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

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49

But the commercial life of Italy might be quickened by other means than
the establishment of colonies whether at home or abroad. Gracchus saw
that the question of rapid and easy communication between the existing
towns was all important. The great roads of Rome betrayed their military
intent in the unswerving inflexibility of their course. The positions
which they skirted were of strategic, but not necessarily of industrial,
importance. To bring the hamlet into connection with the township, and
the township into touch with the capital, a series of good cross-roads
was needed; and it was probably to this object that the law of
Gracchus[658] was directed. But ease of communication may serve a
political as well as a commercial object. The representative character
of the Comitia would be increased by the provision of facilities for the
journey to Rome; and perhaps when Gracchus promulgated his measure,
there was already before his mind the possibility of the extension of
the franchise to the Latins, which would vastly increase the numbers of
the rural electorate. In any case, the measure was one which tended to
political centralisation, and Gracchus must have known that the
attainment of this object was essential to the unity and stability of a
popular government.

The great enterprise was carried through with extraordinary rapidity
during his second tribunate. But the hastiness of the construction did
not impair the beauty of the work. We are told that the roads ran
straight and fair through the country districts, showing an even surface
of quarried stone and tight-packed earth. Hollows were filled up,
ravines and torrent beds were bridged, and mounting-blocks for horsemen
lay at short and easy distances on both sides of the level course.[659]
Although the initial expense of this construction may have borne heavily
on the finances of the State, it is probable that the future maintenance
of the roads was provided for in other ways. The commerce which they
fostered may have paid its dues at toll-gates erected for the
purpose:[660] and the ancient Roman device of creating a class of
settlers on the line of a public road, for the purpose of keeping it in
repair,[661] was probably extended. Road-making was often the complement
of agrarian assignation,[662] and the two may have been employed
concurrently by Gracchus. It was the custom to assign public land on the
borders of a highway to settlers, the tenure of which was secured to
them and their heirs on condition of keeping the road in due repair.
Sometimes their own labour and that of their slaves were reckoned the
equivalent of the usual dues; at other times the dues themselves were
used by the public authorities for the purpose. Gracchus may thus have
turned his agrarian law to an end which was not contemplated by that
of Tiberius.

The execution of the law must have been a heavy blow to the power and
prestige of the senate. Its control of the purse was infringed and it
ceased to be the sole employer of public labour. For Gracchus, in
defiance of the principle that the author of a measure should not be its
executant,[663] was his own road-maker, as his brother Tiberius had been
his own land commissioner. He was the patron of the contractor and the
benefactor of the Italian artisan. The bounties which he now gave were
the reward of labour, and not subject to the criticism which had
attended his earlier efforts for the relief of poverty in Rome; but some
pretended to take the sinister view that the bands of workmen by which
he was surrounded might be employed for a less innocent purpose than the
making of roads.[664].

The proceedings of Gracchus during his first year of office had made it
inevitable that he should hold the tribunate for a second time. Enough
had been performed to win him the ardent support of the masses; enough
had been promised to make his return to office desirable, not only to
the people, but to the expectant capitalists. The legal hindrances to
re-election had been removed, or could be evaded, and the continuity of
power, which was essential to the realisation of an adequate programme
of reform, could now for the first time be secured. In the present state
of public feeling there was little probability of the veto being
employed by any one of his future colleagues, although some of these
would inevitably be moderates or members of the senatorial party. But
Gracchus was eager that his cause should be represented in another
department of the State, which presented possibilities of assistance or
of mischief, and that the spectacle of the tribunate as the sole focus
of democratic sentiment, exalting itself in opposition to the higher
magistracies of the people, should, if possible, be averted. In one of
his addresses to the commons he said he had to ask a favour of them.
Were it granted, he would value it above all things; should they think
good to refuse, he would bear no grudge against them. Here he paused;
the favour remained undisclosed; and he left popular imagination to
revel in the possibilities of his claims. It was a happy stroke; for he
had filled the minds of his auditors with a gratifying sense of their
own boundless power, and with suspicions of illegal ambitions, with
which it was well that they should become familiar, but which one
dramatic moment would for the time dispel. His words were interpreted as
a request for the consulship: and the prevalent opinion is said to have
been that he desired to hold this office in combination with the
tribunate. The time for the consular elections was approaching and
expectation was roused to its highest pitch, when Gracchus was seen
conducting Gaius Fannius into the Forum and, with the assistance of his
own friends, accosting the electors in his behalf.[665] The candidate
was a man whose political temperament Caius had had full opportunities
of studying. As a tribune he had been much under the influence of Scipio
Aemilianus,[666] and as he rose slowly through the grades of curule
rank,[667] he must still have retained his character as a moderate. He
was therefore preferable to any candidate put forward by the optimates:
and the influence of Gracchus secured Fannius the consulship almost at
the moment when, without the trouble of a canvass or even of a formal
candidature, he himself secured his second term of office. His position
was further strengthened by the return of the ex-consul Fulvius Flaccus,
as one of his colleagues in the tribunate.

It was now, when the grand programme was actually being carried through,
and the execution of the most varied measures was being pressed on by a
single hand, that the possibilities of personal government were first
revealed in Rome. The fiery orator was less to be dreaded than the
unwearied man of action, whose restless energy was controlled by a
clearness of judgment and concentration of purpose, which could
distinguish every item of his vast sphere of administration and treat
the task of the moment as though it were the one nearest to his heart.
Even those who hated and feared Gracchus were struck with amazement at
the practical genius which he revealed; while the sight of the leader in
the midst of his countless tasks, surrounded by the motley retinue which
they involved, roused the wondering admiration of the masses.[668] At
one moment he was being interviewed by a contractor for public works, at
another by an envoy from some state eager to secure his mediation; the
magistrate, the artisan, the soldier and the man of letters besieged his
presence chamber, and each was received with the appropriate word and
the kindly dignity, which kings may acquire from training, but men of
kingly nature receive from heaven as a seal of their fitness to rule.
The impression of overbearing violence which had been given by his
speeches, was immediately dispelled by contact with the man. The time of
storm and stress had been passed for the moment, and in the fruition of
his temporary power the true character of Gracchus was revealed. The
pure intellectual enjoyment which springs from the sense of efficiency
and the effective pursuit of a long-desired task, will not be shaken by
the awkward impediments of the moment. All the human instruments, which
the work demands, reflect the value of the object to which they
contribute: and Gracchus was saved from the insolent pride of the
patrician ruler and the helpless peevishness of the mere agitator whom
circumstances have thrust into power, by the fact that his emotional
nature was mastered by an intellect which had outlived prejudice and had
never known the sense of incapacity. By the very character of its
circumstances the regal nature was forced into a style of life which
resembled and foreshadowed that of the coming monarchy. The
accessibility to his friends and clients of every grade was the pride of
the Roman noble, and doubtless Gracchus would willingly have modelled
his receptions on the informal pattern which sufficed the proudest
patrician at the head of the largest _clientele_. But Gracchus's callers
were not even limited to the whole of Rome; they came from Italy and the
provinces: and it was found to be essential to adopt some rules of
precedence, which would produce a methodical approach to his presence
and secure each of his visitors an adequate hearing. He was the first
Roman, we are told, to observe certain rules of audience. Some members
of the crowd which thronged his ante-chamber, were received singly,
others in smaller or in larger groups.[669] It is improbable that the
mode of reception varied wholly with the official or social rank of
those admitted; the nature of the client's business must also have
dictated the secrecy or publicity of the interview; but the system must
have seemed to his baffled enemies a welcome confirmation of their real
or pretended fears--a symptom of the coming, if not actual, overthrow of
Republicanism, the suspicion of which might one day be driven even into
the thick heads of the gaping crowds, who stood by the portals to gaze
at the ever-shifting throng of callers and to marvel at the power and
popularity of their leader. Had Gracchus been content to live in the
present and to regard his task as completed, it is just possible that
the diverse interests which he had so dexterously welded together might
have enabled him to secure, not indeed a continuity of power (for that
would have been as strenuously resisted by the middle as by the upper
class), but immediate security from the gathering conspiracy, the
preservation of his life, and the probability of a subsequent political
career. It is, however, difficult, to conceive that the position which
Gracchus held could be either resigned or forgiven; and, although we
cannot credit him with any conscious desire for holding a position not
admitted by the laws, yet his genius unconsciously led him to identify
the commonwealth with himself, while his mind, as receptive as it was
progressive, would not have readily acquiesced in the view that a
political creation can at any moment be called complete. The
disinterested statesman will cling to power as tenaciously as one
devoured by the most sordid ambition: and even on the lowest ground of
personal security, the possession of authority is perhaps more necessary
to the one than to the other. So indissolubly blended are the power and
the projects of a leader, that it is idle to raise the question whether
personal motives played any part in the project with which Gracchus was
now about to delight his enemies and alienate his friends. He took up
anew the question of the enfranchisement of the Italians--a question
which the merest political tyro could have told him was enough to doom
the statesman who spoke even a word in its favour. But Caius's position
was no ordinary one, and he may have regarded his present influence as
sufficient to induce the people to accept the unpalatable measure, the
success of which might win for himself and his successors a wider
constituency and a more stable following. The error in judgment is
excusable in one who had never veiled his sympathy with the Italian
cause, and had hitherto found it no hindrance to his popularity; but so
clear-sighted a man as Gracchus must have felt at times that he was
staking, not only his own career, but the fate of the programme and the
party which he had built up, on the chance of securing an end, which had
ceased to be regarded as the mere removal of an obstacle and had grown
to be looked on as the coping-stone of a true reformer's work.

The scope of his proposal[670] was more moderate than that which had
been put forward by Flaccus. He suggested the grant of the full rights
of citizenship to the Latins, and of Latin rights to the other Italian
allies.[671] Italy was thus, from the point of view of private law, to
be Romanised almost up to the Alps;[672] while the cities already in
enjoyment of some or all of the private privileges of the Roman, were to
see the one anomaly removed, which created an invidious distinction
between them and the burgess towns, hampered their commerce, and
imperilled their landed possessions. The proposal had the further
advantage that it took account of the possible unwillingness of many of
the federate cities to accept the Roman franchise; such a refusal was
not likely to be made to the offer of Latin rights: for the Latin
community was itself a federate city with its own laws, magistrates and
courts, and the sense of autonomy would be satisfied while many of the
positive benefits of Roman citizenship would be gained. Grades of
privilege would still exist in Italy, and a healthy discontent might in
time be fostered, which would lead all Italian communities to seek
absorption into the great city. Past methods of incorporation might be
held to furnish a precedent; the scheme proposed by Gracchus was hardly
more revolutionary than that which had, in the third and at the
beginning of the second centuries, resulted in the conferment of full
citizenship on the municipalities of half-burgesses. It differed from it
only in extending the principle to federate towns; but the rights of the
members of the Latin cities bore a close resemblance to those of the old
_municipes_, and they might easily be regarded as already enjoying the
partial citizenship of Rome. The conferment of this partial citizenship
on the other Italians, while in no way destroying local institutions or
impairing local privileges, would lead to the possibility of a common
law for the whole of Italy, would enable every Italian to share in the
benefits of Roman business life, and appear in the court of the urban
praetor to defend such rights as he had acquired, by the use of the
forms of Roman law. The tentativeness of the character of Gracchus's
proposal, while recommending it as in harmony with the cautious spirit
of Roman development which had worked the great changes of the past, may
also have been dictated by the feeling that the more moderate scheme
stood a better chance of acceptance by the mob of Rome. All he asked was
that the grievances which had led to the revolt of Fregellae, and the
dangers revealed by that revolt, should be removed. The numbers of the
added citizens would not be overwhelming; for the majority of Italians
all that was asked was the possession of certain private rights, which
had been so ungrudgingly granted to communities in the past. Throughout
the campaign he probably laid more stress on the duty of protecting the
individual than on the right of the individual to power. And the fact
that the protection was demanded, not against the Roman State, but
against an oppressive nobility that disgraced it by a misuse of its
powers, gave a democratic colouring to the demand, and suggested a
community of suffering, and therefore of sympathy, between the donors
and recipients of the gift. Even before his franchise law was before the
world, he seems to have been engaged in educating his auditors up to
this view of the case; for it was probably in the speeches with which he
introduced his law for the better protection of the life of the Roman
citizen, that he illustrated the cruel caprice of the nobility by grisly
stories of the sufferings of the Italians. He had told of the youthful
legate who had had a cow-herd of Venusia scourged to death, as an answer
to the rustic's jesting query whether the bearers of the litter were
carrying a corpse: and of the consul who had scourged the quaestor of
Teanum Sidicinum, the man of noblest lineage in his state, because the
men's baths, in which the consul's wife had elected to bathe, were not
adequately prepared for her reception.[673] Since the objections of the
populace to the extension of the franchise were the result of prejudice
rather than of reason, they might be weakened if the sense of jealousy
and distrust could be diverted from the people's possible rivals to the
common oppressors of Rome and Italy.

The appeal to sentiment might have been successful, had not the most
sordid passions of the mob been immediately inflamed by the oratory of
the opponents of the measure. The most formidable of these opponents was
drawn from the ranks of Gracchus's own supporters; for the franchise
question had again proved a rock which could make shipwreck of the unity
of the democratic party. His _protege_, the consul Fannius, was not
ashamed to appeal to the most selfish instincts of the populace. "Do you
suppose," he said, "that, when you have given citizenship to the Latins,
there will be any room left for you at public gatherings, or that you
will find a place at the games or festivals? Will they not swamp
everything with their numbers?" [674]

Fannius, as a moderate, was an excellent exponent of senatorial views,
and it was believed that many noble hands had collaborated in the
crushing speech which inflicted one of its death-blows on the Gracchan
proposal.[675]

The opportunity for active opposition had at last arrived, and the
senate was emboldened to repeat the measure which four years earlier had
swept the aliens out of Rome. Perhaps in consequence of powers given by
the law of Pennus, the consul Fannius was empowered to issue an edict
that no Italian, who did not possess a vote in the Roman assemblies,
should be permitted within five miles of Rome at the time when the
proposal about the franchise was to be submitted to the Comitia.[676]
Caius answered this announcement with a fiery edict of his own, in which
he inveighed against the consul and promised his tribunician help to any
of the allies who chose to remain in the city.[677] The power which he
threatened to exercise was probably legal, since there is no reason to
suppose that the tribunician _auxilium_ could be interposed solely for
the assistance of members of the citizen body;[678] but he must have
known that the execution of this promise was impracticable, since the
injured party could be aided only by the personal interposition of the
tribune, and it was clear that a single magistrate, burdened with many
cares, and living a life of the most varied and strenuous activity,
could not be present in every quarter of Rome and in a considerable
portion of the surrounding territory. Even the cooperation of his ardent
colleague Flaccus could not have availed for the protection of many of
his Italian friends, and the course of events so soon taught him the
futility of this means of struggling for Italian rights that when,
somewhat later in the year, one of his Italian friends was seized by a
creature of Fannius before his eyes, he passed by without an attempt at
aid. His enemies, he knew, were at the time eager for a struggle in
which, when they had isolated him from his Italian supporters, physical
violence would decide the day: and he remarked that he did not wish to
give them the pretext for the hand-to-hand combat which they
desired.[679] One motive, indeed, of the invidious edict issued by the
consul seems to have been to leave Gracchus to face the new position
which his latest proposal had created, without any external help; but as
external help, if successfully asserted, could only have taken the form
of physical violence, there was reasonable ground for holding that the
decree excluding the Italians was the only means of preventing a serious
riot or even a civil war. The senate could scarcely have feared the
moral influence of the Italians on the voting populace of Rome, and they
knew that, in the present state of public sentiment, the constitutional
means of resistance which had failed against Tiberius Gracchus might be
successfully employed against his brother. The whole history of the
first tribunate of Caius Gracchus proves the frank recognition of the
fact that the tribunician veto could no longer be employed against a
measure which enlisted anything like the united support of the people;
but, like all other devices for suspending legislation, its employment
was still possible for opponents, and welcome even to lukewarm
supporters, when the body politic was divided on an important measure
and even the allies of its advocate felt their gratitude and their
loyalty submitted to an unwelcome strain. Resistance by means of the
intercession did not now require the stolid courage of an Octavius, and
when Livius Drusus threatened the veto,[680] there was no question of
his deposition. Some nerve might have been required, had he made this
announcement in the midst of an excited crowd of Italian postulants for
the franchise; but from this experience he was saved by the
precautionary measure taken by the senate. It is probable that Drusus's
announcement caused an entire suspension of the legal machinery
connected with the franchise bill, and that its author never ventured to
bring it to the vote.

It is possible that to this stage of Gracchus's career belongs a
proposal which he promulgated for a change in the order of voting at the
Comitia Centuriata. The alteration in the structure of this assembly,
which had taken place about the middle of the third century, had indeed
done much to equalise the voting power of the upper and lower classes;
but the first class and the knights of the eighteen centuries were still
called on to give their suffrage first, and the other classes doubtless
voted in the order determined by the property qualification at which
they were rated. As the votes of each century were separately taken and
proclaimed, the absolute majority required for the decisions of the
assembly might be attained without the inferior orders being called on
to express their judgment, and it was notorious that the opinion of
later voters was profoundly influenced by the results already announced.
Gracchus proposed that the votes of all the classes should be taken in
an order determined solely by the lot.[681] His interest in the Comitia
Centuriata was probably due to the fact that it controlled the consular
elections, and a democratic consulship, which he had vainly tried to
secure by his support of Fannius, might be rendered more attainable by
the adoption of the change which he advocated. The great danger of the
coming year was the election of a consul strongly identified with the
senatorial interest--of a man like Popillius who would be keen to seize
some moment of reaction and attempt to ruin the leaders of the reform
movement, even if he could not undo their work. It is practically
certain that this proposal of Gracchus never passed into law, it is
questionable whether it was ever brought before the Comitia. The
reformer was immediately plunged into a struggle to maintain some of his
existing enactments, and to keep the favour of the populace in the face
of insidious attempts which were being made to undermine their
confidence in himself.

The senate had struck out a new line of opposition, and they had found a
willing, because a convinced, instrument for their schemes. It is
inconceivable that a council, which reckoned within itself
representatives of all the noblest houses at Rome, should not have
possessed a considerable number of members who were influenced by the
political views of a Cato or a Scipio, or by the lessons of that
humanism which had carried the Gracchi beyond the bounds of Roman
caution, but which might suffuse a more conservative mind with just
sufficient enlightenment to see that much was wrong, and that moderate
remedies were not altogether beyond the limits of practicability. But
this section of senatorial opinion could find no voice and take no
independent action. It was crushed by the reactionary spirit of the
majority of the peers, and frightened at the results to which its
theories seem to lead, when their cautious qualifications, never likely
to find acceptance with the masses, were swept away by more
thorough-going advocates. But the voice, which the senate kept stifled
during the security of its rule, might prove valuable in a crisis. The
moderate might be put forward to outbid the extremist; for his
moderation would certainly lead him to respect the prejudices of the
mob, while any excesses, which he was encouraged or instructed to
commit, need not touch the points essential to political salvation, and
might be corrected, or left to a natural dissolution, when the crisis
had been passed and the demagogue overthrown. The instrument chosen by
the senate was Marcus Livius Drusus,[682] the tribune who had threatened
to interpose his veto on the franchise bill. There is no reason why the
historian should not treat the political attitude of this rival of
Gracchus as seriously as it seems to have been treated by Drusus's
illustrious son, who reproduced, and perhaps borrowed from his father's
career, the combination of a democratic propaganda, which threw specious
unessentials to the people, with the design of maintaining and
strengthening the rule of the nobility. The younger Drusus was, it is
true, a convert to the Italian claims which his father had resisted; but
even this advocacy shows development rather than change, for the party
represented by the elder Drusus was by no means blind to the necessity
for a better security of Italian rights. The difference between the
father and the son was that the one was an instrument and the other an
agent. But a man who is being consciously employed as an instrument, may
not only be thoroughly honest, but may reap a harvest of moral and
mental satisfaction at the opportunities of self-fulfilment which chance
has thrown in his way. The position may argue a certain lack of the
sense of humour, but is not necessarily accompanied by any conscious
sacrifice of dignity. Certainly the public of Rome was not in the secret
of the comedy that was being played. It saw only a man of high birth and
aristocratic culture, gifted with all the authority which great wealth
and a command of dignified oratory can give,[683] approaching them with
bounties greater in appearance than those which Gracchus had recently
been willing to impart, attaching no conditions to the gift and, though
speaking in the name of the senate, conveying no hint of the deprivation
of any of the privileges that had so recently been won. And the new
largess was for the Roman people alone; it was not depreciated by the
knowledge that the blessings, which it conferred or to which it was
added, would be shared by rivals from every part of Italy.