Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  Eventually the Romans sent a consular army powerful enough to crush the revolt, first driving the slaves from the open field, afterwards taking the fortresses of Taormina and Enna by treachery. Thousands were tortured and executed in the aftermath. When Tiberius Gracchus was first elected tribune of the plebs, however, the matter still hung in the balance: the Sicilian slave revolution raged as a beacon of liberation that might yet set all Italy alight, its victories over Roman troops further evidence of the inadequacies of the Republic’s army. An inscription from Polla in Lucania records the participation of runaway slaves in the Sicilian war – clear evidence of the links between slaves on opposite sides of the straits implied by the outbreaks at Rome, Minturnae and Sinuessa. It was the class struggle of slaves, therefore, and the direct threat it posed to Italian and Sicilian property, that split the senatorial aristocracy in 133–132 BC, with a minority around Gracchus convinced that land reform was essential to maintain the army and guarantee order in the countryside, an opposing minority deeply hostile to any redistributive measures that threatened the integrity of estates, and a mass in the middle confused by the crisis but conservative by instinct. Thus, when Gracchus proposed his bill, he had no confidence it would pass the Senate. He did not reach this judgement out of the blue. A number of recent popular measures – the appointment of Scipio Aemilianus to the Spanish command, the tribunes’ resistance to the draft, laws introducing a secret ballot – had provoked strong opposition. Even land reform had been proposed not long before – by Laelius ‘the Prudent’, who, significantly, had earned his epithet by bowing to senatorial pressure to back down. Rather than have his bill burdened with a formal senatorial rejection, Tiberius Gracchus took it straight to the People without consulting his peers.

  The proposed land reform was neat and moderate. It concerned all ager publicus – land taken from disloyal allies and converted into ‘publicly owned farmland’ – seized since the Second Punic War. Much of it had passed into the hands of the rich, who had come to regard it as their own, building villas and family tombs on it, and using it in dowries, mortgages and sales, such that any claim by the state to repossess it would be regarded by them as expropriation. But many of them were technically in breach of the law, and the Gracchan bill aimed to release parcels of ager publicus by enforcing the original statutory limit on the size of holdings: 500 iugera (120 hectares) per person, plus 250 more for each child. A land commission was to investigate all claims on ager publicus, to confiscate excessive holdings, and to redistribute the excess to new occupants (possibly in units of 30 iugera). The big land-holders were to be compensated with a rent-free hereditary lease on the land they retained. The new small-holders were to pay a small quit-rent and agree not to alienate their land for a fixed period of years.

  Scholars have debated why opposition to this bill was so embittered and finally violent. Noteworthy is the fact that the land commission continued to function after the defeat of the Gracchan party in 132 BC. The Senate majority had probably been won to moderate reform by a combination of Gracchan arguments and the pressure of events – the slave revolt, popular agitation, the problem of army recruitment, the illegality of large holdings of ager publicus, the potential benefits of reform. But it had also been terrified by the eruption of mass struggle on the streets of the capital: whereas land reform by a senatorial commission was gradual and measured, the street demonstrations and packed popular assemblies were potentially uncontrollable. Where would it all end? After all, Gracchus had sidelined the Senate at the outset by taking his bill direct to the People. He had revived the traditional role of the tribune of the plebs as defender of the common citizen – or rather, had accelerated a worrying trend that was apparent since at least 151 BC. And in raising himself up as a popular leader – by making himself a commissioner under his own law, and by seeking a second term as tribune – he threatened the convention by which offices were rotated among senators as a way of controlling competition and maintaining cohesion within the ruling class. Was this the beginning of a new popular politics that might reduce the Senate to irrelevance?

  Particular concern arose when King Attalus III of Pergamum bequeathed his entire kingdom to the Romans in 133 BC. Gracchus seized on this extraordinary windfall – Pergamum was very rich – by proposing that the royal treasures should be distributed to the beneficiaries of the land reform to assist them in stocking their farms. The Senate was outraged by this further threat to its traditional prerogatives, which included virtually untrammelled control over diplomacy and finance. It was not, it seems, reform as such that the Senate feared, but the popular movement necessary to bring it about. There was no contradiction, therefore, between the senators’ support for the pogrom and assize court which shattered the Gracchan party, and their tolerance of the land commission’s work thereafter.

  This, though, was not enough to end the crisis. Without the pressure of the popular movement, the Senate’s support was lukewarm, and the obstructiveness of big landowners slowed the pace of reform. The potential for political filibustering and legal challenges was immense. A number of inscribed boundary stones have been found which record Gracchan land allocations – so we know the commission was working. But there is no reliable way of quantifying the transference of land, and we have at least one clear example of deliberate obstruction – in 129–128 BC, when the land commission’s responsibilities were shifted to one of the consuls, who promptly departed to the provinces, causing all work to be temporarily suspended. By 123 BC, the Gracchans appear to have resolved upon a new political offensive to drive forward reform. Gaius Gracchus, Tiberius’s younger brother and one of the land commissioners, stood successfully for election as tribune of the plebs on a radical platform. Since, moreover, he would be elected again the following year, when another Gracchan would also be elected to one of the two consulships, this amounted to a more serious – and, to its opponents, more threatening – bid for governmental power than that of ten years before. The experience of Tiberius’s tribunate and the struggles of the intervening years had taught sharp lessons. What emerged in 123 BC was nothing short of a full manifesto – in effect, an entire programme for government: something unprecedented in Roman politics, and revolutionary in its implications. Moreover, careful political calculation was implicit in the range of policies offered: there was a deliberate attempt by the Gracchans to construct a broad, popular, anti-senatorial coalition – a coalition powerful enough, it may have seemed, to defeat reaction, marginalize the Senate, and transform Roman politics and Italian society.

  Gaius Gracchus is often assumed to have been a greater orator and popular leader than his brother, and to have been the more creative and audacious reformer. He is described as such by ancient writers, and modern scholars have been inclined to agree. The truth is that we know too little about either of the brothers to be sure. Political programmes – and the leaders and parties that carry them – take time to crystallize. The tribunate of Gaius Gracchus took place in the context of that of his brother ten years earlier: it was the experience of reactionary violence, and the time since spent debating the politics of crisis and change, that determined the far more radical course the reformers now followed. Four sets of policies, each reflecting the interests of a key social group, constituted the new Gracchan programme.

  First, the original land law was revised, and the work of the commission was then pushed forward with renewed vigour. There may have been a new stipulation that ager publicus could – perhaps should – be distributed in relatively large plots of up to 200 iugera (48 hectares). Small farms created under earlier allocations may have failed. Brunt has commented, ‘There was an inherent contradiction in the Gracchan objective of increasing the number of Rome’s peasant soldiers, when it was soldiering that did much to destroy the peasantry.’(6) Why should new smallholdings have been any more successful than old, given high conscription, the growth of commercial agriculture, and the perennial marginality of the subsistence farmer? It may have made sense
to increase the size of holdings. The Gracchans also revived the long-lapsed policy of founding colonies. Though their scheme for one at Capua fell through, colonies were founded at Tarentum and Scolacium in the far south of Italy, and, more controversially, at Carthage, the first example of a Roman colony overseas. The aim of colonies was different from before: instead of providing military security, Gracchan settlements were intended to provide farms for needy Roman citizens. Finally, to facilitate the marketing of agricultural produce, a new programme of road-building began.

  Roads were not the only public works initiated by the Gracchans; they also built new granaries in the city of Rome. These were necessary for the state corn-supply, another Gracchan initiative – one pregnant with implications for the future – whereby the government purchased and stored corn in bulk, releasing it on to the market when necessary to support the bread price, which was fixed at an affordable rate. Both policies – public works and the corn supply – were designed to benefit the landless poor, mainly the huge population of Rome itself, perhaps already close to half a million. The urban crowd was probably decisive in most votes in the popular assemblies, because votes were cast in person. Though voting was by tribe (in the Assembly of the Tribes) or by century (in the Assembly of the Centuries) – the popular assemblies were therefore electoral colleges – the decision of these constituent groups was made by counting the votes cast by individual members. City-dwellers dominated for the obvious reason that countrymen had to make an exceptional effort to vote. Tiberius Gracchus had been attacked and killed at harvest time – that is, when most supporters of land reform were away from the city. Gaius Gracchus was consciously attempting to build a firm base of support in Rome itself.

  Land for the assidui (the small farmers). Jobs and cheap bread for the proletarii (the landless poor). To these was added a third raft of reforms designed to attract the support of the equestrians. The Roman aristocracy was divided into three groups: senators, equestrians and decurions. At the top were the senators, a group of 300 or so of the richest men in the Empire, who had seats in the Senate and qualified for election to the most senior state offices. The equestrians formed a second division. They also were rich, some of them exceptionally so, but the basic property qualification was only 100,000 denarii, less than half that of a senator, and it is likely that the equestrian order had come to number many thousands. The numbers, wealth and influence of equestrians had grown enormously with the rise of empire. They were army officers, business contractors, slave-dealers and money-lenders. Most were also landowners: without land as security, few could have established themselves in business in the first place; and because of the Roman prejudice against commercial property, profits from business were frequently ploughed into new land purchases. Of particular importance were the publicani (public contractors). Probably the easiest way for an equestrian to become really rich was to secure a public contract to provide a specific commodity or service – perhaps to supply military equipment to the army, to run state-owned mines, or, most lucrative of all, to ‘farm’ taxes in the provinces. This was ‘private-public partnership’: the state avoided expenditure and responsibility; the contractors were rewarded with a hefty rake-off. A company of tax-farmers, for example, would undertake to collect the taxes due from one or more cities in a province, and their reward would be a proportion of the takings – plus whatever extra they could extort along the way.

  Relations between senators and equestrians were sometimes tense. They might come into conflict in the provinces, perhaps in a clash of economic interests, if a senatorial governor was promoting a company in which he had an interest, or where a governor concerned with maintaining good order sought to check extortion. This sense that equestrians were under the thumb of senators – that economic success was dependent on currying favour – fed a wider political frustration. Although some equestrians gained admittance to the Senate as ‘new men’ (novi homines) – the Equestrian Order has been described as the ‘seed-bed’ of the Senate – the numbers involved were too few to satisfy aspirations. Equestrian empire-builders found themselves pushing at a barrier of senatorial privilege. Most failed to break through and were denied access to the highest offices (and rewards) in the state. A social group with new economic weight found itself politically confined. The Gracchans set out to exploit the tension between the two orders, and to build up equestrian power as a counterweight to that of the Senate. Gracchus’s aim, according to one ancient commentator, was to make the state ‘two-headed’.

  The treasury of Pergamum – now the province of Asia – had already been tapped for funds to stock new farms created by Gracchan land allotments. It seems, however, that the cities of Asia were not at first subject to taxation, revenue being drawn only from the former royal estates, from customs dues, and from a tax on cattle. Gaius Gracchus ended the immunity of the cities and gave responsibility for collecting the taxes to companies of publicani, whose operations were governed by contracts let at Rome and renewable every five years. Gracchus’s policy for Asia – the richest of Rome’s provinces – was to exploit it both to enrich the equestrians and to fund land reform, public works and welfare measures. It is a policy that illustrates perfectly the politics of ‘democratic imperialism’. Left-wing historians have sometimes been rather dewy-eyed about the reformers of the Late Republic, so it is necessary to stress that the conflict between reformers and conservatives – populares and optimates as they came to be called by contemporaries – was a dispute over the division of spoils. The issue at stake in Asia was whether senators, equestrians or common citizens would benefit most from the exploitation of native peasants. For a measure of the hatred with which foreign tax-collectors were viewed, we need go no further than The New Testament, which makes frequent disparaging reference to publicani. Jesus could be vilified by his enemies as ‘a glutton, a drunkard, and a friend of tax-collectors and sinners’. Jesus’s advice to tax-collectors who sought salvation was to ‘collect no more than the amount prescribed’; presumably they commonly extorted more. The popular view – in ancient Palestine at least – was that publicani were corrupt and on a moral level with prostitutes. The Gracchi were as much imperialists as the most reactionary senator; indeed, their whole programme was designed to strengthen the Roman Empire, and its realization depended upon efficient exploitation of the provinces and the deployment of accumulated surpluses in Italy.

  A second key measure was an attempt to shift the balance of political power in Rome from the Senate to the Equestrian Order. Gracchus’s aim was to strip the Senate of its role as a high court, abolishing its authority to set up special tribunals with capital powers (of the kind used against the Gracchans in 132 BC), and removing its right to investigate charges of corruption brought against its own members during their service as provincial governors – a notorious abuse that had led to a series of cover-ups. Though some details are obscure because the ancient sources do not agree, Gracchus’s main concern seems to have been to create a new high court with juries formed exclusively of equestrians. This had major implications. Senators in imperial service had been almost invulnerable to prosecution for abuse of power. Now, by contrast, senators who clashed with the publicani were in grave danger: Roman justice was highly politicized, and it would have been easy enough to concoct a case to destroy an obstructive provincial governor.

  The final strand of Gracchan reform proved the most problematic. In 125 BC, Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, an associate of the Gracchi, a replacement member of the land commission, and in that particular year one of the two elected consuls, had proposed a franchise bill which would have granted Roman citizenship to all free members of Latin and allied communities in Italy. The reformers favoured an extension of citizenship as a way of consolidating Rome’s Italian manpower base. Up to two-thirds of a Roman army might be formed of Latins and allies. Yet it was Romans, those with voting rights in the imperial city, who got the main share of booty, land, public contracts, and government posts. The regular army tax (tribu
tum) had been abolished in 167 BC, so that Romans – unlike other Italians – now paid no direct taxes. The Gracchan land commission had almost certainly sometimes redistributed ager publicus from non-Romans to Romans. The equestrian publicani favoured by Gracchan policy were all Roman. Elevation to the Senate was impossible for a Latin – however rich. The Roman courts protected their own – not simply because they were corrupt (though they were), but because the whole justice system was rooted in the citizen community. Roman magistrates were accountable to ‘the Senate and People of Rome’, not to Latins and allies: their decisions therefore reflected Roman interests.

  These imbalances between contribution and reward had mattered little in the 3rd century BC. Romans, Latins and allies had fought side-by-side in defence of their homeland against Gauls, Samnites, Greeks and Carthaginians; there had been great sacrifice, but only modest gains. The wars of the 2nd century BC, by contrast, were foreign wars of conquest in which Latins and allies could have no interest unless they shared fully in the now ample rewards. This fracture line between Romans and non-Romans not only compromised military recruitment and morale, but also, by dividing the ranks of the free, undermined the security of property in a countryside now filled with slaves.

  Such was the opposition to Flaccus’s franchise bill, however, that it was never even put to the vote. Learning from this failure, in 122 BC Gaius Gracchus proposed a more moderate franchise bill, offering Roman citizenship to Latins, and Latin citizenship to allies, the latter as a halfway-house towards full enfranchisement. Even this was so controversial, however, that it shattered Gracchus’s own popular base. Most senators were hostile because the flooding of the Roman political system with new, pro-Gracchan citizens threatened to swamp their own networks of clients and supporters. As the ups and downs of Gracchan populism demonstrated, power in the popular assemblies was finely balanced. Because voting in person restricted political activity largely to those who lived in or close to the city, many tribes and centuries – the units that delivered the block votes in the Assemblies of the Tribes and the Centuries respectively – were probably controlled by small caucuses; some, no doubt, were little more than pocket boroughs for great families. Even where attendances were larger, many in the city mob were enrolled as clients (clientes) in one or another aristocratic retinue and could be relied upon to vote in their patron’s interests. Tiberius Gracchus’s supporters had been overpowered when the small farmers were out of the city at harvest time: the Roman mob was far from being solidly Gracchan.