The Rise of Rome

by Anthony Everitt

  Whatever the truth of the story, Gracchus did die sometime after his second consulship in 163, leaving his young widow to bring up the children alone. We have observed that Africanus conducted himself as the equal of an eastern monarch, and his daughter was the nearest thing the Republic had to an international royal celebrity. The pharaoh of Egypt, Ptolemy VIII, offered her his hand in marriage. Nicknamed Physcon (Greek for “sausage,” “potbelly,” or “bladder”), he was an unappealing prospect, and Cornelia politely declined. She decided not to marry again, but to manage her estates and devote herself to the education of her children. She lived the blameless life of a Roman matron. It was unusual for aristocratic widows to remain unmarried, but Cornelia was that rare thing in the ancient world—an independent woman.

  HOW CORNELIA BROUGHT up her sons is uncertain, but at some point in the third century educational practice in Rome changed. Originally, it was based on an apprenticeship supervised by the father—in working families probably linked to agriculture or a trade, in more aristocratic homes to military training and an induction into public life in the Forum. Gradually, a Greek model came to be followed. Greek-speaking tutors were employed (for example, the poets Livius Andronicus and Ennius), who taught both Latin and Greek. This is no doubt what a wealthy Hellenistic family such as the Scipios would have done.

  At about the same time, elementary and secondary schools opened, to which Cornelia could have sent Tiberius and Gaius. In that case, a paedagogus, usually a slave, would have taken them to and from their classes and generally supervised their behavior. A secondary school master, or grammaticus, taught language and poetry, and was sometimes a distinguished intellectual in his own right. For children in their mid to late teens, the principle of apprenticeship was maintained, with boys being attached for a time to a leading senator, rather like today’s interns. Oratory was a highly developed art form and was essential to a political career. Teachers of rhetoric offered advanced training in the elaborate techniques of persuasion.

  THE STATUS OF women in ancient Rome was mixed. Their main task was to bear legitimate children, and chastity outside the marriage bed was essential to achieving that aim. They had no political rights; they could not attend, address, or vote at citizen assemblies, and they could not hold public office.

  As a rule, a girl married young, between twelve and fifteen years of age, but her husband was often a man in his twenties or older. Irrespective of whether she had passed puberty (generally thought to begin in the fourteenth year), it seems that she was expected to have, or perhaps to endure, sex immediately upon marriage. There were different kinds of contract. A wife might be passed into the manus, or hands, of her husband, but this was becoming increasingly unpopular. Otherwise, she remained under her father’s nominal patria potestas or, if he was dead, she controlled her affairs sui iuris, by her own legal authority, albeit under the guidance of a guardian or tutor. This was Cornelia’s situation.

  Divorce was easy, and because of the age difference there was a large number of widows. While many remarried, Romans rather admired the univira, the woman who, like Cornelia, stayed true to the memory of one man.

  (Boys, of course, enjoyed greater license than girls. They were expected to sow their wild oats, within reason. Once, when Cato saw a young nobleman emerge from a brothel, he told him, “Keep up the good work.” When he came across the young man a short time later, in similar circumstances, he remarked, “When I complimented you on ‘good work’ I didn’t mean you should make this place your home.”)

  In spite of legal constraints, women were able to play an important role in family and public life if they wished, provided they obeyed the conventions of modesty and respectability. Within her household, a wife was the domina, or mistress, and she was regarded on an equal level with her husband. She led a full social life, visiting friends, patronizing the Games, and attending her husband’s dinner parties. She was able to exert political influence through her husband, whose career she promoted. Although marriages were often cool, professional affairs, we know of many happy couples.

  Cornelia was not alone in seeing so many of her children die in their early years. The duty to produce progeny was hampered by primitive medical knowledge. The upper classes seem to have practised birth control and abortion, although it is unclear how effective their methods were. Techniques such as washing out the vagina, coating it with old olive oil, inserting sponges soaked in vinegar, or jumping up and down after intercourse are unlikely to have done much good. Doctors did their best to encourage fertility and were not meant to facilitate abortion, but in Hippocratic medicine a substance known as misy was claimed to prevent pregnancy for a year; unfortunately, we do not know what it is (some have suggested yellow copperas). Various plants were commonly used for birth control, and some have been found in modern times to have contraceptive properties—Daucus carota, or Queen Anne’s lace, for example.

  Women who broke the rules of propriety received no mercy. In the first century, a certain Sempronia met the full force of male condemnation. It has been speculated that she was Cornelia’s granddaughter and, whether or not this was so, was similarly well-endowed with charm and intellect. She married well and received a good education in Greek and Latin literature. She wrote poetry, had a ready wit, and was an amusing conversationalist.

  However, according to the historian Gaius Sallustius Crispus (whom we know as Sallust), there was another side to her personality:

  She had greater skill in lyre-playing and dancing than there is any need for a respectable woman to acquire, besides many other accomplishments such as minister to dissipation. There was nothing that she set a smaller value on than seemliness and chastity, and she was as careless of her reputation as she was of her money. Her passions were so ardent that she more often made advances to men than they did to her. Many times … she had broken a solemn promise, repudiated a debt by perjury, and been an accessory to murder.

  It is a curiously unconvincing passage: venial sins such as being a lively partygoer are gradually amplified into an unsubstantiated accusation of involvement in murder, as if one thing naturally led to the other. Some of Sempronia’s excesses echo those of Tanaquil and Tullia, perhaps because historians from the late Republic borrowed her traits in order to flesh out their portraits of those early fictionalized queens. As in their cases, Sempronia’s real offense seems to have been that she openly supported a dissident politician, an impermissible intervention into an exclusively masculine sphere of activity. Charges of sexual promiscuity and criminality, invented or exaggerated, were her punishment, for they would destroy her social standing.

  CORNELIA MARRIED HER daughter, another Sempronia of course, to her celebrated cousin, Scipio Aemilianus. Her two boy jewels were the center of her attention. They shared a family resemblance, but their personalities were very different. Tiberius, the elder by nine years, was “gentle and sedate,” their biographer Plutarch writes, “while Gaius was highly strung and impetuous. When addressing the assembly one stood composedly on the spot, while the other was the first Roman to walk up and down the speakers’ platform and pull his toga off his shoulder as he spoke.” As regards food and lifestyle, Tiberius lived simply, while Gaius was ostentatious and picky.

  As descendants of the most famous Roman of his day, the young men had distinguished political and military futures ahead of them. Cornelia used to tease them, complaining that she was still known as Scipio Aemilianus’s mother-in-law, and not as the mother of the Gracchi. Tiberius’s career nearly ended as soon as it began. He was appointed quaestor, or finance officer, to a consular general in Spain. The campaign against guerrilla insurgents went very badly. The Romans were comprehensively outmaneuvered and took refuge in their camp. Hearing that the enemy expected reinforcements, the consul had all fires put out and led his army of twenty thousand men out into the dead of night. He hoped to find safety at a remote former campsite. However, the Spaniards followed and soon had the Romans at their mercy. The consul, seeing that h
is situation was hopeless, agreed a surrender, to which he bound himself by oath. Thanks to his father, who had once commanded in Spain, Tiberius had excellent connections and played a leading part in negotiating the terms.

  The Senate was outraged when it heard what had happened. Legions did not surrender. A tribunal with Scipio Aemilianus among its members ruled that the treaty should not stand. But sworn agreements could not be abrogated with impunity. In expiation for the religious offense of the breach, the consul was sent back naked and bound and handed over to the Spaniards. (They refused to accept him, in a faint echo of the Caudine Forks fiasco.)

  Tiberius got off scot-free, despite the fact that he had been instrumental in making the treaty. Some put it down to the influence of Scipio, his adoptive uncle. His popularity with the troops may have counted for something, too. Cicero writes that the scandal was “a constant source of grief and fear to Tiberius Gracchus; and this estranged him, brave and famous as he was, from the wisdom of the Senators.” He was not simply unnerved but mortified that his fides, his good faith, had been sabotaged.

  Tiberius’s politics changed. From being a political conservative, he began to promote the interests of the People. There was one issue in particular that drew his attention—land reform.

  ON THE LONG overland journey to Spain to take up his quaestor-ship, Tiberius had passed through Tuscany on his way north. He was struck by how few people there were in the fields. Those he did see, tilling the soil or tending flocks, were foreign slaves rather than native Italians or Roman citizens. On his return in 137, he looked further into the matter.

  What he found was a situation that needed to be addressed. As Rome vanquished its enemies in the peninsula, it confiscated a proportion of the land of defeated communities. Some of this was made over to smallholders and coloniae, but the rest remained ager publicus, or publicly owned land. After the end of the struggle with Carthage, the authorities had been preoccupied with new wars in Greece, Asia Minor, and Spain; and in southern Italy a great deal of ager publicus remained undistributed.

  Wealthy landowners, especially profiteers from the lucrative wars of the second century, bought up the farms of soldiers who had been absent for years on distant campaigns and also silently expropriated public land. Hannibal had laid waste thousands on thousands of acres and substantial investment was needed to rebuild the farming industry. Large estates, or latifundia, were created rather than single farms. They were more often devoted to animal husbandry than to the labor-intensive production of crops and were staffed by teams of slaves.

  The net result of these changes was the gradual disappearance of the sturdy peasant farmer, who earned enough to qualify for recruitment into the army. (As we have seen, the very poor—capite censi, or the “head count”—were not allowed to serve.) This applied not only to Romans but also to the citizens of allied communities, liable as they were to provide troops for the Republic’s wars. One obvious solution to the problem was to open the legions to the head count, but it was a firm and traditional belief that only those with property, who had something to lose, would fight bravely for their country. So that exit was barred.

  Tiberius was not alone in believing that the situation was untenable and urgently needed correction. Thoughtful Romans were less worried about economic change in the countryside (for they increasingly imported grain and other foodstuffs from northern Africa and Sicily) than they were about the decline of the social class that stocked the legions. They also feared the large and growing population of disaffected slaves who were replacing freemen throughout the peninsula. This was no nightmarish fantasy but a real threat, for in 133 a great slave revolt broke out in Sicily that took more than a year to put down. Senior politicians supported change, and a friend of Aemilianus had suggested reform when he was consul a few years previously, but he met with furious resistance and withdrew his plans; for this he was rewarded with the sarcastic nickname Sapiens, or the Wise. Many senators were illegally squatting on ager publicus and were vehemently opposed to any interference.

  Tiberius decided that the time for action had arrived. He was too junior a figure to get his hands on the official levers of power as praetor or consul, but he was well liked by the People and was entitled to stand for tribune. As already explained, the tribuneship was not a governmental position conferring imperium, and appointments were made by the concilium plebis. Its purpose was to promote popular sovereignty and public accountability. Tribunes could propose laws and summon meetings of the Senate. However, they had become an accepted part of the political scene and were sometimes even used by the Senate to veto the plans of unruly elected officials. They were not as radical as they used to be, until the arrival of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus.

  He was elected one of the ten tribunes for 133 and put forward a land-reform bill, or lex agraria. He knew there would be fierce and self-interested opposition in the Senate and was careful to design a balanced package. He renewed an old law, which had fallen into disuse, banning the occupation of more than five hundred iugera of land—that is, about three hundred acres. But he sweetened the pill by allowing an additional two hundred and fifty iugera for each landowner’s son (the concession was withdrawn after it failed to win over critics) and by offering all the land as freehold in perpetuity. Also, the fertile fields of Campania were excluded from the legislation. The territory so reclaimed was to be distributed to Roman citizens in up to thirty-iugera parcels. These could not be sold (although presumably they could be inherited), and a small rent would be payable.

  So far, so reasonable. But Tiberius then made a fateful decision. A convention had grown up that all new legislation was first presented to the Senate for its consideration before being taken to the Assembly for enactment. The bold tribune decided to sidestep the obstructive Senate and proceed directly to the People. This was legal but highly unusual: such a thing had not happened for almost exactly a century.

  Tiberius ran a vigorous campaign to promote his proposal, which was hugely popular. In an ancient equivalent of a poster campaign, graffiti were written on walls, monuments, and porticoes or colonnades, which were busy gathering places. “Wild beasts who roam over Italy all have caves and lairs to lurk in,” he would say, “but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common air and light, but nothing else.” This high-flying oratory went down well with his audiences, but a young fellow tribune, Marcus Octavius, indicated that he intended to use his official powers to veto the legislation. Tiberius did his best to make him change his mind. He pointed out that Octavius was a large-scale occupier of ager publicus, but that he would pay him from his own resources the value of any of his land that was confiscated.

  All to no avail. Tiberius convened an Assembly in the Forum and had the clerk read the bill. Octavius told the man to be silent. Tiberius postponed the meeting to another day, and again tried to have the bill read, with the same result. He took his cause to the Senate in the Senate House nearby, where he was treated contemptuously. He hurried back to the Assembly, where he took his next fateful step. He announced a further postponement, but warned that he would not only put his bill to the vote but also table a motion on whether Octavius should continue to hold office. He was as good as his word, and at the following meeting the vote on Octavius’s deposition was taken, although there was a delay because the voting urns had been stolen. The ballot was conducted by tribes, and one after another they voted to remove Octavius. As each tribe reported, Tiberius turned to Octavius and asked him to reconsider his position. “Do not throw into chaos a project that is morally right and of the greatest utility to all Italy,” he pleaded. Octavius refused, and when a majority against him had been reached he was dragged down from the speakers’ platform. His friends rushed him away from the Forum or he might well have been lynched. The land-reform bill was then passed and a commission to implement it was established, of which the two Gracchus brothers were members.

  At about this time the king of Pergamum died and, to avert a civil war, bequeath
ed his kingdom to Rome, which now became the province of Asia. The contents of the Pergamum treasury were paid into the Roman exchequer, and Tiberius had the bright idea of passing a law that distributed this money to the new smallholders, so that they could stock up on seed and equipment.

  In his handling of the Octavius crisis, Tiberius had, once again, probably broken no law, but the deposition of a tribune was unprecedented. Even if land reform was a worthy cause—and many believed it was—it began to look as if its supporters were willing to subvert the constitution in order to achieve their ends. They had upset the delicate balance between the Assembly and the Senate, which had served the Republic well for centuries.

  With all the postponed Assembly meetings, it was now summer and the victorious Tiberius feared that when he left office at the end of the year his law might be repealed before it had been put into full effect. All his good work would have gone for nothing. Also, he was worried about his security and, as an elected guardian of the People, his person was inviolable. He took his third and last fateful decision. Although once again it broke convention, he stood for a second year as tribune. For conservatives in the Senate, this was too much.

  Voting began at the election, which was held on the Capitol, but order soon broke down. The presiding officer handed over to another tribune, who was a friend of Tiberius. Noisy objections were raised. Tiberius put off the voting until the next day. He and his followers got up early to occupy the assembly-place in front of the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest before the opposition arrived. When leaving his house, he accidentally stubbed his big toe on the threshold and blood was noticed leaking from his sandal—not a good omen.