A History of Rome, Vol 1 by A H.J. Greenidge

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CHAPTER IV

Rome had lived for nine years in a feverish atmosphere of projected
reform; yet not a single question raised by her bolder spirits had
received its final answer. The agrarian legislation had indeed run a
successful course; yet the very hindrance to its operation at a critical
moment had, in the eyes of the discontented, turned success into failure
and left behind a bitter feeling of resentment at the treacherous
dexterity of the government. The men, in whose imagined interests the
people had been defrauded of their coveted land, had by a singular irony
of fortune been driven ignominiously from Rome and were now the victims
of graver suspicions on the part of the government than on that of the
Roman mob. The effect of the late senatorial diplomacy had been to
create two hostile classes instead of one. From both these classes the
aristocrats drew their soldiers for the constant campaigns that the
needs of Empire involved: and both were equally resentful of the burdens
and abuses of military service, for which no one was officially directed
to suggest a cure. The poorest classes had been given the ballot when
they wanted food and craved a less precarious sustenance than that
afforded by the capricious benevolence of the rich. The friction between
the senatorial government and the upper middle class was probably
increasing. The equites must have been casting hungry eyes at the new
province of Asia and asking themselves whether commercial interests were
always to be at the mercy of the nobility as represented by the senate,
the provincial administrators and the courts of justice. It was believed
that governors, commissioners and senators were being bought by the gold
of kings, and that mines of wealth were being lost to the honest
capitalist through the utter corruption of the governing few. The final
threats of Tiberius Gracchus were still in the air, and a vast unworked
material lay ready to the hand of the aspiring agitator. In an ancient
monarchy or aristocracy of the feudal type, where abuses have become
sanctified by tradition, or in a modern nation or state with its
splendid capacity for inertia due to the habitual somnolence of the
majority of its electors, such questions may vaguely suggest themselves
for half a century without ever receiving an answer. But Rome could only
avoid a revolution by discarding her constitution. The sovereignty of
the people was a thesis which the senate dared not attack; and this
sovereignty had for the first time in Roman history become a stern
reality. The city in its vastness now dominated the country districts:
and the sovereign, now large, now small, now wild, now sober, but ever
the sovereign in spite of his kaleidoscopic changes, could be summoned
at any moment to the Forum. Democratic agitation was becoming habitual.
It is true that it was also becoming unsafe. But a man who could hold
the wolf by the ears for a year or two might work a revolution in Rome
and perhaps be her virtual master.

It was no difficult task to find the man, for there was one who was
marked out by birth, traditions, temperament and genius as the fittest
exponent of a cause which, in spite of its intricate complications that
baffled the analysis of the ordinary mind, could still in its essential
features be described as the cause of the people. It is indeed singular
that, in a political civilisation so unkind as the Roman to the merits
of youth, hopes should be roused and fear inspired by a man so young and
inexperienced as Caius Gracchus. But the popular fancy is often caught
by the immaturity that is as yet unhampered by caution and undimmed by
disillusion, and by the fresh young voice that has not yet been attuned
to the poor half-truths which are the stock-in-trade of the worldly
wise. And those who were about Gracchus must soon have seen that the
traces of youth were to be found only in his passion, his frankness, his
impetuous vigour; no discerning eye could fail to be aware of the cool,
calculating, intellect which unconsciously used emotion as its mask, of
a mind that could map and plan a political campaign in perfect
self-confident security, view the country as a whole and yet master
every detail, and then leave the issue of the fight to burning words and
passionate appeals. This supreme combination of emotional and artistic
gifts, which made Gracchus so irresistible as a leader, was strikingly
manifested in his oratory. We are told of the intensity of his mien, the
violence of his gestures, the restlessness that forced him to pace the
Rostra and pluck the toga from his shoulder, of the language that roused
his hearers to an almost intolerable tension of pity or
indignation.[568] Nature had made him the sublimest, because the most
unconscious of actors; eyes, tone, gesture all answered the bidding of
the magic words.[569] Sometimes the emotion was too highly strung; the
words would become coarser, the voice harsher, the faultless sentences
would grow confused, until the soft tone of a flute blown by an
attendant slave would recall his mind to reason and his voice to the
accustomed pitch.[570] Men contrasted him with his gentle and stately
brother Tiberius, endowed with all the quiet dignity of the Roman
orator, and diverging only from the pure and polished exposition of his
cause to awake a feeling of commiseration for the wrongs which he
unfolded.[571] Tiberius played but on a single chord; Caius on many.
Tiberius appealed to noble instincts, Caius appealed to all and his
Protean manifestations were a symbol of a more complex creed, a wider
knowledge of humanity, a greater recklessness as to his means, and of
that burning consciousness, which Tiberius had not, that there were
personal wrongs to be avenged as well as political ideas to be realised.
To a narrow mind the vendetta is simply an act of justice; to an
intellectual hater such as Gracchus it is also a work of reason. The
folly of crime but exaggerates its grossness, and the hatred for the
criminal is merged in an exalting and inspiring contempt. Yet the man
thus attuned to passion was, what every great orator must be, a painful
student of the most delicate of arts. The language of the successful
demagogue seldom becomes the study of the schools; yet so it was with
Gracchus. The orators of a later age, whose critical appreciation was
purer than their practice, could find no better guide to the aspirant
for forensic fame than the speeches of the turbulent tribune. Cicero
dwells on the fulness and richness of his flow of words, the grandeur
and dignity of the expression, the acuteness of the thought.[572] They
seemed to some to lack the finishing touch;[573] which is equivalent to
saying that with him oratory had not degenerated into rhetoric. The few
fragments that survive awaken our wonder, first for their marvellous
simplicity and clearness: then, for the dexterous perfection of their
form. The balance of the rhythmic clauses never obscures or overloads
the sense. Gracchus could tell a tale, like that of the cruel wrongs
inflicted on the allies, which could arouse a thrill of horror without
also awakening the reflection that the speaker was a man of great
sensibility and had a wonderful command of commiserative terminology. He
could ask the crowd where he should fly, whether to the Capitol dripping
with a brother's blood, or to the home where the widowed mother sat in
misery and tears;[574] and no one thought that this was a mere figure of
speech. It all seemed real, because Gracchus was a true artist as well
as a true man, and knew by an unerring instinct when to pause. This type
of objective oratory, with its simple and vivid pictures, its brilliant
but never laboured wit, its capacity for producing the illusion that the
man is revealed in the utterance, its suggestion of something deeper
than that which the mere words convey--a suggestion which all feel but
only the learned understand--is equally pleasing to the trained and the
unlettered mind. The polished weapon, which dazzled the eyes of the
crowd, was viewed with respect even by the cultured nobles against whom
it was directed.

Caius's qualities had been tested for some years before he attained the
tribunate, and the promise given by his name, his attitude and his
eloquence was strengthened by the fact that he had no rival in the
popular favour. Carbo was probably on his way to the Optimates, and
Flaccus's failure was too recent to make him valuable in any other
quality than that of an assistant. But Caius had risen through the
opportunities given by the agitation which these men had sustained,
although his advance to the foremost place seemed more like the work of
destiny than of design. When a youth of twenty-one, he had found himself
elevated to the rank of a land commissioner;[575] but this accidental
identification with Tiberius's policy was not immediately followed by
any action which betrayed a craving for an active political career. He
is said to have shunned the Forum, that training school and advertising
arena where the aspiring youth of Rome practised their litigious
eloquence, and to have lived a life of calm retirement which some
attributed to fear and others to resentment. It was even believed by a
few that he doubted the wisdom of his brother's career.[576] But It was
soon found that the leisure which he cultivated was not that of easy
enjoyment and did not promise prolonged repose. He was grappling with
the mysteries of language, and learning by patient study the art of
finding the words that would give to thought both form and wings. The
thought, too, must have been taking a clearer shape: for Tiberius had
left a heritage of crude ideas, and men were trying to introduce some of
these into the region of practical politics. The first call to arms was
Carbo's proposal for legalising re-election to the tribunate. It drew
from Gracchus a speech in its support, which contained a bitter
indictment of those who had been the cause of the "human sacrifice"
fulfilled in his brother's murder.[577] Five years later he was amongst
the foremost of the opponents of the alien-act of Pennus, and exposed
the dangerous folly involved in a jealous policy of exclusion. But the
courts of law are said to have given him the first great opportunity of
revealing his extraordinary powers to the world. As an advocate for a
friend called Vettius, he delivered a speech which seemed to lift him to
a plane unapproachable by the other orators of the day. The spectacle of
the crowd almost raving with joy and frantically applauding the
new-found hero, showed that a man had appeared who could really touch
the hearts of the people, and is said to have suggested to men of
affairs that every means must be used to hinder Gracchus's accession to
the tribunate.[578] The chance of the lot sent him as quaestor with the
consul Orestes to Sardinia. It was with joyful hearts that his enemies
saw him depart to that unhealthy clime,[579] and to Caius himself the
change to the active life of the camp was not unpleasing. He is said
still to have dreaded the plunge into the stormy sea of politics, and in
Sardinia he was safe from the appeals of the people and the entreaties
of his friends.[580] Yet already he had received a warning that there
was no escape. While wrestling with himself as to whether he should seek
the quaestorship, his fevered mind had conjured up a vision. The phantom
of his brother had appeared and addressed him in these words "Why dost
thou linger, Caius? It is not given thee to draw back. One life, one
death is fated for us both, as defenders of the people's rights." His
belief in the reality of this warning is amply attested;[581] but the
sense that he was predestined and foredoomed, though it may have given
an added seriousness to his life, left him as calm and vigorous as
before. Like Tiberius he was within a sphere of his father's influence,
and this memory must have stimulated his devotion to his military and
provincial duties. He won distinction in the field and a repute for
justice in his dealings with the subject tribes, while his simplicity of
life and capacity for toil suggested the veteran campaigner, not the
tyro from the most luxurious of cities.[582] The extent of the services
in Sardinia and neighbouring lands which his name and character enabled
him to render to the State, has been perhaps exaggerated, or at least
faultily stated, by our authority; but, in view of the unquestioned
confidence shown by the Numantines in his brother when as young a man,
there is no reason to doubt their reality. It is said that, when the
treacherous winter of Sardinia had shaken the troops with chills, the
commander sent to the cities asking for a supply of clothing. These
towns, which were probably federate communities and exempt by treaty
from the requisitions of Rome, appealed to the senate. They feared no
doubt the easy lapse of an act of kindness into a burden fixed by
precedent. The senate, as in duty bound, upheld their contention; and
suffering and disease would have reigned in the Roman camp, had not
Gracchus visited the cities in person and prevailed on them to send the
necessary help.[583] On another occasion envoys from Micipsa of Numidia
are said to have appeared at Rome and offered a supply of corn for the
Sardinian army. The request had perhaps been made by Gracchus. To the
Numidian king he was simply the grandson of the elder Africanus: And the
envoys in their simplicity mentioned his name as the Intermediary of the
royal bounty. The senate, we are told, rejected the Proffered help. The
curious parallelism between the present career of Caius and the early
activities of his brother must have struck many; to the senate these
proofs of energy and devotion seemed but the prelude to similar
ingenious attempts to capture public favour at home: and their fears are
said to have helped them to the decision to keep Orestes for a further
year as proconsul in Sardinia.[584] It is possible that the resolution
was partly due to military exigencies; the fact that the troops were
relieved was natural in consideration of the sufferings which they had
undergone, but the retention of the general to complete a desultory
campaign which chiefly demanded knowledge of the country, was a wise and
not unusual proceeding. It was, however, an advantage that, as custom
dictated, the quaestor must remain in the company of his commander.
Gracchus's reappearance in Rome was postponed for a year. It was a
slight grace, but much might happen in the time.

It was in this latter sense that the move was interpreted by the
quaestor. A trivial wrong inflamed the impetuous and resentful nature
which expectation and entreaty had failed to move. Stung by the belief
that he was the victim of a disgraceful subterfuge, Gracchus immediately
took ship to Rome. His appearance in the capital was something of a
shock even to his friends.[585] Public sentiment regarded a quaestor as
holding an almost filial relation to his superior; the ties produced by
their joint activity were held to be indissoluble,[586] and the
voluntary departure of the subordinate was deemed a breach of official
duty. Lapses in conduct on the part of citizens engaged in the public
service, which fell short of being criminal, might be visited with
varying degrees of ignominy by the censorship: and it happened that this
court of morals was now in existence in the persons of the censors Cn.
Servilius Caepio and L. Cassius Longinus, who had entered office in the
previous year. The censorian judgments, although arbitrary and as a rule
spontaneous, were sometimes elicited by prosecution: and an accuser was
found to bring the conduct of Gracchus formally before the notice of the
magistrates. Had the review of the knights been in progress after his
arrival, his case would have been heard during the performance of this
ceremony; for he was as yet but a member of the equestrian order, and
the slightest disability pronounced against him, had he been found
guilty, would have assumed the form of the deprivation of his public
horse and his exclusion from the eighteen centuries. But it is possible
that, at this stage of the history of the censorship, penalties could be
inflicted upon the members of all classes at any date preceding the
lustral sacrifice, that the usual examination of the citizen body had
been completed, and that Gracchus appeared alone before the tribunal of
the censors. His defence became famous;[587] its result is unknown. The
trial probably ended in his acquittal,[588] although condemnation would
have exercised little influence on his subsequent career, for the
ignominy pronounced by the censors entailed no disability for holding a
magistracy. But, whatever may have been the issue, Gracchus improved the
occasion by an harangue to the people,[589] in which he defended his
conduct as one of their representatives in Sardinia. The speech was
important for its caustic descriptions of the habits of the nobility
when freed from the moral atmosphere of Rome. With extreme ingenuity he
worked into the description of the habits of his own official life a
scathing indictment, expressed in the frankest terms, of the
self-seeking, the luxury, the unnatural vices, the rampant robbery of
the average provincial despot. His auditors learnt the details of a
commander's environment--the elaborate cooking apparatus, the throng of
handsome favourites, the jars of wine which, when emptied, returned to
Rome as receptacles of gold and silver mysteriously acquired. Gracchus
must have delighted his audience with a subject on which the masses love
to dwell, the vices of their superiors. The luridness of the picture
must have given it a false appearance of universal truth. It seemed to
be the indictment of a class, and suggested that the speaker stood aloof
from his own order and looked only to the pure judgment of the people.
His enemies tried a new device. They knew that one flaw in his armour
was his sympathy with the claims of the allies. Could he be compromised
as an agent in that dark conspiracy which had prompted the impudent
Italian claims and ended in open rebellion, his credit would be gone,
even if his career were not closed by exile. He was accordingly
threatened with an impeachment for complicity in the movement which had
issued in the outbreak at Fregellae. It is uncertain whether he was
forced to submit to the judgment of a court; but we are told that he
dissipated every suspicion, and surmounted the last and most dangerous
of the obstacles with which his path was blocked.[590] Straightway he
offered himself for the tribunate, and, as the day of the election
approached, every effort was made by the nobility to secure his defeat.
Old differences were forgotten; a common panic produced harmony amongst
the cliques; it even seems as if his opponents agreed that no man of
extreme views should be advanced against him, for Gracchus in his
tribunate had to contend with no such hostile colleague as Octavius. The
candidature of an extremist might mean votes for Gracchus: and it was
preferable to concentrate support on neutral men, or even on men of
liberal views who were known to be in favour with the crowd. The great
_clientele_ of the country districts was doubtless beaten up; and we
know that, on the other side, the hopes of the needy agriculturist, and
the gratitude of the newly established peasant farmer, brought many a
supporter to Gracchus from distant Italian homesteads. The city was so
flooded by the inrush of the country folk that many an elector found
himself without a roof to shelter him, and the place of voting could
accommodate only a portion of the crowd. The rest climbed on roofs and
tiles, and filled the air with discordant party cries until space was
given for a descent to the voting enclosures. When the poll was
declared, it was found that the electoral manoeuvres of the nobility had
been so far successful that Gracchus occupied but the fourth place on
the list.[591] But, from the moment of his entrance on office, his
predominance was assured. We hear nothing of the colleagues whom he
overshadowed. Some may have been caught in the stream of Gracchus's
eloquence; others have found it useless or dangerous to oppose the
enthusiasm which his proposals aroused, and the formidable combination
which he created by the alluring prospects that he held out to the
members of the equestrian order. The collegiate character of the
magistracy practically sank into abeyance, and his rule was that of a
single man. First he gave vent to the passions of the mob by dwelling,
as no one had yet dared to do, on the gloomy tragedy of his brother's
fall and the cruel persecution which had followed the catastrophe. The
blood of a murdered tribune was wholly unavenged in a state which had
once waged war with Falerii to punish a mere insult to the holy office,
and had condemned a citizen to death because he had not risen from his
place while a tribune walked through the Forum. "Before your very eyes,"
he said, "they beat Tiberius to death with cudgels; they dragged his
dead body from the Capitol through the midst of the city to cast it into
the river; those of his friends whom they seized, they put to death
untried. And yet think how your constitution guards the citizen's life!
If a man is accused on a capital charge and does not immediately obey
the summons, it is ordained that a trumpeter come at dawn before his
door and summon him by sound of trumpet; until this is done, no vote may
be pronounced against him. So carefully and watchfully did our ancestors
regulate the course of justice." [592] A cry for vengeance is here
merged in a great constitutional principle; and these utterances paved
the way for the measure immediately formulated that no court should be
established to try a citizen on a capital charge, unless such a court
had received the sanction of the people.[593] The power of the Comitia
to delegate its jurisdiction without appeal is here affirmed; the right
of the senate to institute an inquisition without appeal is here denied.
The measure was a development of a suggestion which had been made by
Tiberius Gracchus, who had himself probably called attention to the fact
that the establishment of capital commissions by the senate was a
violation of the principle of the _provocatio_ Caius Gracchus, however,
did not attempt to ordain that an appeal should be possible from the
judgment of the standing commissions (_quaestiones perpetuae_); for,
though the initiative in the creation of these courts had been taken by
the senate, they had long received the sanction of law, and their
self-sufficiency was perhaps covered by the principle that the people,
in creating a commission, waived its own powers of final jurisdiction.
But there were other technical as well as practical disadvantages in
instituting an appeal from these commissions. The _provocatio_ had
always been the challenge to the decision of a magistrate; but in these
standing courts the actions of the president and of the _judices_ who
sat with him were practically indistinguishable, and the sentence
pronounced was in no sense a magisterial decision. The courts had also
been instituted to avoid the clumsiness of popular jurisdiction; but
this clumsiness would be restored, if their decision was to be shaken by
a further appeal to the Comitia. Gracchus, in fact, when he proposed
this law, was not thinking of the ordinary course of jurisdiction at
all. He had before his mind the summary measures by which the senate
took on itself to visit such epidemics of crime as were held to be
beyond the strength of the regular courts, and more especially the
manner in which this body had lately dealt with alleged cases of
sedition or treason. The investigation directed against the supporters
of his brother was the crucial instance which he brought before the
people, and it is possible that, at a still later date, the inquiry
which followed the fall of Fregellae had been instituted on the sole
authority of the senate and had found a certain number of victims in the
citizen body. Practically, therefore, Gracchus in this law wholly
denied, either as the result of experience or by anticipation, the
legality of the summary jurisdiction which followed a declaration of
martial law.

In the creation of these extraordinary commissions the senate never took
upon itself the office of judge, nor was the commission itself composed
of senators appointed by the house. The jurisdiction was exercised by a
magistrate at the bidding of the senate, and the court thus constituted
selected its assessors, who formed a mere council for advice, at its own
discretion. It was plain that, if the law was to be effective, its chief
sanction must be directed, not against the corporation which appointed,
but against the judge. The responsibility of the individual is the
easiest to secure, and no precautions against martial law can be
effective if a division of authority, or even obedience to authority, is
once admitted. Gracchus, therefore, pronounced that criminal proceedings
should be possible against the magistrate who had exercised the
jurisdiction now pronounced illegal.[594] The common law of Rome went
even further, and pronounced every individual responsible for illegal
acts done at the bidding of a magistrate. The crime which the magistrate
had committed by the exercise of this forbidden jurisdiction was
probably declared to be treason: and, as there was no standing court at
Rome which took cognisance of this offence, the jurisdiction of the
Comitia was ordained. The penalty for the crime was doubtless a capital
one, and by ancient prescription such a punishment necessitated a trial
before the Assembly of the Centuries. It is, however, possible that
Gracchus rendered the plebeian assembly of the Tribes competent to
pronounce the capital sentence against the magistrate who had violated
the prescriptions of his law. But, although the magistrate was the
chief, he appears not to have been the sole offender under the
provisions of this bill. In spite of the fact that the senate as a whole
was incapable of being punished for the advice which had prompted the
magistrate to an illegal course of action, it seems that the individual
senator who moved, or perhaps supported, the decree which led to the
forbidden jurisdiction, was made liable to the penalties of the
law.[595] The operation of the enactment was made retrospective, or was
perhaps conceived by its very nature to cover the past abuses which had
called it into being; for in a sense it created no new crime, but simply
restated the principle of the appeal in a form suited to the proceedings
against which it wished to guard. It might have been argued that
customary law protected the consul who directed the proceedings of the
court which doomed the supporters of Tiberius Gracchus; but the
argument, if used, was of no avail. Popillius was to be the witness to
all men of the reality of this reassertion of the palladium of Roman
liberty. An impeachment was framed against him, and either before or
after his withdrawal from Rome, Caius Gracchus himself formulated and
carried through the Plebs the bill of interdiction which doomed him to
exile.[596] It was in vain that Popillius's young sons and numerous
relatives besought the people for mercy.[597] The memory of the outrage
was too recent, the joyful sense of the power of retaliation too novel
and too strong. All that was possible was a counter demonstration which
should emphasise the sympathy of loyalists with the illustrious victim,
and Popillius was escorted to the gates by a weeping crowd.[598] We know
that condemnation also overtook his colleague Rupilius,[599] and it is
probable that he too fell a victim to the sense of vengeance or of
justice aroused by the Gracchan law.