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

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Since the reality of the problems with which the Gracchi dealt is
undeniable, and since few would be inclined to admit that the most
effective treatment of a problem, whether social or political, is to
refuse it a solution, any reasonable criticism of their reforms must be
based solely on a consideration of their aims and methods. The land
question, which was taken up by both these legislators, attracts our
first attention. The aim of the resumption and redistribution of the
public domain had been the revival of the class of peasant holders, whom
legend declared, perhaps with a certain element of truth, to have formed
the flower of the civic population during the years when Rome was
struggling for a place amongst the surrounding peoples and in the
subsequent period of her expansion over Italy. Such an aim may be looked
at from two points of view. It may be regarded as an end in itself,
without any reference to its political results, or it may be looked on
as an effort to increase the power and security of the State without any
peculiar consideration of the comfort and well-being of its individual
members. The Gracchan scheme, regarded from the first point of view,
can, with respect to its end as distinguished from its methods, be
criticised unfavourably only by those who hold that an urban life does
under all circumstances convey moral, mental and physical benefits which
are denied by the conditions of residence in country districts. It is
true that the objector may in turn point out that the question of the
standard of comfort to be attained in either sphere is here of supreme
importance; but such an issue brings us at once within the region of
means and not of ends, and an ideal of human life cannot be judged
solely with reference to the practicability of its realisation. It is
the second point of view from which the aim of this land legislation may
be contemplated, which first gives the critic the opportunity of denying
the validity of the end as well as the efficiency of the means. If the
new agriculturist was meant to be an element of strength to the Roman
State, to save it from the selfishness of a narrow oligarchy, the
instability of a city mob and the corruption of both, to defend the
conquests which the city had won or to push her empire further, it was
necessary to prove that he could be of utility both as a voting unit and
as a soldier in the legions. His capacity for performing the first
function efficiently was, at the very least, extremely questionable. The
reality of the farmer's vote obviously depended on the closeness of his
residence to the capital, since there is not the least trace, at this or
at any future time during the history of the Republic, of the formation
of any design for modifying the rigidly primary character of the popular
assemblies of Rome. The rights of the voter at a distance had always
been considered so purely potential, that the inland and northern
settlements which Rome established in Italy had generally been endowed
with Latin rights, while the colonies of Roman citizens clustered more
closely round their mother; and men had always been found ready to
sacrifice the active rights of Roman citizenship, on account of the
worthlessness of their possession in a remote colony. It was even
difficult to reconcile the passive rights of Roman citizenship with
residence at a distance from the capital; for all the higher
jurisdiction was centred in Rome and could not easily be sought by the
inhabitants of distant settlements.[748] But, even if we exclude the
question of relative distance from the centre of affairs, it was still
not probable that the dweller in the country would be a good citizen
according to the Hellenic comprehension of that phrase. When Aristotle
approves of a country democracy, simply because it is not strictly a
democracy at all,[749] he is thinking, not merely of the farmer's lack
of interest in city politics, but of the incompatibility of the
perpetual demands which rural pursuits make on time and energy with
attendance on public business at the centre of affairs. The son of the
soil soon learns that he owes undivided allegiance to his mother: and he
will seldom be stirred by a political emotion strong enough to overcome
the practical appeals which are made by seed-time and harvest. But the
opportunities for discarding civic obligations were far greater in Rome
than in the Greek communities. The Roman assemblies had no stated days
of meeting, laws might be promulgated and passed at any period of the
year, their tenor was explained at public gatherings which were often
announced on the very morning of the day for which they were summoned,
and could be attended only by those whom chance or leisure or the
habitual pursuit of political excitement had brought to the Capitol or
the Forum. There was not at this period a fixed date even for the
elections of the higher magistrates. An attempt was perhaps made to
arrange them for the summer, when the roads were passable, the labours
of spring were over, and the toils of harvest time had not yet
commenced.[750] But the creation of the magistrates with Imperium
depended to a large extent on the convenience of the consuls, one of
whom had sometimes to be summoned back from a campaign to preside at the
Comitia which were to elect his successors; while even the date of the
tribunician elections might have been conditioned by political
considerations. The closing events of the life of Tiberius Gracchus
prove how difficult it was to secure the attendance of the country voter
even when an election of known political import was in prospect; while
Caius realised that the best security for the popular leader, whether as
a legislator or a candidate, was to attach the urban resident to himself
by the ties of gratitude and interest. We can scarcely admit, in the
face of facts like these, that the agriculturist created by the Gracchan
reforms was likely to render any signal political assistance to his
city. It is true that the existence of a practically disfranchised
proletariate may have a modifying influence on politics. It could not in
Rome serve the purpose, which it sometimes fulfils in the modern world,
of moulding the opinion of the voter; but even in Rome it suggested a
reserve that might be brought up on emergencies. A state, however, does
not live on emergencies but on the constant and watchful activity of its
members. Such activity could be displayed at Rome only by the leisured
senator or the leaders of the city mob. The forces that had worked for
oligarchy in the past might under changed conditions produce a narrow
type of urban democracy; but they presented no hope of the realisation
of a true popular government.

It might be hoped, however, that the newly created farmer might add to
the military, if not the political, strength of the State. The hope, so
far as it rested on the agriculturist himself, was rendered something of
an anachronism by the present conditions of service. Even in the old
days a campaign prolonged beyond the ordinary duration of six months had
often effected the ruin of the peasant proprietor; and now that the
cautious policy of the protectorate had been so largely abandoned and
Rome's military efforts, no longer limited to wars of defence or
aggression, were directed to securing her ascendency in distant
dependencies by means of permanent garrisons, service in the legions was
a still more fatal impediment to industrial development. Rome had not
yet learnt the lesson that an empire cannot be garrisoned by an army of
conscripts; but she was becoming conscious of the inadequacy of her own
military system, and this consciousness led her to take the easy but
fatal step of throwing far the larger burden of foreign service on the
Latins and Italian allies. Any increase in the number and efficiency of
her own military forces would thus remove a dangerous grievance, while
it added to the strength which, in the last resort, could alone secure
the permanence of her supremacy even in Italy. Such an increase was
finally effected in the only possible manner--by the adoption of a
system of voluntary enlistment and by carrying still further the
increasing disregard for those antiquated conditions of wealth and
status, which were a part of the theory that service was a burden and
wholly inconsistent with the new requirement that it should become a
profession. Although it must be confessed that little assistance in this
direction was directly tendered by the Gracchan legislation, yet it
should be remembered that, even if we exclude from consideration the
small efforts made by Caius to render military service a more attractive
calling, the increase of the farmer class might of itself have done much
to solve the problem. Although the single occupant of a farm was clearly
incapable of taking his part in expeditions beyond the seas without
serious injury to his own interests, yet the sons of such a man might
have performed a considerable term of military service without
disastrous consequences to the estate, and where the inheritance had
remained undivided and several brothers held the land in common, the
duties of the soldier and the farmer might have been alternated without
leaving the homestead divested of its head. The recognition of the
military life as a profession must have profited still more by the
policy which encouraged the growth of the country population; for the
energy of the surplus members of the household, whose services were not
needed or could not be adequately rewarded on the farm, would find a
more salutary outlet in the stirring life of the camp than in the
enervating influences of the city. The country-side might still continue
to supply a better physique and a finer morale than were likely to be
discovered in the poorer quarters of Rome.

The objects aimed at in the Gracchan scheme of land-reform, although in
some respects difficult of realisation, have aroused less hostile
criticism than the methods which were adopted for their fulfilment. It
may be held that the scheme of practical confiscation, which, advocated
by Tiberius Gracchus, plunged him at once into a fierce political
struggle and encountered resistance which could only be overcome by
unconstitutional means, might have been avoided had the reformer seen
that an economic remedy must be ultimate to be successful, and that an
economic tendency can only be resisted by destroying the conditions
which give it the false appearance of a law. The two conditions which
were at the time fatal to the efforts of the moderate holder of land,
are generally held to have been the cheapness and, under the inhumane
circumstances of its employment, even efficiency of slave labour, and
the competition of cheap corn from the provinces. The remedial measures
which might immediately present themselves to the mind of a modern
economist, who was unfettered by a belief in free trade or in the
legitimacy of securing the cheapest labour available, are the
prohibition of, or restrictions on, the importation of slaves, and the
imposition of a duty on foreign corn. The first device might in its
extreme form have been impracticable, for it would have been difficult
to ensure such a supervision of the slave market as to discriminate
between the sale of slaves for agricultural or pastoral work and their
acquirement for domestic purposes. A tax on servile labour employed on
land, or the moderate regulation which Caesar subsequently enforced that
a certain proportion of the herdsmen employed on the pasture lands
should be of free birth,[751] would have been more practicable measures,
and perhaps, if presented as an alternative to confiscation, might not
have encountered an unconquerable resistance from the capitalists,
although their very moderation might have won them but a lukewarm
support from the people, and ensured the failure that attends on
half-measures which do not carry their meaning on their face and lack
the boldness which excites enthusiasm. But the real objection which the
Gracchi and their circle would have had to legislation of this type,
whether it had been suggested to them in its extreme shape or in some
modified form, would have been that it could not have secured the object
at which they aimed. Such measures would merely have revived the free
labourer, while their dream was to re-establish the peasant proprietor,
or at least the occupant who held his land on a perfectly secure tenure
from the State. And even the revival of the free labourer would only
have been exhibited on the most modest scale; for such legislation would
have done nothing to reclaim arable land which had degenerated into
pasturage, and to reawaken life in the great deserted tracts, whose
solitude was only broken by the rare presence of the herdsman's cabin.
To raise a cry for the restoration of free labour on this exiguous scale
might have exposed a legislator to the disappointment, if not derision,
of his friends and invited the criticism, effective because popular, of
all his secret foes. The masters of the world were not likely to give
enthusiastic support to a leader who exhibited as their goal the lonely,
barren and often dangerous life of sheep-driver to some greedy
capitalist, and who offered them the companionship, and not the service,
of the slaves that their victorious arms had won.

The alternative of protective legislation for the defence of Italian
grain may be even more summarily dismissed. It was, in the first place,
impossible from the point of view of political expediency. The Gracchi,
or any other reforming legislators, had to depend for their main support
on the voting population of the city of Rome: and such a constituency
would never have dreamed for a moment of sanctioning a measure which
would have made the price of corn dearer in the Roman market, even if
the objections of the capitalists who placed the foreign grain on that
market could have been successfully overcome. So far from dreaming of
the practicability of such a scheme, Caius Gracchus had been forced to
allow the sale of corn at Rome at a cost below the current market-price.
But, even had protection been possible, it must have come as the last,
not as the first, of the constructive measures necessary for the
settlement of the agrarian question. It might have done something to
keep the small farms standing, but these farms had to be created before
their maintenance was secured; and if adopted, apart from some scheme
aiming at a redivision of the land, such a protective measure would
merely have benefited such existing owners of the large estates as still
continued to devote a portion of their domains to agriculture. The fact,
however, which may be regarded as certain, that foreign corn could
undersell that of Italy in the Roman market, and probably in that of all
the great towns within easy access of the sea, may seem a fatal flaw in
the agrarian projects of the Gracchi. What reason was there for
supposing that the tendencies which in the past had favoured the growth
of large holdings and replaced agriculture by pasturage, should remain
inoperative in the future? Tiberius Gracchus's own regulation about the
inalienability of the lands which he assigned, seemed to reveal the
suspicion that the tendencies towards accumulation had not yet been
exhausted, and that the occupants of the newly created farms might not
find the pursuit of agriculture so profitable as to cling to them in
scorn of the enticements of the encroaching capitalist. Doubtless the
prohibition to sell revealed a weakness in the agricultural system of
the times; but the regulation was probably framed, not in despair of the
small holder securing a maintenance, but as a protection against the
money-lender, that curse of the peasant-proprietor, who might now be
less willing to approach the peasant, when the security which he
obtained could under no circumstances lead to his acquiring eventual
ownership. With respect to the future, there was reasonable hope that
the farmer, if kept in tolerable security from the strategic advances of
his wealthier neighbours, would be able to hold his own. In a modern
state, possessing a teeming population and a complex industrial
organisation, where the profits of a widely spread commercial life have
raised the standard of comfort and created a host of varied needs, the
view may reasonably be taken that, before agriculture can declare itself
successful, it must be able to point to some central market where it
will receive an adequate reward for the labour it entails. But this view
was by no means so prevalent in the simpler societies of antiquity. The
difficulties of communication, which, with reference to transport, must
have made Rome seem nearer to Africa than to Umbria, and must have
produced a similar tendency to reliance on foreign imports in many of
the great coast towns, would alone have been sufficient to weaken the
reliance of the farmer on the consumption of his products by the larger
cities. The belief that the homestead might be almost self-sufficient
probably lingered on in remote country districts even in the days of the
Gracchi; or, if absolute self-existence was unattainable, the
necessities of life, which the home could not produce, might be procured
without effort by periodical visits to the market or fair, which formed
the industrial centre of a group of hamlets. The seemingly ample size of
the Gracchan allotments, some of which were three times as great as the
larger of the colonial assignments of earlier days,[752] pointed to the
possibility of the support of a large family, if the simpler needs of
life were alone considered. The farmer's soul need not be vexed by
competition if he was content to live and not to trade, and it might
have been hoped that the devotion to the soil, which ownership inspires,
might have worked its magic even on the lands left barren through
neglect. There might even be a hope for the cultivator who aimed at the
markets of the larger towns; for, if corn returned no profit, yet oil
and wine were not yet undersold, and were both of them commodities which
would bring better returns than grain to the minute and scrupulous care
in which the smaller cultivator excels the owner of a great domain. The
failure of corn-growing as a productive industry, perhaps the
legislation of the Gracchi itself, must have given a great impetus to
the cultivation of the vine and the olive, the value attached to which
during the closing years of the Republic is, as we have seen, attested
by the fact that the extension of these products was prohibited in the
Transalpine regions in order to protect the interests of the
Roman producer.

An agricultural revival was, therefore, possible; but its success
demanded a spirit that would enter readily into the work, and submit
without a murmur to the conditions of life which the stern task
enjoined. It was here that the agrarian legislation of the Gracchi found
its obstacle. So far as it did fail--so far, that is, as it was not
sufficient to prevent the renewed accumulation of the people in the
towns and the continued depopulation of the country districts--it failed
because it offended against social ideals rather than against economic
tendencies. Many of the settlers whom it planted on the allotments, must
already have been demoralised by the feverish atmosphere of Rome; while
others of a saner and more vigorous type may have soon looked back on
the capital, not as the lounging-place of the idler, but as the exchange
of the world, or have turned their thoughts to the provinces as the
sphere where energy was best rewarded and capital gave its speediest
returns. Of the other social measures of this period, colonisation, in
so far as it had a purely agricultural object, is subject to the
criteria that have been applied to the agrarian movements of the time;
although it is possible that the formation of new or the remodelling of
old political societies, which must have followed the scheme of Drusus,
had this been ever realised, would have infused a more vigorous life in
agricultural settlements of this type than was likely to be awakened in
those which formed a mere outlying part of Rome or some existing
municipality. We have seen how the colonial plan of Drusus differed in
its intention from that of Caius Gracchus; but the latter statesman had,
in the settlement which he projected at Junonia, planned a foundation
which would proximately have lived on the wealth of its territory rather
than on its trade, and must always have been, like Carthage of old, as
much an agricultural as a commercial state. To an agrarian project such
as this no economic objection could have been offered and, had the
scheme of transmarine colonisation been fully carried out, the provinces
themselves might have been made to benefit the farming class of Italy,
whose economic foes they had become. The distance also of such
settlements from Rome would have blunted the craving for the life of the
capital, which beset the minds and paralysed the energies of the
occupants of Italian land.

But, on the whole, the Gracchan scheme of colonisation was, as we have
seen, commercial rather than agricultural, and was probably intended to
benefit a class that was not adapted to rural occupations, either by
association or training. By this enterprise Caius Gracchus showed that
he saw with perfect clearness the true reason, and the final evidence,
of the stagnation of the middle class. A nation which has abandoned
agriculture and allows itself to be fed by foreign hands, even by those
of its own subjects, is exposed to military dangers which are obvious,
and to political perils somewhat more obscure but bearing their evil
fruit from time to time; but such treason to the soil is no sign of
national decay, if the legions of workers have merely transferred their
allegiance from the country to the town, from agriculture to manufacture
and commerce. In Italy this comforting explanation was impossible.
Except perhaps in Latium and Campania, there were few industrial
centres; many of those that existed were in the hands of Greeks, many
more had sunk under the stress of war and had never been revived. The
great syndicates in which Roman capital was invested, employed slaves
and freedmen as their agents; the operations of these great houses were
directed mainly to the provinces, and the Italian seaports were employed
merely as channels for a business which was speculative and financial
and, so far as Italy was concerned, only to a very slight, if to any,
degree productive. To re-establish the producer or the trader of
moderate means, was to revive a stable element in the population, whose
existence might soften the rugged asperity with which capital confronted
power on the one hand and poverty on the other. But to revive it at Rome
would have demanded artificial measures, which, attacking as they must
have done the monopolies possessed by the Equites, would have defeated
the legislator's immediate object and probably proved impracticable,
while such a revival would also have accentuated the centralisation,
which might be useful to the politician but was deplored by the social
reformer. The debilitated class might, however, recover its elasticity
if placed in congenial surroundings and invited to the sites which had
once attracted the enterprise of the Greek trader; and Caius Gracchus's
settlements in the south of Italy were means to this end. We have no
warrant for pronouncing the experiment an utter failure. Some of these
colonies lived on, although in what guise is unknown. But even a
moderate amount of success would have demanded a continuity in the
scheme, which was rudely interrupted by the fall of its promoter, and it
is not to be imagined that the larger capitalists, whose power the
reformer had himself increased, looked with a friendly eye upon these
smaller rivals. The scheme of social reform projected by Gracchus found
its completion in his law for the sale of corn. When he had made
provision for the born agriculturist and the born tradesman, there still
remained a residuum of poorer citizens whose inclination and habits
prompted them to neither calling. It was for these men that the monthly
grant of cheapened grain was intended. Their bread was won by labour,
but by a labour so fitful and precarious that it was known to be often
insufficient to secure the minimum means of subsistence, unless some
help was furnished by the State. The healthier form of state-aid--the
employment of labour--was certainly practised by Caius Gracchus, and
perhaps the extensive public works which he initiated and supervised,
were intended to benefit the artisan who laboured in their construction
as well as the trader who would profit by their completion.

Whatever may be our judgment on the merits and results of this social
programme, the importance of the political character which it was to
assume, from the close of the career of Caius Gracchus to the downfall
of the Republic, can hardly be exaggerated. The items of reform as
embodied in his legislation became the constant factors in every
democratic programme which was to be issued in the future. In these we
see the demand for land, for colonial assignations, for transmarine
settlements, for a renewal or extension of the corn law, perpetually
recurring. It is true that this recurrence may be in part due to the
very potency of the personality of the first reformer and to the magic
of the memory which he left behind him. Party-cries tend to become
shibboleths and it is difficult to unravel the web that has been spun by
the hand of a master. Even the hated cry for the Italian franchise,
which had proved the undoing of Caius Gracchus, became acceptable to
party leaders and to an ever-growing section of their followers, largely
because it had become entwined with his programme of reform. But the
vigorous life of his great manifesto cannot be explained wholly on this
ground. It is a greater exaltation of its author to believe that its
life was due to its intrinsic utility, and that Gracchus indicated real
needs which, because they remained unsatisfied until the birth of the
Principate, were ever the occasion for the renewal of proposals so
closely modelled on his own.