Rome

by Faulkner, Neil

  But for the first time the conservatives were able to reach beyond their own networks and build a wider opposition to the reformers. The senatorial leaders engineered a sophisticated two-pronged attack. First, they opposed the franchise bill on the grounds it would dilute citizen privileges – not least the very welfare reforms the Gracchans themselves had introduced. Second, they set up another tribune, Marcus Livius Drusus, to outflank the Gracchans on the left by proposing to abolish the rent imposed on new land-holders and to increase the number of new colonies to twelve. The aim was to drain support from the Gracchans – the genuine party of reform – on both the left and the right, so that they could be isolated and destroyed.

  The attack was highly successful. Whereas Gracchus had secured a second term as tribune in 122 BC, he failed at his third attempt, a political defeat which opened the way to a generalized onslaught against his supporters. Fearing a repeat of the violence of 132 BC, the Gracchans armed themselves for self-defence and took refuge on the Aventine Hill, a predominantly plebeian part of Rome and traditional centre of radical protest. The Senate then declared martial law (issuing a senatus consultum ultimum), on the basis of which the consul Lucius Opimius proclaimed a general levy of the citizens of Rome and raised a force sufficient for an assault on the Aventine. Gaius Gracchus, Fulvius Flaccus and many others were cut down in the streets, and then mass arrests and executions, amounting to some 3,000 victims, completed the destruction of the revived Gracchan party. Much Gracchan legislation was also swept away by the tide of reaction: the colony at Carthage was annulled; the grain law was amended; a free market in public land was restored; the land commission was wound up.

  In the turmoil of 123–122 BC, a reform movement led by aristocratic radicals and supported by crowds of common citizens had begun to grow over into full-blown democratic revolution. But it had run into an impenetrable barrier of reaction and privilege. A majority of aristocrats – both senators and equestrians – were either nervous or hostile, perceiving the popular movement as a potential threat to the traditional order and the rights of property. Many ordinary citizens became hostile once persuaded that their privileges would be diluted by an extension of the franchise; many were confused by the fake reformism of Drusus; and many were so rooted in the retinues of aristocratic patrons that they had never been open to Gracchan arguments in the first place. In sum, the numbers of Roman citizens consistently committed to all-out reform were too small – the cross-currents of self-interest too strong – to achieve the critical mass necessary to bring about a democratic revolution from below. Even the limited reforms achieved were reversed in the years after Gaius Gracchus’s death; and the growth of the latifundia proceeded thereafter unchecked. The Gracchan route to a resolution of the crisis of the Late Republic was blocked. Another would have to be found.

  A popular general: the supremacy of Marius, 107–88 BC

  The Roman Revolution – the slow-motion breakdown of the Republican system of government and its replacement by the dictatorship of the Caesars – was a revolution without a revolutionary class. It is for this reason that it was so protracted and chaotic. For this reason, too, it is easily misunderstood, its deeper meaning hidden by the clash of aristocratic factions and their private armies. Rome was in the grip of a deep-rooted crisis in the years 133–30 BC, but the peculiar configuration of Roman society prevented any simple resolution through the action of a powerful class-based party like the Independents of 1649, the Jacobins of 1793, or the Bolsheviks of 1917. None of the main groups constituting the Roman citizen-body – senators, equestrians, decurions, assidui, proletarii – was able to play an effective revolutionary role.

  The senatorial aristocracy was split by the crisis. A small minority favoured radical reform. A larger minority opposed reform of any kind and was determined to defend senatorial property, privilege and power against dilution. The ‘centre’ was open to argument, but, as part of a property-owning elite, most senators were instinctively cautious and conservative, becoming openly reactionary in the face of revolt from below. The Senate was therefore congenitally incapable of leading the reform of Roman society: feeble at best, hostile at worst, it was a barrier to change that had to be physically broken.

  The equestrians were hardly more capable of providing new political leadership; they were certainly not the basis for some sort of ‘bourgeois revolution’. The equestrians were themselves top aristocrats, men of property who feared revolt from below no less than senators; they had no wish to unleash a revolutionary struggle against the Republic that might place them at the mercy of radicals demanding cancellation of debts and redistribution of land. Equestrian hostility to the Senate was, in any case, muted. It is not as if the equestrians constituted an independent business class with interests sharply opposed to aristocratic landowners; they were not a bourgeoisie in the modern sense. Most equestrians were themselves landowners. Many had no business interests at all. Those who did, or who pursued careers in public service – especially the most successful of these, like the leading publicani – depended heavily on senatorial patronage. The Roman Republic offered neither a free market to enterprise nor a career open to the talents: it was a controlled society in which opportunities for enrichment and advancement were embedded in political structures. Public contracts and government appointments were in the gift of senators. The equestrians who prospered were those who enjoyed the favour of powerful patrons. The highest aspiration of an equestrian was to enter the Senate as a ‘new man’. There was, in short, no firm economic, social or political ground on which the Equestrian Order might have taken a stand against the Senate.

  Senators and equestrians were the grandees of Roman politics. Below them was a class of lesser aristocrats or gentry who formed the local governing elites in Italian towns. The composition of town councils was regulated by the census, which ranked people by property ownership, so that Roman towns were safely in the hands of landed oligarchs. (Later, under the Empire, they were known as curiales or decuriones – members of the Curial Order, the class of town councillors.) While there was some basis for tension between grandees and gentry – as between senators and equestrians – this was more than offset by myriad factors promoting collaboration. For one thing, the Roman state had always backed oligarchs against democrats, and could be relied upon to intervene in support of any established municipal authority threatened by popular disorder: for many Italian gentry, political loyalty to the Republic was synonymous with social order. Hannibal’s attempt to raise the Italian towns against Rome had, after all, foundered on the rock of oligarchic resistance to city-state democracy.

  Secondly, many towns enjoyed the patronage of senatorial and equestrian grandees – as did many decurions individually – and this was an important source of largesse and influence. Quintus Cicero, writing to his more famous brother about canvassing for the consulship, explained how the aspiring Roman politician should cultivate the support of leading men in the towns, whom he would find most eager to form political friendships. It is easy to see why. Though the example is of later date – c. AD 113 – the inscription recording Pliny the Younger’s benefactions to his home town of Comum is instructive of long-established practice: ‘He left […] sesterces in his will for the construction of baths, with an additional 300,000 sesterces for decoration, and in addition to that 200,000 sesterces for upkeep; and for the support of his freedmen, a hundred persons, he likewise bequeathed to the municipality 1,866,666 sesterces, the income from which he desired to have applied thereafter to an annual banquet for the public. In his lifetime he also gave 500,000 sesterces for the support of the boys and girls of the lower class, and also a library and 100,000 sesterces for the upkeep of the library.’(7) The material interest binding country-town gentry to the senatorial elite could hardly be more obvious.

  Not only were decurions cocooned within a system of patronage; they were also divided among themselves. The gentry competed fiercely with one another for advancement within their towns – a
s Pompeii’s numerous painted election-notices testify – seeking election as duovirs (mayors), aediles (in charge of public works and municipal regulation) or quaestors (city treasurers). The most successful could even aspire to rise from the Curial to the Equestrian Order – with perhaps the Senate itself on the distant horizon of ambition. There were intense rivalries, too, between neighbouring towns, sometimes going back centuries; so intense that they occasionally erupted into violence, as when, in AD 59, the ancient antagonism between Pompeii and Nuceria degenerated into an amphitheatre riot in which 11 people were killed. Roman policy had, of course, exacerbated such feuds, creating a hierarchy of privilege which set Roman, Latin and ally at loggerheads, diverting political energy into a struggle for the franchise and equal rights. As well as being divided, the Curial Order was scattered in separate townships across Italy, with no overarching organization – in contrast to senators and equestrians – such as might have facilitated concerted action. The decurions were no more a revolutionary force than senators or equestrians.

  That left the common people. The small citizen-farmers certainly had no love for the senatorial elite – or the rich generally – but their position was weak, and growing weaker. The peasantry was a scattered class of individualists, difficult to organize in the first place, harder still to keep together as a coherent force. The peasant farmer’s ambition was restricted to his own farm; he wanted to defeat his oppressors and then be left alone to work the land with his family; he had no vision of a wider social transformation involving the collective action of peasants in general. That is why the peasants backed the Gracchi in their struggle against land poverty, but had no independent existence as a party, no leadership of their own, no political staying-power once the aristocratic reformers who had called them forth had been cut down. The Roman peasants of the Late Republic were further weakened by two specific circumstances: first, heavy conscription and the growth of commercial farming had combined to undermine traditional subsistence agriculture and erode peasant numbers; second, the still-substantial privilege of Roman citizenship prevented Roman peasants making common cause with Latins, allies and slaves in the Italian countryside. The assidui therefore lacked the economic weight, social coherence, and political organization necessary to constitute a serious revolutionary force.

  Then, finally, there was the city mob. Most citizens lived in Rome or another Roman town, and it was here that the political, social and cultural life that defined ‘civilization’ was lived. But ancient cities were centres of consumption, not production. They were parasitic on the countryside, leeching away agricultural surpluses to be invested in monumental architecture, luxury living, and the ‘bread and circuses’ which, increasingly, sustained the urban poor. The senators and equestrians in Rome and the decurions in other towns were mainly landowners – not an independent mercantile elite as in medieval cities – and the urban masses were linked to them by ties of economic dependence and political affiliation. The archaeology of Pompeii is especially instructive. There was no zoning into rich and poor neighbourhoods. Many of the working population lived in the grand houses, either as part of the household, or through renting workshops and first-floor apartments along the street front. There were, of course, no factories – all production was at workshop level – but nor, it seems, was there an independent petty bourgeoisie of workshop masters organized in guilds. Instead, workshops belonged to the owners of grand houses, and guilds were subordinate to aristocratic patrons. Urban economic activity was embedded in an oligarchic power structure.

  The mob – the plebs media, ‘the middling sort’ – was not, then, an independent political player. There was to be no equivalent in the Roman Revolution of the English Levellers or the Parisian sansculottes. The Late Republican crowd never detached itself from its aristocratic leaders. Because cities were parasitic and citizens privileged, the plebs media could intervene in urban politics in support of a reformist senator, but it could not break its ties of dependence, forge links with the rural masses, and challenge the power of the senatorial aristocracy as a whole. Indeed, the corruption and fickleness of the Roman mob – famously caricatured by Shakespeare in Julius Caesar – were real enough. The mob was bribed by largesse (effectively a share in the spoils of empire) and was loyal to the aristocratic patrons who dispensed it. One example will suffice: the grain dole – soon to be distributed free to all those on the citizen roll – was brought to Rome in fleets of ships from Sicily, North Africa, and (later) Egypt. It was a tithe levied on provincial peasants for the benefit of the Roman mob. Dependent for their privileges on imperialism and the aristocratic elite, the citizens of Rome were incapable of becoming an independent political force; indeed, they were only marginally more likely to back a reformer than a conservative, and often they split into warring gangs at the behest of rival aristocratic factions.

  Each constituent element of the Roman citizen-body was disabled by a combination of self-interest and weakness from playing a revolutionary role. Yet the crisis grew worse, not better, and the clamour for reform, albeit from a formless mélange of competing and contradictory interests, grew louder. Chaos, the ancients believed, spawned Night and Day, Earth and Heaven, Gods and Mortals – all things. Chaos now would conjure armies, wars, military coups, a Caesar, an Augustan Age – a new world order. When a clash of class forces produces chronic instability but no clear outcome – when there is no revolutionary class able to seize power for itself and remodel society in its own image – leadership may devolve on military ‘strongmen’ who lift themselves above the factions, building support by promising both reform and a restoration of order, and maintaining power by balancing – or wobbling – between evenly balanced opposing forces. The first such military strongman – the first of the great warlords of the Late Republic – was Gaius Marius.

  The occasion of Marius’s rise to power was a severe military crisis comparable with that of the 130s BC. It gradually unfolded between 113 and 104 BC, involving a long guerrilla war in Africa, a devastating Celtic-Germanic invasion in the north, and a second great slave revolt in Sicily: multiple threats, none of which was easily mastered. The story, so far as Marius is concerned, begins in Numidia (roughly modern Algeria) in North Africa. A huge territory immediately west of the Roman province of Africa, Numidia comprised a rich coastal plain and river valleys where arable agriculture was practised, and a vast hinterland of mountain and desert. Since the end of the Second Punic War it had been ruled by two exceptionally long-lived client-kings – Masinissa (202–148 BC), the founder of the dynasty who as a young adventurer had fought alongside Scipio Africanus against Hannibal, and his son Micipsa (148–118 BC). Then the succession was disputed between two full brothers, Hiempsal and Adherbal, and their older, more accomplished, but bastard half-brother Jugurtha. When Jugurtha murdered Hiempsal and appeared poised to take over the kingdom, Adherbal invited the Romans to mediate. Reluctant to see Numidia united under a vigorous ruler of doubtful allegiance, the Romans divided the kingdom, giving the richer east to Adherbal, the more desolate west to Jugurtha.

  The integrity and independence of Numidia were compromised, and Jugurtha raised the more resolute nobles to challenge the division of the kingdom. Cirta, the principal town of western Numidia, was captured, Adherbal assassinated, and the Italian merchant community massacred (113–112 BC). To restore control to their clients, the Romans then commenced a series of annual invasions by consular armies; but the Numidians proved formidable opponents. The desert was their ally. Limited water, food and forage crippled the mobility of Roman forces. When they did march, the invaders were swallowed up in the vastness of the landscape, unable to bring their opponents to battle. For the Numidians were mainly light cavalry, able to move fast and strike at will, employing the tactics of ambush and skirmish, against which Rome’s legions were cumbersome and ineffective. Jugurtha was master of these methods – one of ancient history’s great guerrilla leaders. (Though rumour had it that some of Rome’s commanders were bribed wit
h African gold, and the capture of a Roman army in 110 BC provoked the passage of a law for investigating the corruption of senator-generals.)

  The war entered its second phase with the appointment to command of the consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus in 109 BC. Metellus was no aristocratic fop: he restored morale, took the offensive, beat off a determined surprise attack on his main column, and captured a number of enemy strong-points. But the Romans still controlled little more than the ground they occupied. Jugurtha and his army continued their war of avoidance and attrition, making good their losses by recruiting new allies, Gaetulian tribesmen from Numidia’s southern border, and King Bocchus of Mauretania (Morocco) in the west. The war dragged on through 108 BC. Late that year, Metellus’s second-in-command, Gaius Marius, took home leave and returned to Rome to stand for election to the consulship.

  Marius was a ‘new man’ (novus homo) from the small hill-town of Arpinum in central Italy. The town had gained Roman citizenship only in 188 BC, and Marius was the first of his family to achieve senatorial status. After serving in Spain in the 130s BC, he had held a series of magistracies in Rome from the late 120s onwards, culminating in the praetorship in 115 BC. In the same year, he contracted a marriage alliance with the ancient patrician family of the Julii. For Marius, the plebian new man from Arpinum, association with the patrician Julii represented spectacular social advancement. But it suited the Julii too, for the family had won little distinction of late, and Marius, whatever his background, was a rising star. (Rarely can such calculation have been better rewarded. Marius was destined to achieve unprecedented political honours. But even his achievement was to be eclipsed by that of his nephew – Julius Caesar. And then, between 30 BC and AD 68, the family was to produce a line of emperors.)