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

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At daybreak the consul Opimius sent a small force of armed men to the
Capitol, evidently for the purpose of preventing the point of vantage
being seized by the hostile democrats, and then he issued notices for a
meeting of the senate. For the present he remained in the temple of
Castor and Pollux to watch events. When the fathers had obeyed his
summons, he crossed the Forum and met them in the Curia. Shortly after
their deliberations had begun, a scene, believed to have been carefully
prepared, began to be enacted in the Forum.[717] A band of mourners was
seen slowly making its way through the crowded market-place; conspicuous
on its bier was the body of Antullius, stripped so that the wound which
was the price of his loyalty might be seen by all. The bearers took the
route that led them past the senate-house, sobbing as they went and
wailing out the mourning cry. The consul was duly startled, and curious
senators hastened to the door. The bier was then laid on the ground, and
the horrified aristocrats expressed their detestation of the dreadful
crime of which it was a witness. Their indignation may have imposed on
some members of the crowd; others were inclined to mock this outburst of
oligarchic pathos, and to wonder that the men who had slain Tiberius
Gracchus and hurled his body into the Tiber, could find their hearts
thus suddenly dissolved at the death of an unfortunate but
undistinguished servant. The motive of the threnody was somewhat too
obvious, and many minds passed from the memory of Tiberius's death to
the thought of the doom which this little drama was meant to presage for
his brother.

The senators returned to the Curia, and the final resolution was taken.
Opimius was willing to venture on the step which Scaevola had declined,
and a new principle of constitutional law was tentatively admitted. A
state of siege was declared in the terms that "the consul should see
that the State took no harm," [718] and active measures were taken to
prepare the force which this decree foreshadowed. Opimius bade the
senators see to their arms, and enjoined each of the members of the
equestrian centuries to bring with him two slaves in full equipment at
the dawn of the next day.[719] But an attempt was made to avert the
immediate use of force by issuing a summons to Gracchus and Flaccus to
attend at the senate and defend their conduct there.[720] The summons
was perfectly legal, since the consul had the right to demand the
presence of any citizen or even any inferior magistrate; but the two
leaders may well be excused for their act of contumacy in disobeying the
command. They knew that they would merely be putting themselves as
prisoners into the hands of a hostile force; nor, in the light of past
events, was it probable that their surrender and punishment would save
their followers from destruction. Preparations for defence, or a
counter-demonstration which would prove the size and determination of
their following, might lead the senate to think of negotiation. Its
members had an inducement to take this view. Their legal position, with
respect to the step which they were now contemplating, was unsound; and
although they might claim that they had the government in the shape of
its chief executive officer on their side, and that their late policy
had attracted the support of the majority of the citizens, yet there was
no uncontested precedent for the legitimacy of waging war against a
faction at Rome; they had no mandate to perform this mission, and its
execution, which had lately been rendered illegal by statute law, might
subsequently be repudiated even by many of those whom they now regarded
as their supporters. Yet we cannot wonder at the uncompromising attitude
of the senate. They held themselves to be the legitimate government of
the State; they had learnt the lesson that a government must rest either
on its merits or on force; they were unwilling to repeat the scandalous
scene which, on the occasion of Tiberius Gracchus's death, had proved
their weakness, and were perhaps unable to resort to such unpremeditated
measures in the face of the larger following of Caius; they could enlist
on their side some members of the upper middle class who would share in
the guilt, if guilt there was: and lastly they had at their mercy two
men, of whom one had twice shaken the commonwealth and the other had
gloried in the prospect of its self-mutilation in the future.

The wisdom and justice of resistance appealed immediately to the mind of
Flaccus, whose combative instincts found their natural satisfaction in
the prospect of an interchange of blows. The finer and more complex
spirit of Gracchus issued in a more uncertain mood. The bane of the
thinker and the patriot was upon him. Was a man who had led the State to
fight against it, and the rule of reason to be exchanged for the base
arbitrament of the sword? None knew the emotions with which he turned
from the Forum to gaze long and steadfastly at the statue of his father
and to move away with a groan;[721] but the sight of his sorrow roused a
sympathy which the call to arms might not have stirred. Many of the
bystanders were stung from their attitude of indifference to curse
themselves for their base abandonment of the man who had sacrificed so
much, to follow him to his house, and to keep a vigil before his doors.
The night was passed in gloomy wakefulness, the spirits of the watchers
were filled with apprehension of the common sacrifice which the coming
day might demand, and the silence was only broken when the voluntary
guard was at intervals relieved by those who had already slumbered.
Meanwhile the neighbours of Flaccus were being startled by the sounds of
boisterous revelry that issued from his halls. The host was displaying
an almost boyish exuberance of spirits, while his congenial comrades
yelled and clapped as the wine and the jest went round. At daybreak
Fulvius was dragged from his heavy slumbers, and he and his companions
armed themselves with the spoils of his consulship, the Gallic weapons
that hung as trophies upon his walls.[722] They then set out with
clamorous threats to take possession of the Aventine. The home that
Icilius had won for the Plebs was to be the scene of another struggle
for freedom. It was in later times pretended that Fulvius had taken the
step, from which even Catilina shrank, of calling the slaves to arms on
a promise of freedom.[723] We have no means of disproving the
allegation, which seems to have occurred with suspicious frequency in
the records left by aristocratic writers of the popular movements which
they had assisted to crush. But it is easy to see that the devotion of
slaves to their own masters during such struggles, and the finding of
their bodies amidst the slain, would be proof enough to a government,
anxious to emphasise its merits as a saviour of society, that general
appeals had been made to the servile class. Such a deduction might
certainly have been drawn from a view of the forces mustered under
Opimius; for in these the slaves may have exceeded the citizens in
number.[724]

Gracchus's mind was still divided between resistance and resignation. He
consented to accompany his reckless friend to the Aventine, as the only
place of refuge; but he declined to don his armour, merely fastening
under his toga a tiny dagger,[725] as a means of defence in the last
resort, or perhaps of salvation, did all other measures fail. The
presage of his coming doom was shared by his wife Licinia who clung to
him at the door, and when he gently disengaged himself from her arms,
made one more effort to grasp his robe and sank senseless on the
threshold. When Gracchus reached the Aventine with his friends, he found
that Flaccus and his party had seized the temple of Diana and had made
hasty preparations for fortifying it against attack. But Gracchus,
impressed with the helplessness or the horror of the situation,
persuaded him to make an effort at accommodation, and the younger son of
Flaccus, a boy of singular beauty, was despatched to the Curia on the
mission of peace.[726] With modest mien and tears streaming from his
eyes he gave his message to the consul. Many--perhaps most--of those who
listened were not averse to accept a compromise which would relieve the
intolerable strain and avert a civil strife. But Opimius was inflexible;
the senate, he said, could not be approached by deputy; the principals
must descend from the Aventine, lay down their arms, deliver themselves
up to justice as citizens subject to the laws, and then they might
appeal to the senate's grace; he ended by forbidding the youth to
return, if he could not bring with him an acceptance of these final
terms. The more pacific members of the senate could offer no effective
objection, for it was clear that the consul was acting within his legal
rights. The coercion of a disobedient citizen was a matter for the
executive power and, though Opimius had spoken in the name of the
senate, the authority and the responsibility were his. Retirement would
have been their only mode of protest; but this would have been a
violation of the discipline which bound the Council to its head, and
would have betrayed a suspicious indifference to the cause which was
regarded as that of the constitution. It is said that, on the return of
the messenger, Gracchus expressed willingness to accept the consul's
terms and was prepared to enter the senate and there plead his own cause
and that of his followers.[727] But none of his comrades would agree,
and Flaccus again despatched his son with proposals similar to those
which had been rejected. Opimius carried out his injunction by detaining
the boy and, thirsting for battle to effect the end which delay would
have assured, advanced his armed forces against the position held by
Flaccus. He was not wholly dependent on the improvised levies of the
previous day. There were in Rome at that moment some bands of Cretan
archers,[728] which had either just returned from service with the
legions or were destined to take part in some immediate campaign. It was
to their efforts that the success of the attack was mainly due. The
barricade at the temple might have resisted the onslaught of the
heavily-armed soldier; but its defenders were pierced by the arrows, the
precinct was strewn with wounded men, and the ranks were in utter
disorder when the final assault was made. There were names of
distinction which lent a dignity to the massacre that followed. Men like
Publius Lentulus, the venerable chief of the senate, gave a perpetual
colour of respectability to the action of Opimius by appearing in their
panoplies amongst the forces that he led.[729]

When the rout was complete and the whole crowd in full flight, Flaccus
sought escape in a workshop owned by a man of his acquaintance; but the
course of his flight had been observed, the narrow court which led to
the house was soon crowded by pursuers, who, maddened by their ignorance
of the actual tenement that concealed the person of Flaccus, vowed that
they would burn the whole alley to the ground if his hiding-place were
not revealed.[730] The trembling artisan who had befriended him did not
dare to betray his suppliant, but relieved his scruples by whispering
the secret to another. The hiding place was immediately revealed, and
the great ex-consul who had laid the foundations of Rome's dominion in
farther Gaul, a man strenuous and enlightened, ardent and faithful but
perhaps not overwise, was hacked to pieces by his own citizens in an
obscure corner of the slums of Rome. His elder son fell fighting by his
side. To the younger, the fair ambassador of that day, now a prisoner of
the consul, the favour was granted of choosing his own mode of death.
Early Rome had repudiated the principle of visiting the sins of the
fathers upon the children;[731] but the cold-blooded horrors of the
Oriental and Hellenic world were now becoming accepted maxims of state
to a government trembling for its safety and implacable in its revenge.

Meanwhile Gracchus had been saved from both the stain of civil war and
the humiliation of capture by his foes. No man had seen him strike a
blow throughout the contest. In sheer disgust at the appalling scene he
had withdrawn to the shrine of Diana, and was there prepared to compass
his own death.[732] His hand was stayed by two faithful friends,
Pomponius and Laetorius,[733] who urged him to escape. Gracchus obeyed,
but it was believed by some that, before he left the temple, he
stretched forth his hand to the goddess and prayed that the Roman people
might never be quit of slavery as a reward for their ingratitude and
treachery.[734] This outburst of anger, a very natural consequence of
his own humiliating plight, is said to have been kindled by the
knowledge that the larger portion of the mob had already listened to a
promise of amnesty and had joined the forces of Opimius. Unlike most
imprecations, that of Gracchus was destined to be fulfilled.

The flight of Gracchus led him down the slope of the Aventine to the
gate called Trigemina which stood near the Tiber's bank. In hastening
down the hill he had sprained his ankle, and time for his escape was
only gained by the devotion of Pomponius,[735] who turned, and
single-handed kept the pursuing enemy at bay until trampling on his
prostrate body they rushed in the direction of the wooden bridge which
spanned the river. Here Laetorius imitated the heroism of his comrade.
Standing with drawn sword at the head of the bridge, he thrust back all
who tried to pass until Gracchus had gained the other bank. Then he too
fell, pierced with wounds. The fugitive had now but a single slave to
bear him company in his flight; it led them through frequented streets,
where the passers-by stopped on their way, cheered them on as though
they were witnessing a contest of speed, but gave no sign of help and
turned deaf ears to Gracchus's pleading for a horse; for the pursuers
were close behind, and the dulled and panic-stricken mob had no thought
but for themselves. The grove of Furrina[736] received them just before
they were overtaken by the pursuing band; and in the sacred precinct the
last act was accomplished. It was known only that master and slave had
been found lying side by side. Some believed that the faithful servant
had slain Gracchus and then pierced his own breast; others held that
they were both living when the enemy came upon them, but that the slave
clung with such frantic devotion to his master that Gracchus's body
could not be reached until the living shield had been pierced and torn
away.[737] The activity of the pursuers had been stimulated by greed,
for Opimius had put a price upon the heads of both the leaders of the
faction on the Aventine. The bearers of these trophies of victory were
to receive their weight in gold. The humble citizens who produced the
head of Flaccus are said to have been defrauded of their reward; but the
action of the man who wrested the head of Gracchus from the first
possessor of the prize and bore it on a javelin's point to Opimius, long
furnished a text to the moralist who discoursed on the madness of greed
and the thirst of gold. Its unnatural weight is said to have revealed
the fact that the brain had been extracted and the cavity filled with
molten lead.[738] The bodies of the slain were for the most part thrown
into the Tiber, but one account records that that of Gracchus was handed
over to his mother for burial.[739] The number of the victims of the
siege, the pursuit and the subsequent judicial investigation is said to
have been three thousand.[740] The resistance to authority, which was
all that could be alleged against the followers of Gracchus, was
treated, not as a riot, but as a rebellion. The Tullianum saw its daily
dole of victims, who were strangled by the executioner; the goods of the
condemned were confiscated by the State and sold at public auction. All
public signs of mourning were forbidden to their wives;[741] and the
opinion of Scaevola, the greatest legal expert of the day, was that some
property of his niece Licinia, which had been wrecked in the general
tumult, could be recovered only from the goods of her husband, to whom
the sedition was due.[742] The attitude of the government was, in fact,
based on the view that the members of the defeated party, whether slain
or executed, had been declared enemies of the State. Their action had
put them outside the pale of law, and the decree of the senate, which
had assisted Opimius in the extreme course that he had taken, was an
index that the danger, which it vaguely specified, aimed at the actual
existence of the commonwealth and undermined the very foundations of
society. Such was the theory of martial law which Opimius's bold action
gave to his successors. Its weakness lay in the circumstance that it was
unknown to the statutes and to the courts; its plausibility was due
partly to the fact that, since the desuetude of the dictatorship, no
power actually existed in Rome which could legally employ force to crush
even the most dangerous popular rising, and partly to the peculiarities
of the movement which witnessed the first exercise of this authority.
The killing of Caius Gracchus and his followers, however useless and
mischievous the act may have been, had about it an air of spurious
legality, with which no ingenuity could invest the murder of Tiberius
and his adherents. The fallen chiefs were in enjoyment of no magisterial
authority that could justify either their initial action or their
subsequent disobedience; they had fortified a position in the town, and
had certainly taken up arms, presumably for the purpose of inflicting
grievous harm on loyal fellow-citizens. As their opponents were
certainly the government, what could they be but declared foes who had
been caught red-handed in an act of treason so open and so violent that
the old identity of "traitors" and "enemies" was alone applicable to
their case? Thus legal theory itself proclaimed the existence of civil
war, and handed on to future generations of party leaders an instrument
of massacre and extirpation which reached its culminating point in the
proscription list of Sulla.

Opimius, after he had ceased to preside at his death-dealing commission,
expressed the view that he had removed the rabies of discord from the
State by the foundation of a temple to Harmony. The bitter line which
some unseen hand scribbled on the door,[743] expressed the doubt, which
must soon have crept over many minds, whether the doctor had not been
madder than the patient, and the view, which was soon destined to be
widely held, that the authors of the discord which had been professedly
healed, the teachers who were educating Rome up to a higher ideal of
civil strife, were the very men who were now in power.[744] We shall see
in the sequel with what speed Time wrought his political revenge. In the
hearts of men the Gracchi were even more speedily avenged. The Roman
people often alternated between bursts of passionate sentiment and
abject states of cowardly contentment; but through all these phases of
feeling the memory of the two reformers grew and flourished. To accept
the Gracchi was an article of faith impressed on the proudest noble and
the most bigoted optimate by the clamorous crowd which he addressed. The
man who aped them might be pronounced an impostor or a traitor; the men
he aped belonged almost to the distant world of the half-divine. Their
statues were raised in public places, the sites on which they had met
their death were accounted holy ground and were strewn with humble
offerings of the season's fruits. Many even offered to their images a
daily sacrifice and sank on their knees before them as before those of
the gods.[745] The quiet respect or ecstatic reverence with which the
names and memories of the Gracchi were treated, was partly due to a
vague sense in the mind of the common man that they were the authors of
the happier aspects of the system under which he lived, of the brighter
gleams which occasionally pierced the clouds of oppression and
discomfort; it was also due to the conviction in the mind of the
statesman, often resisted but always recurring, that their work was
unalterable. To undo it was to plunge into the dark ages, to attempt to
modify it was immediately to see the necessity of its renewal. At every
turn in the paths of political life the statesman was confronted by two
figures, whom fear or admiration raised to gigantic proportions. The
orthodox historian would angrily declare that they were but the figures
of two young men, whose intemperate action had thrown Rome into
convulsion and who had met their fate, not undeserved however
lamentable, the one in a street riot, the other while heading an armed
sedition. But the criticism contained the elements of its own
refutation. The youth, the brotherhood, the martyrdom of the men were
the very elements that gave a softening radiance to the hard contour of
their lives. The Gracchi were a stern and ever-present reality; they
were also a bright and gracious memory. In either character they must
have lived; but the combination of both presentments has secured them an
immortality which age, wisdom, experience and success have often
struggled vainly to secure. That strange feeling which a great and
beautiful life has often inspired, that it belongs to eternity rather
than to the immediate past, and that it has few points of contact with
the prosaic round of present existence, had almost banished from
Cornelia's mind the selfish instincts of her loss, and had perhaps even
dulled the tender memories which cluster round the frailer rather than
the stronger elements in the characters of those we love. Those who
visited her in her villa at Misenum, where she kept her intellectual
court, surrounded by all that was best in letters, and exchanging
greetings or gifts with the potentates of the earth, were amazed at the
composure with which she spoke of the lives and actions of her
sons.[746] The memory drew no tear, her voice conveyed no intonation of
sorrow or regret. She spoke of them as though they were historical
figures of the past, men too distant and too great to arouse the weak
emotion which darkens contemplation. Some thought that her mind had been
shaken by age, or that her sensibility had been dulled by misfortune.
"In this they proved their own utter lack of sensibility" says the
loving biographer of the Gracchi: They did not know, he adds, the signs
of that nobility of soul, which is sometimes given by birth and is
always perfected by culture, or the reasonable spirit of endurance which
mental and moral excellence supply. The calmness of Cornelia proved, as
well, that she was at one with her children after their death, and their
identity with a mind so pure is as great a tribute to their motives as
the admiration or fear of the Romans is to their intellect and their
deeds, Cornelia deserved a memorial in Rome for her own intrinsic worth;
but the demeanour of her latter days justifies the legend engraved on
the statue which was to be seen in the portico of Metellus: "To
Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi".[747]

We are now in a position to form some estimate of the political changes
which had swept over Rome during the past twelve years. The
revolutionary legislation of this period was, strictly speaking, not
itself the change, but merely the formula which marked an established
growth; nor can any profit be derived from drawing a marked contrast
between the aims and methods of the two men who were responsible for the
most decisive of these reforms. A superficial view of the facts might
lead us to suppose that Tiberius Gracchus had bent his energies solely
to social amelioration, and that it was reserved for his brother Caius
to effect vast changes in the working, though not in the structure, of
the constitution. But even a chronological survey of the actions of
these two statesmen reveals the vast union of interests that suddenly
thrust themselves forward, with a vehemence which demanded either such a
resistance as no political society is homogeneous enough to maintain, or
such concessions as may be graciously made by a government which after
the grant may still retain most of the forms and much of the substance
of its former power. So closely interwoven were social and political
questions, so necessary was it for the attempted satisfaction of one
class immediately to create the demand for the recognition or
compensation of another, that Tiberius Gracchus had no sooner formulated
his agrarian proposals than he was beset with thoughts of legislating
for the army, transferring some of the judicial power to the equestrian
order, and granting the franchise to the allies. Even the belief that
these projects were merely a device for securing his own ascendency,
does not prove that their announcement was due to a brilliant discovery
of their originator, or that he created wants which he thereupon
proposed to satisfy. The desperate statesman seizes on the grievance
which is nearest to hand; it is true that he may increase a want by
giving the first loud and clear expression to the low and confused
murmurings of discontent; but a grievance that lives and gives violent
tokens of its presence, as did that of the Italian allies in the
Fregellan revolt, must be real, not fictitious: and when it finds a
remedy, as the needs of the poor and the political claims of the knights
did under the regime of Caius Gracchus, the presumption is that the
disease has been of long standing, and that what it has for a long time
lacked was not recognition, but the opportunity and the intelligence
necessary to secure redress. Caius Gracchus was as little of a political
explorer as his brother; it did not require the intuition of genius to
see facts which formed the normal environment of every prominent
politician of the age. His claim to greatness rests, partly on the
mental and moral strength which he shared with Tiberius and which gave
him the power to counteract the force of inertia and transmute vague
thought, first into glowing words and then into vigorous action; partly
on the extraordinary ingenuity with which he balanced the interests and
claims of classes so as to form a coalition which was for the time
resistless: and partly on the finality with which he removed the
jealousies of the hour from the idle arena of daily political strife,
and gave them their place in the permanent machinery of the
constitution, there to remain as the necessary condition of the
precarious peace or the internecine war which the jarring elements of a
balance of power bring in turn to its possessors.