The Storm Before the Storm
Page 6
Having defused this crisis the Senate also refused to ignite a new one. They knew there were limits to how far they could go with their repressive antics, so they did not attempt to repeal the Lex Agraria or to shut down the land commission. Either because they finally admitted the efficacy of reform or because they believed that stopping the process now would spark a riot, the Senate allowed the commission to continue its work. They assigned Mucianus—one of the senatorial authors of the Lex Agraria—to take Tiberius’s place on the commission alongside Claudius and young Gaius Gracchus. The redistribution of ager publicus continued.5
WHILE ALL OF this was unfolding in Rome, Scipio Aemilianus was half a world away wrapping up the conquest of Numantia. He had arrived eighteen months earlier and found the Spanish legions demoralized, inert, and lacking discipline. Aemilianus cleaned them up and ran them around on daily exercise to get them back into fighting shape. After a full year of preparation, Aemilianus then called in the full weight of Rome’s available manpower. In the spring of 133 more than 60,000 Italian, African, and Spanish soldiers surrounded the pitiful city of Numantia, which was now manned by just 8,000 holdouts. In the face of this overwhelming force the Numantines admitted defeat: “Despairing, therefore, of escape and in a revulsion of rage and fury they made an end of themselves, their families and their native city with the sword, with poison and with general conflagration.” When the few remaining traumatized survivors exited the gates, Aemilianus ordered them thrown in chains and Numantia razed to the ground.6
Aemilianus expected this victory to be the talk of Rome, but shortly after the fall of Numantia word came of a major political crisis in Rome. After passing a controversial land bill, Tiberius Gracchus and three hundred of his followers had been killed and dumped in the Tiber. Aemilianus did not respond diplomatically to the news. With the official story being that Tiberius had conspired to make himself a king, Aemilianus responded with another dose of Homeric wisdom: “So perish all those who attempt such crimes.” But when Aemilianus’s Homeric quip landed back home, the streets murmured with displeasure. Had Aemilianus just sanctioned the murder of a tribune—his own brother-in-law, no less? The same people who had carried Aemilianus to two extraordinary consulships now saw him as just another out-of-touch noble.7
Aemilianus was oblivious to the shift in mood back in Rome, however, and continued to believe that thanks to his latest conquest his star burned brighter than ever. When he returned home in the summer of 132, he was shocked by the reception he received. Rather than adoring throngs he found people in Rome glowering and standoffish. A distressed Aemilianus hardly recognized the people that had unanimously elected him consul just two years earlier.8
Things might have gone differently for Aemilianus had he been able to lavishly spread the wealth from his conquest in Numantia, but unfortunately there was no wealth to spread. Compared to his triumph after the sack of Carthage, Aemilianus’s Numantine triumph was a pathetic affair. Few riches. Few slaves. Nothing exotic or beautiful or wondrous to behold. For all the lives that had been ruined in the Spanish wars, it must have been infuriating to discover that all Rome had to show for it was a few trinkets and some gaunt Spaniards.9
Shortly after Aemilianus’s meager triumph, a rising Gracchan partisan named Gaius Papirius Carbo was elected tribune for 131. A passionate young reformer, Carbo introduced a bill that would extend the secret ballot to all legislative assemblies. If passed, it would complete the transformation of Roman voting from public voice to secret ballot—as all electoral, judicial, and legislative Assemblies would now be secret. Carbo also introduced a bill to retroactively confirm the legitimacy of Tiberius’s reelection bid to undercut the conservative argument that Tiberius’s murder was justified because he broke the law.10
Believing that things were moving too far in a popular direction, Aemilianus spoke in the Forum against Carbo’s bill. He said the traditional prohibition on recurring office holding was in keeping with republican virtue—which must have struck the crowd as hypocritical since Aemilianus had secured an exemption from those very same prohibitions. During one of Aemilianus’s public appearances, Carbo himself stepped forward to demand what Aemilianus really thought about the murder of Tiberius. Aemilianus said, “If he intended to seize the state he was killed justly.” When the audience turned hostile Aemilianus returned the compliment. As he looked out at the angry mob Aemilianus did not see true Romans, but instead a gaggle of foreign interlopers: immigrants, freedmen, and slaves who did not know what Roman virtue and dignity meant. “How can I,” he bellowed, “who have so many times heard the battle shout of the enemy without feeling fear, be disturbed by the shouts of men like you, to whom Italy is only a stepmother?” Not surprisingly, this only led to further heckling and Aemilianus’s bitter withdrawal from the Forum. The measure confirming the right of reelection did not pass, but the fight had done irreparable damage to Aemilianus’s reputation.11
IN SOME WAYS, Aemilianus was right about the crowd he faced in the Forum that day. In the early days of Rome, there was no difference between the plebs urbana—the residents of the city—and the populus Romanus—the citizens of Rome. The residents of the city were citizens of Rome, and the citizens of Rome were the residents of the city. But by the end of the second century, Rome was by far the largest city in the Mediterranean. Where other cities of the day boasted tens of thousands of citizens, Rome boasted hundreds of thousands. As the largest and most powerful city in the Mediterranean, Rome became a center of migratory gravity. Noncitizen Italians frequently moved to the growing metropolis, and were followed by Greek philosophers, and Spanish artisans, and North African merchants, and Syrian ambassadors, and Gallic mercenaries. By the 130s, Rome had transformed into a polyglot mix of every language and etÚicity in the known world.12
As it was with the rural peasants, the mass influx of slaves also played a dramatic role in the transformation of the urban population. Wealthy Romans purchased skilled artisans from across the Mediterranean and put them to work in the city manufacturing goods for sale. But unlike their less-skilled brethren, skilled slaves often only stayed slaves for a limited amount of time. Owners allowed a man to buy his way out of slavery and go into private business under the auspices of his former owner. These freedmen clients allowed senators to engage in the kind of commercial enterprises they were supposedly forbidden from participating in. Senators used their freedmen as legal fronts to operate apartment complexes and retail shopping stalls and engage in overseas trade. Freedmen also expedited the transformation of senatorial estates into commercial ventures, while allowing the senator’s hands to remain clean of the grubby business of business.13
Unlike the mostly rural residents of Italy, the plebs urbana lived entirely on wage labor. Work was principally in retail and trade as Rome became the great clearinghouse of imperial trade. The docks, warehouses, and shops teemed with life every single day. Slaves worked alongside wage laborers on large public works projects—aqueducts and roads—with new projects always started as old projects were completed. Since the city of Rome was a strictly cash economy and all food, lodgings, and fuel required coins, there was never desperate poverty. If you did not have money to live you either departed for the countryside or died in a back alley. Poverty was fatal.14
Politically, the plebs urbana hadn’t had a collective political identity since the now ancient Conflict of the Orders. Though the democratic Assemblies operated through the thirty-five tribes, all citizens domiciled in Rome were lumped together into just four of those tribes. So though they often outnumbered all other voters at an Assembly, they still only wielded four collective votes. But though their voting influence was limited, their very presence in the city made them a latent force in Roman politics. As the crisis over the Lex Agraria had shown, physically controlling the Assembly space was now a critical part of winning political battles. The permanent presence of the plebs urbana meant that however muted their electoral voices might be, their actual voices could be heard lou
d and clear, as Scipio Aemilianus discovered when they heckled him for his intemperate remarks against Tiberius Gracchus.15
As the plebs urbana again found their political voice, they discovered they could demand aspiring politicians cater to their particular needs. Land redistribution did not particularly appeal to them—they were traders, artisans, and merchants, not farmers. But what did appeal to them was the promise of a stable supply of cheap grain. Since the plebs urbana could not feed themselves, they relied on the surrounding countryside to produce the grain that kept them alive. As every budding Roman politician would learn, what the plebs urbana really wanted was food security. They were all acutely aware that the supply was susceptible to sudden shortages caused by the weather, transportation mishaps, and crop failures. Or, for example, a massive slave revolt in Sicily.16
IN THE TIME of the Gracchi, the grain that fed Rome mostly came from Sicily. Ceded by the Carthaginians in 241, Sicily was the first overseas province acquired by Rome. The incredibly fertile island was an endless bounty waiting to be harvested. Roman owners flooded in, bringing with them slaves “driven in droves like so many herds of cattle.” The working conditions on the Sicilian estates were atrocious as slaves were “vilely beaten and scourged beyond all reason.” They were also so ill-provided-for that they took up banditry to survive, preying on native Sicilians who, like their cousins in Italy, were being squeezed by growing slave estates. Complaints rained in, but there were only a handful of junior Roman magistrates to administer the whole island—as long as the profits made everyone rich, there was little reason to reform the cruel system.17
Without hope, the Sicilian slaves began plotting rebellion. The man who emerged as the principal leader was a Syrian named Eunus. Eunus arrived in Sicily as a talkative and charismatic con artist. Claiming to be a prophet and fire-breather, he charmed his masters with tales that one day he would be their king. In 135, a group of slaves approached him secretly. They wanted to kill their masters and asked the prophet Eunus for advice. Eunus said the gods favored their plot, and soon four hundred armed men put themselves under Eunus’s command. That night they attacked the city of Enna. Contrary to his jovial promises, Eunus was not benevolent in victory. He rounded up the inhabitants of Enna, separated out skilled blacksmiths, and executed the rest. When word of the massacre spread it sparked a general uprising. Within weeks, ten thousand slaves had joined the rebellion. Eunus then fulfilled his own prophecy. Placing a stolen diadem on his head, he proclaimed himself King Antiochus of Sicily.18
In the wake of Eunus’s revolt, a second revolt erupted on the other side of the island just a few weeks later. A Cilician slave named Cleon heard about Eunus’s rebellion and launched his own insurrection, attracting five thousand men to his banner. Cleon’s army then overran the southern port of Agrigentum and sacked it. There was some hope among the beleaguered Sicilians that the two slave armies would come into conflict and destroy each other—and were horrified when Cleon instead bent his knee to “King Antiochus of Sicily.” Combined, the slave armies were now unbeatable.19
Inside the Senate, the assumption was that this revolt would soon peter out, but every new batch of reinforcements sent to Sicily never came back. The Senate dispatched a praetor to bring the province back under control, and when he failed they had to send another the following year. But by now the slaves numbered some two hundred thousand and no Roman force appeared capable of defeating them. And it wasn’t just the slaves. Many of the poor Sicilian peasants had taken to raiding wealthy estates out of a mix of greed, desperation, and revenge. Anarchy reigned.20
So as the Senate dealt with the quagmire in Spain, and the sudden Gracchan Revolution, they also dealt with this ongoing Sicilian slave revolt. The Senate was frustrated by the whole affair, and were aware that out in the streets of Rome the disruption to the food supply was making the plebs urbana angry. With the rebellion still ongoing in the summer of 132—fully three years since the initial revolt—the Senate dispatched consul Publius Rupilius to Sicily. Having wrapped up his work on the anti-Gracchan tribunal, Rupilius was now off to crush yet another seditious insurrection.21
If Rupilius succeeded where other Roman commanders had failed, it was thanks to the devastation of Sicily. The insurrectionary slaves had naturally cast aside their plows, so the farms and pastures of the island went uncultivated. By the time Rupilius arrived in 132, the great breadbasket of Rome was barren. With conditions so grim, it was not hard for Rupilius to find desperate souls inside each slave-held city to open the gates in exchange for food and leniency. When the Romans arrived at Enna, Cleon led a slave army out into the field, but Cleon himself was killed in the subsequent battle and his army defeated. Rupilius then found a willing traitor to open the gates of Enna and King Antiochus fled out the back door. The King was found hiding in a cave a few days later with “his cook, his barber, the man who rubbed him in the bath and the jester at his banquets.” Rupilius tossed King Antiochus in a cell where he was consumed by lice and died. After three years, what later became known as the First Servile War was over.22
The Senate was thrilled by the end of the slave rebellion, and coupled with the victory in Numantia and the eradication of the Gracchan menace, the noble leadership of Rome was no doubt ready to enjoy a measure of peace and quiet. But within months of the victory in Sicily, reports came in from the east that Rome had another massive provincial revolt on its hands. The embassy sent to annex the Kingdom of Pergamum discovered that many did not want their independent kingdom to be turned into a mere province of Rome’s growing empire.
FOR THE ROMANS a provincae originally meant the general sphere within which a magistrate would wield authority in Rome’s name. It could be a geographic area, or a military assignment, or a legal jurisdiction. But as Rome accepted its permanent imperial responsibilities, the annual provincae of the various magistrates began to take on stable geographic boundaries. By 146, the Senate annually assigned magistrates to the provinces of Sicily, Sardinia, Nearer and Further Spain, Macedonia, and Africa. Though it was not a term used by the Romans, these provincial magistrates can reasonably be called provincial governors. In the early days of Rome’s empire, a governor’s work was primarily focused on military security. Political affairs were limited to securing alliances with local cities and tribes, and economic matters restricted to collecting taxes and paying for the military occupation.23
The administration in a province consisted of a small group of functionaries. A newly arrived praetor or consul would bring with him a household staff and an informal group of advisers called legati drawn from among the magistrate’s friends and family. The governor was also assigned a quaestor—a young man entering public service for the first time who would be entrusted with the provincial treasury. For some young quaestors this was a nerve-wracking experience, for others an opportunity to prove their virtue, and still others an opportunity for graft and bribery.
Because the Roman administrative presence was so slight, provincial governors mostly relied on local leaders and existing legal and social institutions. The aristocracy of a given city were courted and co-opted, their sons sent back to Rome as hostages, where they would be well treated and given a full Roman education. As a matter of practical governance, local laws, social customs, and institutions were retained—the final fount of authority now simply Rome rather than a local royal court.24
Though the regular administration was small, and the official burdens of being a subject of the Republic light, that did not mean being a provincial was easy to bear. Each governor arrived at the pinnacle of his career and had often taken on loads of debt to make it this far. Governing the provinces was understood to be a time to remake a man’s fortunes. But an incoming governor only had so much time, and with the great wars of conquest now past, they often resorted to extorting money from various tribes and cities in exchange for not going to war. Governors wanted to make as much money as they could before they got out. Unfortunately for the provincials, the next govern
or would arrive in exactly the same circumstances and the cycle would repeat.25
This type of abuse by the governors was cited as a frequent cause of revolts, so in 149—just as they were annexing the central Mediterranean—the Romans established their first ever permanent court, the quaestio de repetundis: the Extortion Court. The purview of the court was investigating and punishing Roman magistrates who used their power to wring unjust revenue from the provincials. But, of course, jurors for the Extortion Court were drawn exclusively from the senatorial ranks—you can guess how often they found one of their wayward colleagues guilty.26
The new province of Asia was destined to become one of the most lucrative provinces in the empire, and thus a hotbed of extortion and abuse. But before the Romans could exploit their new province they had to organize it—which was about to prove very difficult. When Scipio Nasica and his fellow senatorial ambassadors arrived in 132, they found that not everyone in Pergamum believed that they were the property of the Roman people.