achievements of a number of prominent Romans (sadly or not, none of it survives) and whom Cicero was hoping would turn out a suitable poem in praise of his victory over Catiline. Archias was born in Antioch in ancient Syria but claimed to be a Roman citizen, by the name of Aulus Licinius Archias, on the grounds that he had emigrated to Italy, had become a citizen of the town of Heraclea and so after the Social War had the right to Roman citizenship. This status was being contested in the courts. The defence ran into difficulties, however. There was no written proof that Archias was a citizen of Heraclea, because the town’s record office had burned down in the Social War. There was little written proof of his Roman citizenship either, as he did not appear on any census list; he had, suspiciously we might think, been out of the country on the occasions of both the most recent censuses. So Cicero had to rely on some witnesses to vouch for him and on the private records of the praetor, now dead, who had first approved his claim.