The Gracchan Crisis: The Return of Political Violence

The Agrarian Question

The political crisis that opened the century of Republican self-destruction arose from a problem that the strategic successes of the previous volumes had themselves created. The Roman military system of the middle Republic had rested, institutionally and demographically, on the assidui — the propertied smallholding citizens who qualified for legionary service by the census and who constituted, in the traditional understanding, both the agricultural and the military backbone of the state. The wars of the second century had subjected this class to a compound pressure. Prolonged overseas service removed the smallholder from his land for years at a stretch; the influx of slave labor from the great conquests (150,000 Epirotes enslaved after Pydna alone, comparable masses from Carthage, Corinth, Spain, and Sardinia) provided the capital-owning class with an agricultural workforce against which the free smallholder could not compete; and the ager publicus — the public land confiscated from defeated Italian communities across the previous two centuries, which was legally subject to occupation limits of five hundred iugera per holder — had been progressively engrossed by large possessors in open defiance of the statutory limits, which had gone unenforced for generations. The result, as the reforming tradition understood it, was the visible transformation of the Italian countryside: the smallholding assiduus displaced by the slave-worked latifundium, the recruiting base of the legions narrowing census by census, and a growing landless urban population that was, in the traditional constitutional understanding, neither economically productive nor militarily useful.

The modern scholarly literature has complicated every element of this traditional picture — the demographic evidence for smallholder decline is ambiguous, the census figures admit multiple interpretations, and the archaeological record of the Italian countryside shows more continuity of small-farm occupation than the literary tradition suggests. But the political fact is not in dispute: the Roman reforming faction of the 130s BC believed the traditional picture, articulated it as the justification for the most consequential legislative initiative of the century, and acted on it. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, tribune of the plebs for 133 BC, was the bearer of that initiative, and his personal formation explains much of its character. He was the son of the censor of 169 and the grandson, through his mother Cornelia, of Scipio Africanus; he had served with distinction at Carthage in 146 under his cousin-by-adoption Scipio Aemilianus; and he had been the quaestor whose personal credit with the Celtiberians had extracted the Roman army from the Numantine disaster of 137 — only to see the treaty he had negotiated repudiated by the Senate and his own good faith publicly consumed in the repudiation, an episode treated in the previous volume and universally recognized, by ancient and modern observers alike, as one of the personal springs of his subsequent political course. Plutarch adds the detail, which he attributes to Gaius Gracchus's own memoir, that Tiberius's convictions crystallized as he traveled through Etruria on the road to Spain and observed the countryside worked everywhere by imported barbarian slaves, with the free citizens who should have been farming it nowhere to be seen.

The lex agraria that Tiberius carried in 133 BC was, in its substance, conservative: it reasserted the ancient occupation limit of five hundred iugera of public land (with an additional allowance per son), guaranteed the possessors secure title to their permitted holdings, and established a standing commission of three men — Tiberius himself, his younger brother Gaius, and his father-in-law Appius Claudius Pulcher, the princeps senatus — to recover the excess and distribute it to landless citizens in small inalienable allotments. The substance was less revolutionary than the method. When his fellow tribune Marcus Octavius, acting in the interest of the possessing class, interposed his veto against the bill, Tiberius took the step for which no constitutional precedent existed: he carried a vote in the plebeian assembly deposing Octavius from the tribunate itself, on the argument that a tribune who acted against the interest of the plebs had forfeited the office that existed to protect them. The argument had a demagogic logic and no constitutional foundation whatever; the sacrosanctity of the tribunate was the oldest fixed point of the plebeian constitution, and Tiberius had abolished it in order to save it. The bill then passed, and the commission began its work — hampered at once by the Senate's refusal to vote it an operating budget, a stroke Tiberius answered with a second unprecedented step: when the news arrived that Attalus III of Pergamum had died and bequeathed his kingdom to the Roman people, Tiberius proposed that the Attalid treasury be applied directly by the assembly to fund the land commission, invading the Senate's immemorial control of finance and foreign policy in a single motion.

By the summer of 133 Tiberius had thus made himself intolerable to the senatorial majority on three separate grounds — the substance of the land law, the deposition of Octavius, and the invasion of senatorial fiscal prerogative — and had made himself, in the process, dependent for his personal safety on continuation in office, since the sacrosanctity of the tribunate was now the only shield between himself and prosecution. He accordingly stood for immediate re-election, which was itself of contested legality. On the day of the electoral assembly on the Capitol, amid escalating scuffles between his supporters and his opponents, the report reached the Senate, meeting nearby in the Temple of Fides, that Tiberius was demanding a crown — the report was almost certainly a misconstruction of a gesture, Tiberius touching his head to signal that his life was in danger, but it was the construction the moment required. The pontifex maximus Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio, Tiberius's own cousin, demanded that the consul Scaevola suppress the tyrant by force; Scaevola refused to be the first to shed unjudged citizen blood; and Nasica, drawing his toga over his head in the manner of a priest at sacrifice, called on those who would save the state to follow him, and led the senators and their clients up the Capitol armed with clubs and the broken legs of the assembly benches. Tiberius Gracchus was beaten to death at the door of the Temple of Jupiter, along with some three hundred of his supporters, and the bodies were thrown that night into the Tiber — his brother's request for the corpse for burial refused. It was the first political bloodshed at Rome, as the ancient tradition itself observed with careful horror, since the expulsion of the kings nearly four centuries before.

Gaius Gracchus and the Widening of the Breach123–121 BC

The decade following Tiberius's death demonstrated that the killing had resolved nothing. The land commission itself survived — the Senate, with instructive cynicism, allowed the popular measure to proceed once its author was dead, and the surviving boundary stones (cippi) of the Gracchan commissioners, several of which have been recovered by modern archaeology bearing the names of the commissioners, attest that substantial distribution actually occurred through the 120s. The judicial pursuit of Tiberius's surviving supporters proceeded in parallel under a special senatorial court of ugly reputation; Scipio Nasica, the killer, was decently removed to an honorific mission in Asia, where he shortly died; and Scipio Aemilianus, returning from Numantia to find his cousin killed and half-approving the killing — his quotation of Homer, "so perish all who do the like again," was remembered against him — spent the remainder of the decade as the principal senatorial counterweight to the Gracchan faction, until his own sudden death in his bed in 129 BC, on the morning of a major speech, with marks (the tradition insisted) upon his throat. No inquest was held. The ancient sources canvass his wife Sempronia — sister of the Gracchi — and Cornelia their mother among the suspects, along with natural death; the modern reader should register the case as the sources leave it, unresolved, and register also what it signifies that within four years of the Capitol killing the death of Rome's greatest living soldier in his own bedroom could be plausibly attributed, by contemporaries, to political murder.

Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, nine years younger than his brother, reached the tribunate for 123 BC and held it — the constitutional barrier having been legislated away in the interval — for two successive years. He was, by the unanimous testimony of the tradition, the superior of his brother in every instrument of politics: the greatest orator Rome had yet produced (fragments of his speeches were studied in the schools for centuries; Cicero's generation still knew them), an administrator of ferocious capacity, and a strategist who understood what Tiberius had not — that a reforming tribune could survive only by assembling a coalition of interests broad enough to overmatch the senatorial establishment. His legislative program was accordingly comprehensive where his brother's had been single: renewal and extension of the agrarian distributions; a grain law establishing the subsidized public sale of corn to the urban populace, the foundation-stone of the Roman annona for the following six centuries; a law transferring the juries of the extortion court — the standing court before which provincial governors answered for their administration — from senators to the equestrian order, thereby handing the business class a standing weapon against the governing class and institutionalizing a rivalry that would poison provincial administration for a century; public works and road-building on a scale that put thousands of contracts into equestrian hands; the founding of citizen colonies in Italy and, in the boldest single stroke, overseas — the colony of Junonia, to be planted on the cursed and vacant site of Carthage itself; and, in his second year, the proposal on which his coalition finally broke: the extension of Roman citizenship to the Latin allies and Latin rights to the Italians, the first major attempt to resolve the question that would, thirty years later, detonate the Social War.

The citizenship proposal cost Gaius the Roman plebs, who had no wish to share their privileges, and the senatorial counterattack was conducted through a rival tribune, Marcus Livius Drusus, who simply outbid him — proposing colonies more numerous and terms more generous, with no intention of enactment, until the Gracchan coalition dissolved into the constituencies from which it had been assembled. Gaius failed of election to a third tribunate for 121; and when, in that year, the consul Lucius Opimius moved the repeal of the Junonia colony law, the final act was staged with a stateliness that suggests both sides understood what was coming. A scuffle at the repeal assembly, in which an attendant of the consul was killed; the Senate's passage, on Opimius's motion, of the decree that history knows as the senatus consultum ultimum — the first in Roman history — advising the consuls "to see to it that the state take no harm," a formula of studied vagueness that Opimius chose to read as the suspension of all law; the arming of the senatorial party and a contingent of Cretan archers; the Gracchans' occupation of the Aventine, the ancient hill of plebeian secession, in a gesture whose symbolism no Roman could miss; the rejection of their embassies; and the storm. Flaccus, Gaius's consular ally, was killed with his elder son; Gaius himself, unwounded but pursued, crossed the Tiber by the Pons Sublicius — two friends dying to hold the bridgehead behind him in a grim citation of Horatius — and died in the grove of Furrina by the hand of his single remaining slave, Philocrates, who then killed himself over the body. Opimius had placed a bounty on the head equal to its weight in gold; the tradition preserves, with disgust, the name of the man who carried it in on a spear having first filled the skull with molten lead. Some three thousand of the Gracchan party were subsequently killed or executed under Opimius's emergency powers, the bodies again given to the Tiber and the widows forbidden to mourn; and Opimius, acquitted on trial for the killings, was commissioned to build a temple — to Concord — overlooking the Forum in which the reckoning had occurred. The Roman talent for institutional irony has no darker exhibit.

The Constitutional Meaning

The Editor may be permitted, at the close of the opening chapter, to fix the constitutional accounting that the remainder of the volume will repeatedly draw upon, for the Gracchan decade established every precedent of the coming catastrophe in miniature. It established that the tribunate — designed as the shield of the citizen — could be wielded as the sword of a faction, and that the plebeian assembly could be used to legislate over the Senate's head on any subject whatever. It established, in the deposition of Octavius, that constitutional restraints bound only those who chose to be bound. It established, in the killing of Tiberius, that the possessing class would answer an intolerable law with unjudged violence; and in the senatus consultum ultimum of 121, it clothed that violence in a form of legality that would be invoked against Saturninus in 100, against Lepidus in 77, against Catiline in 63, and against Caesar himself in 49 — on which last occasion the intended victim would decline, at the head of a veteran army, to submit to it. And it established — the deepest lesson, learned by every subsequent actor — that reform and reformer alike could be destroyed if the reformer had no force behind him but the assembly's vote. Marius would supply the missing element. The Gracchi died because they were tribunes without legions; the century that followed belongs to the men who understood the corollary.