The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

Meanwhile Carthage, which had “left something for posterity to say on its behalf,” was in flames. In that same year, Scipio Aemilius and his men finally brought the city down. Roman soldiers ran through the streets, setting buildings on fire. It took two weeks for Carthage to burn to the ground. Polybius himself was there, standing beside Scipio Aemilius as Carthage collapsed: “At the sight of the city utterly perishing amidst the flames,” he writes, “Scipio burst into tears…. And on my as king him boldly (for I had been his tutor) what he meant…he immediately turned around and grasped me by the hand and said, ‘O Polybius, it is a grand thing, but I know not how, I feel a terror and dread, lest someone should one day give the same order about my own native city.’”8

  THE LAND where Carthage had once stood now became the Roman province of North Africa. Rome had conquered all of the ancient powers that lay within easy reach; Parthia, Egypt, and what was left of the Seleucids still lay beyond.

  Before further campaigns, Rome had domestic troubles to settle. The success of the Roman wars to this point had brought thousands and thousands of foreign-born captives into the Roman provinces as slaves. Roman slaves were the property of their masters and could be beaten, raped, or starved at will, but as soon as a Roman master set his slave free, that slave became a Roman citizen, with all the rights of citizenship. This, as the historian M. I. Finley has pointed out, made Roman slavery a very odd institution indeed. In a single act, a piece of property became a human being, and since Roman slaves came in all shades (unlike slaves of the American South, who, even freed, carried in their skin color the reminder that they had once belonged to a slave class), freedmen then “melted into the total population within one or at the most two generations.”2169

  Practically speaking, badly treated slaves knew perfectly well how close they were, in essence, to their masters. By 136, there were thousands of these slaves in Sicily, which had prospered after its release from Carthaginian mastery. The Sicilians, writes Diodorus Siculus, “treated them with a heavy hand in their service, and granted them the most meagre care, the bare minimum for food and clothing…. The slaves, distressed by their hardships, and frequently outraged and beaten beyond all reason, could not endure their treatment. Getting together as opportunity offered, they discussed the possibility of revolt, until at last they put their plans into action.”10

  The rebellion broke out first in the city of Enna, where four hundred slaves banded together to murder a slaveowner notorious for his cruelty. They killed everyone in the slaveowner’s house, even the babies, with the sole exception of one daughter who had shown kindness to her father’s slaves. Then they appointed as their king and leader a charismatic slave named Eunus, who was rumored to have magical powers. Certainly he was a smooth and convincing talker, and proved himself to be no mean strategist either: “In three days,” Diodorus writes, “Eunus had armed, as best he could, more than six thousand men…. Then, since he kept recruiting untold numbers of slaves, he ventured even to do battle with Roman generals, and on joining combat repeatedly overcame them with his superior numbers, for he now had more than ten thousand soldiers.”11

  His particular rebellion was soon joined by other slave leaders who acted as generals under his command. Somewhere between seventy thousand and two hundred thousand slaves eventually joined in this revolt, which became known as the First Servile War. Other sympathetic slave rebellions flared up in Rome, and then in several Greek cities. These were put down, but the Sicilian fighting continued.

  The First Servile War dragged on for three years, in part because the plight of the Sicilian slaveholders did not rouse much pity in the breasts of Sicilian laborers: “When these many great troubles fell upon the Sicilians,” Diodorus Siculus writes, “the common people were not only unsympathetic, but actually gloated over their plight, being envious because of the inequality in their respective lots.” Many peasants took the opportunity to set fire to the estates of the rich and blame the devastation on the rebellious slaves.12 They did nothing to restore the old order, because they had suffered under it themselves.

  In this, Sicily was not alone. Not only Rome’s provinces but Rome itself was suffering from an increasing gap between rich and poor. Rome’s constant warfare meant that hundreds of thousands of Roman foot soldiers had marched off to fight, and had returned, poorly paid and sometimes disabled, to badly kept farms, crumbling houses, and unsettled debts.13 Meanwhile merchants were taking advantage of the newly opened trade routes to do a booming business, and public officials were earning higher and higher salaries from newly taxed lands.

  Rome’s management of its conquered lands had also been less than stellar. The Roman historian Appian, who wrote his Civil Wars some two hundred years later, describes the general procedure for territory seized on the Italian peninsula:

  As the Romans conquered the Italian tribes, one after another, in war, they seized part of the lands…. Since they had not time to [sell or rent] the part which lay waste by the war, and this was usually the greater portion, they issued a proclamation that for the time being any who cared to work it could do so for a share of the annual produce…. The wealthy, getting hold of most of the unassigned lands…and adding, part by purchase and part by violence, the little farms of their poor neighbors to their possessions, came to work great districts instead of one estate.14

  To work these large tracts, landowners needed plenty of labor, but Roman law said that hired men, if free, could be drafted into military service. So the wealthy bought more and more slaves, who were exempt from the draft. “Thus,” Appian says, “the powerful citizens became immensely wealthy and the slave class all over the country multiplied,” while common laborers were held down “by poverty, taxes, and military service.”

  The most vocal opposition to this badly planned system was a tribune by the name of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, son of a consul. He had served under Scipio Aemilius in the campaign against Carthage, where he gained fame as the first man to mount the enemy wall.15 In his other foreign service, he had seen the countryside of the Roman provinces dominated by the rich, with shepherds and farmers thrown off their land, and he returned to Rome and embarked on political office determined to bring reform. It was ridiculous, he argued in his public speeches, for Roman generals to order their soldiers to fight for home and hearth, when those very soldiers were on the edge of losing their homes: “He told them,” Plutarch relates, “that they fought indeed and were slain, but it was to maintain the luxury and the wealth of other men. They were styled the masters of the world, but in the meantime had not one foot of ground which they could call their own.”16

  The reforms Tiberius Gracchus suggested, which would have crimped the estate-building of the rich, were naturally unpopular with wealthy Romans. They convinced his fellow tribunes to veto Tiberius’s bill. This was perfectly legal; any tribune had the right to veto a law proposed by another. Tiberius suspected that bribes had been offered, though, and acted on his suspicions by breaching Rome’s constitution. With the help of his supporters, he blocked a whole range of public services and announced that they would not start again until his bill was brought up for the popular vote.

  This was breaking the law in order to do good, and it was this action which began to turn more and more Roman lawmakers against Tiberius Gracchus. No matter what his intentions were, he was introducing a dangerous precedent: he was using his personal popularity with the masses to get his own way.

  Their fears were not calmed when the bill passed and Tiberius put himself, his father-in-law, and his younger brother Gaius in charge of seeing that it was enforced. More people began to mutter—not just lawmakers, but the commoners who had always been on Tiberius’s side. He had bypassed the authority of his fellow tribunes, and the office of tribune was supposed to serve as a protection for the common people. They wanted his reforms passed, but many of them were worried about his methods.

  The suspicions surrounding Tiberius Gracchus blazed up into a riot in 132, when he stood for reelection
to the office of tribune. On the day of the elections, he was in the Capitol when rumors began to pass through the crowd: the wealthy would not allow a vote for him to be cast; assassins were coming to find him. The men around him began to grow more agitated. In the middle of all this, Tiberius put his hand to his head. Appian says that this was a sign to his followers that it was time to resort to violence to get him into office; Plutarch says that those around him thought he was asking to be crowned (a highly unlikely request). Clubs and sticks appeared. Whoever struck the first blow, the whole crowd erupted. Senators themselves were seen wrenching apart benches and using the legs as weapons. According to Plutarch, the first man to strike Tiberius himself was another one of the tribunes, who was armed with the leg of a stool. Tiberius fell and was beaten to death, along with three hundred other victims of the riot. He was barely thirty-one.

  All of the bodies, including that of Tiberius Gracchus, were thrown without ceremony into the Tiber. “This,” Plutarch says, “was the first sedition amongst the Romans, since the abrogation of kingly government, that ended in blood.”17 Before, Senate and commons had managed to resolve their differences within the boundaries set by the Roman constitution; the murder of Tiberius Gracchus ripped those boundaries apart, and they were never fully stitched together again. Later, Romans themselves would look back to the blow that felled him as the fatal wounding of the Republic. But in fact Tiberius Gracchus had begun to insert the knife himself, when he had decided to bypass his fellow tribunes for the sake of the poor. “He lost his life,” Appian concluded, “because he followed up an excellent plan in too lawless a way.”18

  76.1 Slave Revolts

  In that same year, the First Servile War in Sicily finally came to an end when the consul Publius Rupilius crushed the rebellion with startling severity. He besieged the leadership of the revolt in the city of Tauromenium, and refused to lift the siege even when conditions inside became unspeakable: “Beginning by eating the children,” Diodorus says, “they progressed to the women, and did not altogether abstain even from eating one another.”19 When the city surrendered, Rupilius tortured the slaves inside and then threw them, still living, over a cliff. He then pursued the slave-king Eunus across Sicily, captured him, and threw him into prison, where “his flesh disintegrated into a mass of lice.”20

  EIGHT YEARS AFTER Tiberius Gracchus’s death, his brother Gaius Gracchus—nine years younger—stood for election to the tribunate as well. He was, Plutarch says, earnest and vehement where Tiberius had been calm and composed; passionate and zealous where his brother had been careful and precise in speech. He won enough votes to become a junior tribune, and soon showed that he intended to make good his brother’s death. His reforms were even more radical than Tiberius’s had been; he proposed that all public lands be divided between the poor, that foot soldiers should be clothed by the state, that all Italians should be given the vote as part of their citizenship, and half a dozen other enormous shifts in Roman practice. The consuls did their best to block his changes. In frustration, Gaius rounded up his own supporters to “oppose the consuls by force,” and when the two parties came face-to-face another riot broke into bloodshed.21

  Gaius Gracchus was murdered in the fighting. His killers hacked off his head and brought it to one of the consuls as a trophy. Three thousand other Romans fell in the riots as well. Once again the bodies were thrown into the Tiber, which this time came close to choking with the corpses. Tiberius Gracchus had died in a battle fought by clubs and wooden planks, but the riot that killed Gaius Gracchus was carried on with swords. The two sides had armed for war ahead of time.

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  The Problems of Prosperity

  Between 118 and 73 BC, the allies of Rome demand citizenship,

  the Han Dynasty spends too much money on conquest,

  and Sulla and Marius fight for power inside Rome itself

  AFTER THE DISASTER OF THE GRACCHI, it was clear that new laws were not going to bring any solution to the growing problems of poverty and landlessness. The Roman constitution, the elaborate system of tribunes and consuls, senators and judges, checks and balances, would neither bring nor prevent justice; the will of the rich or the charisma of the popular could always subvert it. New laws were not going to bring any solution to the growing problem of poverty and landlessness. Almost every Roman orator looked back wistfully to a golden age “before the destruction of Carthage,” when the Republic was healthy: “Down to the destruction of Carthage,” the Roman historian Sallust wrote a few years later, echoing the lament of the times, “the people and Senate shared the government peaceably and with due restraint, and the enemies did not compete for glory or power; fear of its enemies preserved the good morals of the state.”1

  That there had never been such a time was beside the point. Romans needed to look back with longing to an imaginary golden age, in order to cope with the present. Rome had once been pure, but now was filled with greed, corruption, pride, general decadence, and other fruits of prosperity, an evaluation which was only confirmed by a disaster called the Jugurthine War.

  Down in North Africa, King Masinissa of Numidia had passed his throne on to his son Micipsa. This son, now getting on in years, had two sons of his own, plus a nephew named Jugurtha. The nephew was not in the line of succession, so Micipsa planned a military career for him and sent him off, in command of Numidian troops, to fight with Scipio Aemilius. Here Jugurtha was befriended by Roman officers, who assured him (so Sallust writes) that he could bribe the Roman government to put him onto his uncle’s throne: “At Rome money could buy anything.”2

  77.1 Numidia

  When Micipsa died in 118, Jugurtha took the throne by force; his henchmen murdered one of his cousins, and the other, Adherbal, fled the country. To make sure that the Romans would not take the part of the rightful heir, Jugurtha “sent ambassadors to Rome with a quantity of gold and silver” to bribe senators with. This worked: “Their bitter resentment against Jugurtha was converted into favour and good will,” Sallust remarks.3

  Adherbal showed up in Rome, asking for help on his own account, to find that Jugurtha’s money had already assured him a throne. The Senate decreed that the kingdom should be divided between the two of them; once they were both back down in Numidia, Jugurtha mounted a war against Adherbal, trapped him in his own capital city, captured him, and tortured him to death.

  Public indignation meant that the Senate could not overlook this. In 111, a consul was sent down to Numidia with an army to punish Jugurtha. But like so many Roman officials, the consul was open to corruption: “Jugurtha sent agents who tempted him by offers of money,” Sallust says, and he “quickly succumbed,” subjecting Jugurtha to a token fine and then returning home.4 Another official was then sent to drag Jugurtha to Rome, to stand trial, but once in Rome, Jugurtha paid off a tribune to halt the trial. The Senate sent him home. As he passed through the city gates, he is said to have looked back and said, “There is a city put up for sale, and if it finds a buyer, its days are numbered.”5

  This parade of bribes infuriated the Roman public, who saw in it everything they hated about their own corrupt government. Not until 109 did a Roman officer gain a reputation for dealing honestly with Jugurtha. His name was Gaius Marius, and he was a “new man,” meaning that he came from a family with no political power and no money. Given the mood of the Roman people, this worked in his favor. He spent two years fighting honorably in North Africa; in 107, he was elected consul.217

  After the election he spent three more years campaigning against Jugurtha. Finally, with the help of his senior officer Lucius Cornelius Sulla (the same Sulla who had met with Mithridates II, inaugurating contact between Romans and Parthians, some fifteen years before), Marius managed to lure Jugurtha into a trap and capture him.

  Jugurtha was paraded back into Rome in chains, a symbol not just of Roman victory, but of the triumph of common honesty over aristocratic corruption. Marius himself was hailed as Rome’s champion. He was t
hen elected consul five more times in succession.

  This was actually against the Roman constitution, which was supposed to prevent consuls from serving year after year (and gaining more and more power). But Marius had become the people’s darling, and the constitution hadn’t prevented the wealthy and powerful from doing away with those earlier champions of the common man, the Gracchi brothers; so why should it stand in the way now?

  Marius himself, awarding citizenship to a thousand Italian allies as a reward for their help in battle, was reproved for breaking the constitution: “I’m sorry,” he replied, “but the noise of fighting prevented me from hearing the law.”6

  AFTER HIS SIXTH CONSULSHIP, Marius—realizing that he was unlikely to win a seventh—took himself off into self-imposed retirement. Rome had not fought a real war since Jugurtha’s conquest, and Marius (so Plutarch says) “had no aptitude for peace or life as a private citizen.”7

  Real war was not long in coming, though. The Italian cities on the peninsula, Roman subjects all, had been asking for years to become full Roman citizens with voting rights, a privilege which the Senate had been stingy in granting. The general feeling that the common people of Rome were being trampled underfoot had spread outwards to encompass the Italian peoples as well, and little attention had been paid to their constant requests: “Tiberius Gracchus was persistent in support of the citizens,” Cicero would remark later, “but neglected the rights and treaties of the allies and the Latins.”8 Now the allies and the Latins wanted a voice in Rome’s own affairs. They wanted, in the words of the ancient historian Justin, not just to be citizens, but to be partners in Rome’s power.2189

  When the Senate resisted sharing its authority, a swell of anti-Rome sentiment began. At first this took the form of a rejection of Roman customs and the Latin language, in favor of the old tongues of Italy; the historian E. T. Salmon has pointed out that inscriptions from Italian cities during this time contain an unusual number of archaic words.10 This was followed by the joining together of a number of Italian cities into a new association which they called Italia. In 91, indignant Italians killed a Roman officer at the city of Asculum, and fighting began in earnest.