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

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A less justifiable spirit of retaliation is exhibited by another
enactment with which Gracchus inaugurated his tribunate, although in
this, as in ail his other acts, the blow levelled at his enemies was not
devoid of a deep political significance. He introduced a proposal that a
magistrate who had been deposed by the people should not be allowed to
hold any further office.[600] Octavius was the obvious victim, and the
mere personal significance of the measure does not necessarily imply
that Gracchus was burning with resentment against a man, whose
opposition to his brother had rapidly been forgotten in the degradation
which he had experienced at that brother's hands. Hatred to the injured
may be a sentiment natural to the wrongdoer, but is not likely to be
imparted even to the most ardent supporter of the author of the
mischief. It were better to forget Octavius, if Octavius would allow
himself to be forgotten; but the sturdy champion of the senate, still in
the middle of his career, may have been a future danger and a present
eyesore to the people: Gracchus's invectives probably carried him and
his auditors further than he intended, and the rehabilitation of his
brother's tribunate in its integrity may have seemed to demand this
strong assertion of the justice of his act. But the legality of
deposition by the people was a still more important point. Merely to
assert it would be to imply that Tiberius had been wrong. How could it
be more emphatically proclaimed than by making its consequences
perpetual and giving it a kind of penal character? But the personal
aspect of the measure proved too invidious even for its proposer. A
voice that commanded his respect was raised against it: and Gracchus in
withdrawing the bill confessed that Octavius was spared through the
intercession of Cornelia.[601]

So far his legislation had but given an outlet to the justifiable
resentment of the people, and a guarantee for the security of their most
primitive rights. This was to be followed by an appeal to their
interests and a measure for securing their permanent comfort. The
wonderful solidarity of Gracchus and his supporters, the crowning
triumph of the demagogue which is to make each man feel that he is an
agent in his own salvation, have been traced to this constructive
legislation for the benefit of classes, which ancient authors, writing
under aristocratic prepossessions, have described by the ugly name of
bribery.[602] The poor of Rome, if we include in this designation those
who lived on the margin as well as those who were sunk in the depths of
destitution, probably included the majority of the inhabitants of the
town. The city had practically no organised industries. The retail
trader and the purveyor of luxuries doubtless flourished; but, in the
scanty manufactures which the capital still provided, the army of free
labour must have been always worsted by the cruel competition of the
cheaper and more skilful slave or freedman. But the poor of Rome did not
form the cowed and shivering class that are seen on the streets of a
northern capital. They were the merry and vivacious lazzaroni of the
pavement and the portico, composite products of many climes, with all
the lively endurance of the southerner and intellects sharpened by the
ingenious devices requisite for procuring the minimum sustenance of
life. Could they secure this by the desultory labour which alone was
provided by the economic conditions of Rome, their lot was far from
unhappy. As in most ancient civilisations, the poor were better provided
with the amenities than with the bare necessities of existence. Although
the vast provision for the pleasures of the people, by which the Caesars
maintained their popularity, was yet lacking, and even the erection of a
permanent theatre was frowned on by the senate,[603] yet the capital
provided endless excitement for the leisured mind and the observant eye.
It was for their benefit that the gladiatorial show was provided by the
rich, and the gorgeous triumph by the State; but it was the antics of
the nobility in the law courts and at the hustings that afforded the
more constant and pleasing spectacle. Attendance at the Contiones and
the Comitia not only delighted the eye and ear, but filled the heart
with pride, and sometimes the purse with money. For here the units,
inconsiderable in themselves, had become a collective power; they could
shout down the most dignified of the senators, exalt the favourite of
the moment, reward a service or revenge a slight in the perfect security
given by the secrecy of the ballot. Large numbers of the poorer class
were attached to the great houses by ancestral ties; for the descendants
of freedmen, although they could make no legal claim on the house which
represented the patron of their ancestors, were too valuable as voting
units to be neglected by its representatives, even when the sense of the
obligations of wealth, which was one of the best features of Roman
civilisation, failed to provide an occasional alleviation for the misery
of dependants. From a political point of view, this dependence was
utterly demoralising; for it made the recipients of benefits either
blind supporters of, or traitors to, the personal cause which they
professed. It was on the whole preferable that, if patronage was
essential, the State should take over this duty; the large body of the
unattached proletariate would be placed on a level with their more
fortunate brethren, and the latter would be freed from a dependence
which merely served private and selfish interests. A semi-destitute
proletariate can only be dealt with in three ways. They may be forced to
work, encouraged to emigrate, or partially supported by the State. The
first device was impossible, for it was not a submerged fraction with
which Rome had to deal, but the better part of the resident sovereign
body; the second, although discredited by the senate, had been tried in
one form by Tiberius Gracchus and was to be attempted in another shape
by Caius; but it is a remedy that can never be perfect, for it does not
touch the class, more highly strung, more intelligent, and at the same
time more capable of degradation, which the luxury of the capital
enthrals. The last device had not yet been attempted. It remained for
Gracchus to try it. We have no analysis of his motives; but many
provocatives to his modest attempt at state socialism may be suggested.
There was first the Hellenic ideal of the leisured and independent
citizen, as exemplified by the state payments and the "distributions"
which the great leaders of the old world had thought necessary for the
fulfilment of democracy. There was secondly the very obvious fact that
the government was reaping a golden harvest from the provinces and
merely scattering a few stray grains amongst its subjects. There was
thirdly the consideration that much had been done for the landed class
and nothing for the city proletariate. Other considerations of a more
immediate and economic character were doubtless present. The area of
corn production was now small. Sicily was still perhaps beggared by its
servile war, and the granary of Rome was practically to be found in
Africa. The import of corn from this quarter, dependent as it was on the
weather and controlled purely by considerations of the money-market, was
probably fitful, and the price must have been subject to great
variations. But, at this particular time, the supply must have been
diminished to an alarming extent, and the price proportionately raised,
by the swarm of locusts which had lately made havoc of the crops of
Africa.[604] Lastly, the purely personal advantage of securing a
subsidised class for the political support of the demagogue of the
moment--a consideration which is but a baser interpretation of the
Hellenic ideal--must have appealed to the practical politician in
Gracchus as the more impersonal view appealed to the statesman. He would
secure a permanent and stable constituency, and guard against the
danger, which had proved fatal to his brother, of the absence from Rome
of the majority of his supporters at some critical moment.

From the imperfect records of Gracchus's proposal we gather that a
certain amount of corn was to be sold monthly at a reduced price to any
citizen who offered himself as a purchaser.[605] The rate was fixed at
6-1/3 asses the modius, which is calculated to have been about half the
market-price.[606] The monthly distribution would practically have
excluded all but the urban proletariate, and would thus have both
limited the operation of the relief to the poor of the city and invited
an increase in its numbers. But the details of the measure, which would
be decisive as to its economic character, are unknown to us. We are not
told what proportion the monthly quantity of grain sold at this cheap
rate bore to the total amount required for the support of a family;
whether the relief was granted only to the head of a house or also to
his adult sons; whether any one who claimed the rights of citizenship
could appear at the monthly sale, or only those who had registered their
names at some given time. The fact of registration, if it existed, might
have been regarded as a stigma and might thus have limited the number of
recipients. Some of the economic objections to his scheme were not
unknown to Gracchus; indeed they were pressed home vigorously by his
opponents. It was pointed out that he was enervating the labourer and
exhausting the treasury, The validity of the first objection depends to
a large extent on the unknown "data" which we have just mentioned.
Gracchus may have maintained that a greater standard of comfort would be
secured for the same amount of work. The second objection he was so far
from admitting that he asserted that his proposal would really lighten
the burdens of the Aerarium.[607] He may have taken the view that a
moderate, steady and calculable loss on corn purchased in large
quantities, and therefore presumably at a reduced price, would be
cheaper in the end than the cost entailed by the spasmodic attempts
which the State had to make in times of crisis to put grain upon the
market; and there may have been some truth in the idea that, when the
State became for the first time a steady purchaser, competition between
the publicans of Sicily or the proprietors of Africa might greatly
reduce the normal market price. He does not seem to have been disturbed
by the consideration that the sale of corn below the market price at
Rome was hardly the best way of helping the Italian farmer. The State
would certainly buy in the cheapest market, and this was not to be found
in Italy. But it is probable that under no circumstances could Rome have
become the usual market for the produce of the recently established
proprietors, and that, except at times of unusual scarcity in the
transmarine provinces, imported corn could always have undersold that
which was grown in Italy. Under the new system the Italian husbandman
would find a purchaser in the State, if Sicily and Africa were visited
by some injury to their crops. A vulnerable point in the Gracchan system
of sale was exhibited in the fact that no inquiry was instituted as to
the means of the applicants. This blemish was vigorously brought home to
the legislator when the aged noble, Calpurnius Piso surnamed "the
Frugal," the author of the first law that gave redress to the
provincials, and a vigorous opponent of Gracchus's scheme, gravely
advanced on the occasion of the first distribution and demanded his
appropriate share.[608] The object lesson would be wasted on those who
hold that the honourable acceptance of relief implies the universality
of the gift: that the restraining influences, if they exist, should be
moral and not the result of inquisition. But neither the possibility nor
the necessity of discrimination would probably have been allowed by
Gracchus. It would have been resented by the people, and did not appeal
to the statesmanship, widely spread in the Greek and not unknown in the
Roman world, which regarded it as one of the duties of a State to
provide cheap food for its citizens. The lamentations of a later day
over a pauperised proletariate and an exhausted treasury[609] cannot
strictly be laid to the account of the original scheme, Except in so far
as it served as a precedent; they were the consequence of the action of
later demagogues who, instructed by Gracchus as to the mode in which an
easy popularity might be secured, introduced laws which sanctioned an
almost gratuitous distribution of grain. The Gracchan law contained a
provision for the building of additional store-houses for the
accumulation of the great reserve of corn, which was demanded by the new
system of regular public sales, and the Sempronian granaries thus
created remained as a witness of the originality and completeness of the
tribune's work.[610]

The Roman citizen was still frequently summoned from his work, or roused
from his lethargy, by the call of military service; and the practice of
the conscription fostered a series of grievances, one of which had
already attracted the attention of Tiberius Gracchus. Caius was bound to
deal with the question: and the two provisions of his enactment which
are known to us, show a spirit of moderation which neither justifies the
belief that the demagogue was playing to the army, nor accredits the
view that his interference relaxed the bonds of discipline amongst the
legions.[611] The most scandalous anomaly in the Roman army-system was
the miserable pittance earned by the conscript when the legal deductions
had been made from his nominal rate of pay. His daily wage was but
one-third of the denarius, or five and one-third asses a day, as it had
remained unaltered from the times of the Second Punic War, in spite of
the fact that the conditions of service were now wholly different and
that garrison duty in the provinces for long periods of years had
replaced the temporary call-to-arms which the average Italian campaign
alone demanded; and from this quota was deducted the cost of the
clothing which he wore and, as there is every reason to believe, of the
whole of the rations which he consumed. We should have expected a
radical reformer to have raised his pay or at least to have given him
free food. But Gracchus contented himself with enacting that the
soldier's clothing should be given him free of charge by the State.[612]
Another military abuse was due to the difficulty which commanders
experienced in finding efficient recruits. The young and adventurous
supplied better and more willing material than those already habituated
to the careless life of the streets, or already engaged in some settled
occupation: and, although it is scarcely credible that boys under the
age of eighteen were forced to enlist, they were certainly permitted and
perhaps encouraged to join the ranks. The law of Gracchus forbade the
enlistment of a recruit at an age earlier than the completion of the
seventeenth year.[613] These military measures, slight in themselves,
were of importance as marking the beginning of the movement by which the
whole question of army reform, utterly neglected by the government, was
taken up and carried out by independent representatives of the people.
But a Roman army was to a large extent the creation of the executive
power; and it required a military commander, not a tribune, to produce
the radical alterations which alone could make the mighty instrument,
which had won the empire, capable of defending it.

The last boon of Gracchus to the citizen body as a whole was a new
agrarian law.[614] The necessity of such a measure was chiefly due to
the suspension of the work of the agrarian commission, which had proved
an obstacle to the continued execution of his brother's scheme; and
there is every reason for believing that the new Sempronian law restored
their judicial powers to the commissioners. But experience may have
shown that the substance of Tiberius's enactment required to be
supplemented or modified; and Caius adopted the procedure usually
followed by a Roman legislator when he renewed a measure which had
already been in operation. His law was not a brief series of amendments,
but a comprehensive statute, so completely covering the ground of the
earlier Sempronian law that later legislation cites the law of Caius,
and not that of Tiberius Gracchus, as the authority for the regulations
which had revolutionised the tenure of the public land.[615] The new
provisions seem to have dealt with details rather than with principles,
and there is no indication that they aimed at the acquisition of
territory which had been exempted from the operation of the previous
measure, or even touched the hazardous question of the rights of Rome to
the land claimed by the Italian allies. We cannot attempt to define the
extent to which the executive power granted by the new agrarian law was
either necessary or effective. Certainly the returns of the census
during the next ten years show no increase in the number of registered
citizens;[616] but this circumstance may be due to the steps which were
soon to be taken by the opponents of the Gracchi to nullify the results
of their legislation. It is possible, however, that the new corn law may
have somewhat damped the ardour of the proletariate for a life of
agriculture which would have deprived them of its benefits.

The first tribunate of Caius Gracchus doubtless witnessed the completion
of these four acts of legislation, by which the debt to his supporters
was lavishly paid and their aid was enlisted for causes which could only
indirectly be interpreted as their own. But this year probably witnessed
as well the promulgation of the enactments which were to find their
fulfilment in a second tribunate.[617] Foremost amongst these was one
which dealt with the tenure of the judicial power as exercised, not by
the magistrate, but by the panels of jurors who were interpreters both
of law and fact on the standing commissions which had recently been
created by statute. The interest of the masses in this question was
remote. A permanent murder court seems indeed to have had its place
amongst the commissions; but, even though the corruption of its
president had on one occasion been clearly proved,[618] it is not likely
that senatorial judges would have troubled to expose themselves to undue
influences when pronouncing on the _caput_ of a citizen of the lower
class. The fact that this justice was administered by the nobility may
have excited a certain degree of popular interest; but the question of
the transference of the courts from the hands of the senatorial
_judices_ would probably never have been heard of, had not the largest
item in this judicial competence had a decisively political bearing. The
Roman State had been as unsuccessful as others of the ancient world in
keeping its judicial machinery free from the taint of party influences.
It had been accounted one of the surest signs of popular sovereignty
that the people alone could give judgment on the gravest crimes and
pronounce the capital penalty,[619] and recent political thought had
perhaps wholly adapted itself to the Hellenic view that the government
of a state must be swayed by the body of men that enforces criminal
responsibility in political matters. This vital power was still retained
by the Comitia when criminal justice was concerned with those elemental
facts which are the condition of the existence of a state. The people
still took cognisance of treason in all its degrees--a conception which
to the Roman mind embraced almost every possible form of official
maladministration--and the gloomy record of trials before the Comitia,
from this time onward to the close of the Republic, shows that the
weapon was exercised as the most forcible implement of political
chastisement. But chance had lately presented the opportunity of making
the interesting experiment of assimilating criminal jurisdiction in some
of its branches to that of the civil courts. The president and jurors of
one of the newly established _quaestiones_ formed as isolated a group as
the _judex_ of civil justice with his assessors, or the greater panels
of Centumvirs and Decemvirs. They possessed no authority but that of
jurisdiction within their special department; there seemed no reason why
they should be influenced by considerations arising from issues whether
legislative or administrative. But this appearance of detachment was
wholly illusory, and the well-intentioned experiment was as vain as that
of Solon, when he carefully separated the administrative and judicial
boards in the Athenian commonwealth and composed both bodies of
practically identical individuals. The new court for the trial of
extortion, constituted by the Calpurnian and renewed later by a Junian
law, was controlled by a detachment of the governing body which saw in
each impeachment a libel on its own system of administration, and in
each condemnation a new precedent for hampering the uncontrolled power
exercised in the past or coveted for the future by the individual juror.
This class spirit may have been more powerful than bribery in its
production of suspicious acquittals; and the fact that prosecution was
frankly recognised as the commonest of party weapons, and that speeches
for the prosecution and defence teemed with irrelevant political
allusions, reduced the question of the guilt of the accused to
subordinate proportions in the eyes of all the participants in this
judicial warfare. Charges of corruption were so recklessly hurled at
Rome that we can seldom estimate their validity; but the strong
suspicion of bribery is almost as bad for a government as the proved
offence; and it was certain that senatorial judges did not yield to the
evidence which would have supplied conviction to the ordinary man. Some
recent acquittals furnished an excellent text to the reformer. L.
Aurelius Cotta had emerged successfully from a trial, which had been a
mere duel between Scipio Aemilianus for the prosecution and Metellus
Macedonicus for the defence. The judges had shown their resentment of
Scipio's influence by acquitting Cotta; and few of the spectators of the
struggle seem even to have pretended to believe in the innocence of the
accused.[620] The whole settlement of Asia had been so tainted with the
suspicion of pecuniary influences that, when Manius Aquillius
successfully ran the gauntlet of the courts,[621] it was difficult to
believe that the treasures of the East had not co-operated towards the
result, especially as the senate itself by no means favoured some of the
features of Aquillius's organisation of the province. The legates of
some of the plundered dependencies were still in Rome, bemoaning the
verdict and appealing for sympathy with their helpless fellow
subjects[622] Circumstances favoured the reformer; it was possible to
bring a definite case and to produce actual sufferers before the people;
while the senate, perhaps in consequence of the attitude of some honest
dissentients, was unable to make any effectual resistance to the scandal
and its consequences.

Had Gracchus thought of restoring this jurisdiction to the Comitia, he
would have taken a step which had the theoretical justification that, of
all the powers at Rome, the people was the one which had least interest
in provincial misgovernment. But it would have been a retrograde
movement from the point of view of procedure; it would not necessarily
have abolished senatorial influence, and it would not have attained his
object of holding the government permanently in check by the political
recognition of a class which rivalled the senate in the definiteness of
its organisation and surpassed it in the homogeneity of its interests.
The body of capitalists who had assumed the titular designation of
knights, had long been chafing at the complete subjection of their
commercial interests to the caprice of the provincial governor and the
arbitrary dispositions of the home government. Tiberius Gracchus, when
he revealed the way to the promised land, had probably reflected rather
than suggested the ambition of the great business men to have a more
definite place in the administration assigned them. His appeal had come
too late, or seemed too hopeless of success, to win their support for a
reformer who had outraged their feelings as capitalists; but since his
death ten years for reflection had elapsed, and they were years which
witnessed a vast extension of their potential activity, and aroused an
agonised feeling of helplessness at the subordinate part which they
played both to senate and people when the disposal of kingdoms was in
question. The suggestions for giving them a share in the control of the
provincial world may have been numerous, and their variety is reflected
in the different plans which Caius Gracchus himself advanced. The system
at which his brother had hinted was that of a joint board composed of
the existing senators with the addition of an equal number of equites;
and we have already suggested the possibility that this House of Six
Hundred was intended to be the senate of the future, efficient for all
purposes and not exclusively devoted to the work of criminal
jurisdiction. The same significance may attach to the scheme, which
seems to have been propounded by Caius Gracchus during, or perhaps even
before, his first tenure of the tribunate, and appears at intervals in
proposals made by reformers down to the time of Sulla. Gracchus is said
to have suggested the increase of the senate by the addition of three,
or, as one authority states, six hundred members of the equestrian
order.[623] The proposal, if it was one for an enlarged senate, and not
for a joint panel of _judices_, in which a changing body of equites
would act as a check on the permanent senatorial jurors, must soon have
been seen to be utterly unsuited to its purpose. It is a scheme
characteristic of the aristocrat who is posing as a friend of the
mercantile class and hopes to deceive the vigilance of that keen-sighted
fraternity. To give the senate a permanent infusion of new blood would
be simply to strengthen its authority, while completely cutting away the
links which bound the new members to their original class. Even the
swamping of the existing body by a two-thirds majority of new members
would have been transitory in its effects. The new member of the Curia
would soon have shed his old equestrian views and assumed the outlook of
his older peers. It might indeed have been possible to devise a system
by which the senate would, at the recurring intervals of the _lustra_,
have been filled up in equal proportions from ex-magistrates and
knights: and in this way a constant supply of middle-class sentiment
might have been furnished to the governing body. But even this scheme
would have secured to the elected a life-long tenure of power, and this
was a fatal obstacle both to the intentions of the reformer and the
aspirations of the equestrian order. While the former desired a balance
of power, the latter wished that the interests of their class should be
enforced by its genuine representatives. Both knew that a participation
in the executive power was immaterial, and that all that was needed
might be gained by the possession of judicial authority alone.
Gracchus's final decision, therefore, was to create a wholly new panel
of _judices_ which should be made up exclusively from the members of the
titular class of knights.[624]