(Two ‘companion’ volumes for this period are Nathan Rosenstein and Robert Morstein-Marx, A Companion to the Roman Republic, Oxford, 2006, which has probably more in-depth information and range than the reliable Harriet Flower, The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic, Cambridge and New York, 2004. A succinct overview is Mary Beard and Michael Crawford, Rome in the Late Republic, London, 2000.)
Social reformers were rare in Roman politics and this makes the attempts by two brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, to tackle the social and economic problems in Italy in the late second century bc all the more remarkable. The Gracchi were a noble family, with five consulships to their credit, and Tiberius and Gaius’ mother, Cornelia, was none other than the daughter of Scipio Africanus. She was a formidable woman, mother of twelve children, of whom only three survived. When widowed, she transferred her ambitions onto her sons and the result was two men, nine years apart in age, who were the nearest republican Rome ever produced to Greek reformers such as Solon and Cleisthenes.
Tiberius Gracchus was elected a tribune in December 134. The flexibility of the constitution was such that his nobility was no bar to the office. The traditional powers of his post allowed him not only to pass laws through the concilium plebis but to veto, on behalf of the people, any acts of the magistrates and any decree of the senate. The concilium was thus a genuinely popular assembly—in 188 it was recorded as having 258,318 eligible voters—and assembled on or alongside the Capi-toline Hill, right in the centre of the city. Used with determination the tribunate could thus prove a lever for creating or resisting political change. Tiberius was set on using his powers to achieve land reform. What his motives were is hard to say. His critics saw him as one who was exploiting popular unrest for his own advantage. Tiberius claimed purer motives, no less than the restoration and consolidation of the small landowner whose position, he insisted, was being undermined by the growth of large estates and who was, therefore, being lost for military service (for which landownership was a precondition).
Tiberius’ plan for land reform centred on the ager publicus, land owned by the state (much of it originally the territory of defeated Italian cities) that was available for distribution to citizens. Theoretically there was a maximum allocation of 500
Iugera (120 hectares) for any individual but many citizens and some members of allied communities had acquired much more. Tiberius proposed that they should surrender the extra in return for a formal confirmation of their right to the rest. The surrendered land would then be distributed among the poor in small plots (of 30 iugera, 7 hectares) to which they would be given an inalienable right. They would thus be protected from being bought out by their richer neighbours as well as being retained for military service. The whole procedure would be overseen by a commission of three men.
Politically the cleverness of the proposal was that it did not threaten the concept of private property. Those who would lose out would be those who had been caught out. However, any vigorous use of the conciliumplebis was bound to be unsettling, particularly when it affected richer landowners. The real problem, however, as recent research is showing (see earlier, p. 398), is that land was already short, that far from estates being enormous they were relatively modest in size, and there was little extra to distribute. This would have made the reforms unworkable in any case but Tiberius made things worse for himself. He showed little regard for the sensitivities of the senate, breaking convention by not consulting with them over his proposals. He then deposed one of his fellow tribunes who opposed him. When news came that the kingdom of Pergamum had been bequeathed to Rome by its last ruler, Tiberius suggested that its treasure could be used to provide money grants for those receiving allotments and that the concilium plebis not the senate should discuss the future of its income. This was intruding on the traditional role of the senate as the body responsible for foreign affairs. Most provocatively of all, Tiberius then announced he would stand for a second tribunate, another clear breach of convention that he may have tried to hide under further promises of popular reform.
Tiberius maintained his influence in the concilium plebis, whose meetings were swollen by a mass of poor citizens crowding into the city to vote, but he had isolated himself from the ruling classes. The Roman state valued precedent above all things. More astute reformers in Rome, as in Greece, always claimed that they were simply restoring things as they once had been. A search for consensus had become intrinsic to politics. Tiberius was too impetuous for such ploys and when, on one day in the summer of 133, discussion began on his eligibility for a second term, tensions were already high. The concilium plebis met on the Capitoline Hill; the senate was meeting at the same time in the nearby temple of Fides. As confused accounts of developments in the concilium were relayed to the senate, the pontifex maximus (the head of the priesthood), Scipio Nasica, urged the presiding consul in the senate to have Tiberius killed for attempting to set up a tyranny. The consul refused to use force but Scipio Nasica, convinced of the justice of his case, gathered a crowd of supporters who surged towards the Capitoline Hill, where Tiberius was still holding sway. The result was a pitched battle fought with cudgels and sticks. Perhaps 300 died in the crush, including Tiberius, struck on the head, it was said, by a stool wielded by a hostile fellow tribune. The first popular reform movement in Roman history had been stifled but with methods which could only discredit its opponents.
This was the moment, wrote the contemporary historian Sallust, ‘when the nobility began to abuse their prestige and the people their liberty. Each man was taking, seizing and stealing for himself’
Despite this debacle, the land commission survived, with Tiberius’ brother Gaius as one of its members. It is not clear how far it actually succeeded in setting up new farms; there is little evidence for any major change in landownership in Italy, and many of the wealthier Romans were beginning to invest in land abroad as the empire grew. (For a recent assessment of this difficult area see William V. Harris, ‘The Late Republic’, chapter 19 in Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge and New York, 2007; paperback edition 2013.) Land hunger remained. New groups who were vying for landownership both in and outside Italy emerged: ambitious freed-men (see further p. 521) and the non-Roman Italians who felt themselves discriminated against by those who held Roman citizenship, especially when land redistribution was involved. In 125 a consul, Fulvius Flaccus, an ally of the Gracchi, proposed that citizenship should be offered to allied cities. The proposal came to nothing but the aspirations of these cities were raised and their frustrated hopes were later to develop into a major threat to Rome.
In 124 Tiberius’ brother Gaius was elected a tribune for 123. Gaius was altogether a more formidable man than his brother. He was endowed with enormous energy, personal charisma, and impressive skills as an orator. Descriptions survive in Plutarch’s Life of Gaius striding backwards and forwards across the speaker’s platform, ripping his toga at the height of his emotion, and at work surrounded by a crowd of enthused professionals. Gaius was also more astute as a politician, and when elected tribune his early reforms were aimed at strengthening his power base. For the poorer citizen access to cheap grain was essential, and Gaius stabilized corn prices by instituting a system of bulk buying and storage for sale at a fixed price (thus protecting the poor from variations in the weather and the exploitation of speculators). He attempted to alleviate land hunger by setting up new citizen colonies within Italy and he pushed on with his brother’s land reforms.
Gaius’ legislation suggests he wished to move power away from the senate towards the popular assemblies. To isolate the senate he courted the equites, the equestrians, a class originally composed of those able to provide a horse for the cavalry but now defined by a wealth qualification. It was this class that monopolized state contracts (senators being forbidden to take them). Gaius ensured that the right to raise the revenues of the new province of Asia, which had now been created around the wealthy kingdom of Pergamum, should be auctioned in Rome among the equestrians. In Italy itself he initiated road-building projects that were also highly attractive to equestrian contractors. More daringly Gaius allowed equestrians to participate in the courts, first set up in 149, which judged cases brought by provincials against the rapacity of governors. Since many of the complaints were against equestrians, the equestrians had become judges in their own cause, in effect a boosting of their political position within the state. In other laws passed in the
Concilium Gaius confirmed and extended certain popular rights. The scale of his success could be seen when he was elected to a second tribunate without any of the opposition his brother had run into.
Gaius’ success was not to last. The problem was once again the opposition of allied communities to the work of the land commission. Gaius hoped to buy them off with the promise of Roman citizenship for Latin communities around Rome and the grant of Latin rights, including citizenship for those who migrated to Roman territory, for other allied communities. The proposal was statesmanlike and if implemented might have warded off the damaging Social War which was to break out between Rome and her allies in 91. However, there was no real constituency in support of Gaius’ reforms. No citizen, rich or poor, had any interest in sharing citizenship and the senate knew that an influx of new citizens would make their own control of elections harder to maintain. While Gaius was abroad planning another of his schemes, the foundation of a large overseas colony, to be known as Junonia, near the site of Carthage, the senate backed a rival plan to create more citizen colonies within Italy. This was of much greater interest to citizens and Gaius’ power base crumbled. His franchise bill was lost and he failed in an attempt to secure a third tribunate.
Without office, any Roman, even one of Gaius’ ability, was vulnerable. When an attempt was made in the following year to repeal the law setting up Junonia, Gaius appeared with a crowd of supporters to oppose the repeal. In a scuffle which broke out the servant of one of the consuls, Opimius, was killed and the senate seized on the incident to support Opimius in seeking revenge for what was magnified into an attack on the state. For the first time in Rome’s history a decree, the senatus con-sultum ultimum, was passed urging the consuls to see that the state came to no harm. Gaius withdrew his followers to the Aventine Hill, a traditional gathering place of ‘the people’, but it offered no protection. Opimius attacked ruthlessly and some 3,000 citizens died. Opimius offered a reward for Gaius’ head of its weight in gold. When it was finally produced, the story goes that its brains had been scooped out and the cavity filled with lead. Opimius survived an accusation of putting Roman citizens to death without trial.
Only a few years before, Polybius had written in praise of the Roman constitution and the balance it maintained between aristocratic (the senate), monarchical (the consuls), and popular (the assemblies) elements. Now the image of harmony had been shattered. The senate’s authority had been shown to be hollow, defensible in the last resort only through force. The concilium plebis had emerged as an alternative centre of power that could be manipulated by ambitious tribunes, even if following Gaius’ death the tribunate was temporarily quiescent. The equestrians had also gained a new sense of identity, one they could exercise in the courts and, in the upper orders of the comitia centuriata, at the elections of consuls and praetors. Outside Rome the allies, offered but then denied the possibility of citizenship, simmered with new discontent. The failure of the Gracchi marked a watershed in the political history of the republic.
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