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

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When we turn from the social to the political changes of this period, we
are on far less debatable ground. Although there may be some doubt as to
the intention with which each reform was brought into existence by Caius
Gracchus, its character as illustrated by its place in the economy of
the commonwealth is so clearly stamped upon it and so potently
manifested in the immediately following years, that a comprehensive
discussion of the nature of his single measures would be merely an
unprofitable effort to recall the past or anticipate the future. But the
collective effect of his separate efforts has been subjected to very
different interpretations, and the question has been further complicated
by hazardous, and sometimes overconfident, attempts to determine how far
the legislator's intentions were fulfilled in the actual result of his
reforms. Because it can be shown that the changes introduced by
Gracchus, or, to be more strictly accurate, the symptoms which elicited
these changes, ultimately led to monarchical rule, Gracchus has been at
times regarded as the conscious author and possessor of a personal
supremacy which he deliberately intended should replace the intricate
and somewhat cumbrous mechanism which controlled the constitutional
government of Rome; because he sowed the seeds of a discord so terrible
as to be unendurable even in a state which had never known the absence
of faction and conflict, and had preserved its liberties through
carefully regulated strife, his work has been held to be that of some
avenging angel who came, not to renew, but to destroy. There is truth in
both these pictures; but the Gracchus whom they portray as the force
that annihilated centuries of crafty workmanship, as the first precursor
of the coming monarchy, is the Gracchus who rightly lives in the
historic imagination which, unfettered by conditions of space or time,
prefers the contemplation of the eternity of the work to that of the
environment of the worker; it is a presentment which would be applicable
to any man as able and as resolute as Gracchus, who attempted to meet
the evils created by a weak and irresponsible administration, partly by
the restoration of old forms, partly by the recognition of new and
pressing claims. There is a point at which reform, except it go so far
as to blot out a constitution and substitute another in its place, must
act as a weakening and dissolving force. That point is reached when an
existing government is effectually hampered from exercising the
prerogatives of sovereignty and no other power is sufficiently
strengthened to act as its unquestioned substitute. The dissolution will
be easier if reform bears the not uncommon aspect of conservatism, and a
nominal sovereign, whose strength, never very great, has been sapped by
disuse and the habit of mechanical obedience, is placed in competition
with a somewhat effete usurper. It is not, however, fair to regard
Gracchus as a radical reactionary who was the first to drag a prisoned
and incapable sovereign into the light of day. Had he done this, he
would have been the author of a revolution and the creator of a new
constitution. But this he never attempted to be, and such a view of his
work rests on the mistaken impression that, at the time of his reforms,
the senate was recognised as the true government of Rome. Such a
pretension had never been published nor accepted. We are not concerned
with its reality as a fact; but no sound analysis, whether undertaken by
lawyer or historian, would have admitted its theoretical truth. The
literary atmosphere teemed with theories of popular sovereignty of a
limited kind, and Gracchus, while recognising this sovereignty, did
little to remove its limitations. It is true that, like his brother, he
legislated without seeking the customary sanction of the senate; but
initial reforms could never have been carried through, had the
legislator waited for this sanction; and the future freedom of the
Comitia from senatorial control was at best guaranteed by the force of
the example of the Gracchi, not by any new legal ordinances which they
ordained. Earlier precedents of the same type had not been lacking, and
it was only the comprehensiveness of the Gracchan legislation which
seemed to give a new impetus to the view that in all fundamental
matters, which called for regulation by Act of Parliament, the people
was the single and uncontrolled sovereign. Thus was developed the idea
of the possibility of a new period of growth, which should refashion the
details of the structure of the State into greater correspondence with
the changed conditions of the times. As the earlier process of change
had raised the senate to power, the latter might be interpreted as
containing a promise that a new master was to be given to the Roman
world. But it is highly improbable that to Gracchus or to any of his
contemporaries was the true nature of the prophecy revealed. For the
moment a balance of power was established, and the moneyed class stood
midway between the opposing factions of senate and people. Its new
powers were intended to constrain the senate into efficiency rather than
to reduce it to impotence, and to create these powers Gracchus had
endowed the equestrian order with that right of audit which, in the
earlier theory of the constitution, had been held to be one of the
securest guarantees of the power of the people. Gracchus predicted the
strife that was likely to follow this friction between the government
and the courts; but this prediction, while it perhaps reveals the hope
that in the issues of the future the mercantile class would generally be
found on the side of the people, betrays still more clearly the belief
that the people, and their patron of the moment, were utterly incapable
of standing alone, and that no true democratic government was possible
for Rome. In spite of his Hellenism Gracchus betrayed two
characteristics of the true Roman. He believed in the advisability of
creating a political impasse, from which some mode of escape would
ultimately be devised by the wearied and lacerated combatants; and he
held firmly to the view that the people, considered strictly in itself,
had no organic existence; that it never was, and never could be, a power
in its own right. He made no effort to give the Roman Comitia an
organisation which would have placed it on something like the
independent level of a Greek Ecclesia. Such an omission was perhaps the
result of neglect rather than of deliberation; but this very neglect
proves that Gracchus had in no way emancipated himself from the typical
Roman idea that the people could find expression only through the voice
of a magistrate. This idea unquestionably made the leader of the moment
the practical head of the State during any crisis that called for
constant intervention on the part of the Comitia; but there is no reason
to suppose a belief on the part of Gracchus that such intervention would
be unremittingly demanded, would become as integral a part of the
every-day mechanism of government as the senate's direction of the
provinces or the knight's control of the courts. But even had he held
this view, the situation which it conjured up need not have borne a
close resemblance to monarchy. The natural vehicle for the expression of
the popular will would have been the tribunate--an office which by its
very nature presented such obvious hindrances to personal rule as the
existence of colleagues armed with the power of veto, the short tenure
of office, and the enjoyment of powers that were mainly negative. It is
true that the Gracchi themselves had shown how some of these
difficulties might be overcome. The attempt at re-election, the
accumulation of offices, the disregard of the veto, were innovations
forced on them by the knowledge, gained from bitter experience, that
reform could proceed only from a power that was to some extent outside
the constitution, and that the efficient execution of the contemplated
measures demanded the concentration of varied types of authority in a
single hand. Perhaps Caius faced the situation more frankly than his
brother; but his consciousness of the necessity of such an occasional
power in the State was accompanied by the belief that it would prove the
ruin of the man who grasped it, that the work might be done but that the
worker would be doomed. These gloomy anticipations were not the result
of disordered nerves, but the natural fruit of the coldly calculating
intellect which saw that supremacy either of or through the people was
an illusion, that the power of the nobility must be resisted by keener
and more durable weapons than the Comitia and its temporary leaders,
that the authority of the senate might yield to a slow process of
attrition, but would never be engulfed by any cataclysmic outburst of
popular hostility. It was no part of the statesman's task to pry into
the future and vex himself with the query whether a new and permanent
headship of the State might not be created, to play the all-pervading
part which destiny had assigned to the senate. The senate's power had
not vanished, it was not even vanishing. It was a solid fact, fully
accepted by the very masses who were howling against it. Its decadence
would be the work of time, and all the great Roman reformers of the past
had left much to time and to fortune. The materials with which the
Gracchi worked were far too composite to enable them to forecast the
shape of the structure of which they were laying the foundations. The
essential fact of the future monarchy, the growth of the military power,
must have been almost completely hidden from their eyes. It is true
that, in relation to the fall of the Republic and the growth of the
monarchical idea, the Gracchi were more than mere preparatory or
destructive forces. They furnished faint types, which were gladly
welcomed by subsequent pretenders, of what a constitutional monarch
should be. But it is ever hazardous to identify the destroyer with the
creator or the type with the prophet.

CHAPTER V

The common destiny which had attended the Gracchi was manifested even in
the consequences of their fall. At both crises a brilliant but
disturbing element had vanished, the work of the reformer remained,
because it was the utterance of the people before whose sacred name the
nobility continued to bow, the political atmosphere was cleared, the
legitimate organs of government resumed their acknowledged sway. To
speak of a restoration of power to the nobility after the fall of Caius
Gracchus is to belie both the facts of history and the impressions of
the times. There is little probability that either the nobles or the
commons felt that the two years of successful agitation amounted to a
change of government, or that the senate ever abandoned the conviction
that the reformer, embarrassing as his proceedings might be on account
of the obvious necessity for their acceptance, must succumb to the
devices which had long formed the stock-in-trade of a successful
senatorial campaign; while the transition from the guidance of Gracchus
to that of the accredited representatives of the nobility was rendered
all the easier by the facts that the authority of the tribune had long
been waning, and that, for some months before his death, a large section
of the people had been greedily fixing its eyes on an attractive
programme which had been presented in the name of the senate. The
suppression of the final movement had, it is true, been marked by an
unexampled severity; but these stern measures had followed on an actual
appeal to arms, which had elicited a response from the passive or
quaking multitude and had made them in some sense participants in the
slaughter. If it was terrible to think that three thousand citizens had
been butchered in the streets or in the Tullianum, it was comforting to
remember that they had been officially denounced as public enemies by
the senate. There was no haunting sense of an inviolable wrong inflicted
on the tribunate, for Caius Gracchus had not been tribune when he fell;
there was no memory, half bitter, half grotesque, of indiscriminate
slaughter dealt by a mob of infuriated senators, for this latter and
greater _emeute_ had been suppressed by the regular forces of the State,
led by its highest magistrate. The position of the government was more
secure, the conscience of the people more easy than it had been after
the massacre of Tiberius Gracchus and his followers. This feeling of
security on the part of the government, and of acquiescence on that of
the people, was soon put to the test by the prosecution of the ex-consul
Lucius Opimius. His impeachment before the people by the tribune
Decius[753] raised the vital question whether the novel powers which he
had exercised in crushing Gracchus and his adherents, could be justified
on the ground that they were the necessary, and in fact the only, means
of maintaining public security. It was practically a question whether a
new form of martial law should be admitted to recognition by the highest
organ of the State, the voice of the sovereign people itself; and the
discussion was rendered all the more piquant by the fact that that very
sovereign was reminded that it had lately sanctioned an ordinance which
forbade a capital penalty to be pronounced against a Roman citizen
except by consent of the people, The arguments used on either side were
of the most abstract and far-reaching character.[754] In answer to
Decius's objection that the proceedings of Opimius were an obvious
contravention of statute law, and that the most wanton criminality did
not justify death without trial, the view, never unwelcome to the Roman
mind, that there was a higher justice than law, was advanced by the
champions of the accused. It was maintained that an ultimate right of
self-defence was as necessary to a state as to an individual. The man
who attempted to overturn the foundations of society was a public enemy
beyond the pale of law; the man who resisted his efforts by every means
that lay to hand was merely fulfilling the duty to his country which was
incumbent on a citizen and a magistrate. If this view were accepted, the
complex issue at law resolved itself into a simple question of fact. Had
the leader and the party that had been crushed shown by their actions
that they were overt enemies of the State? The majority which acquitted
Opimius practically decided that Gracchus and his adherents had been
rendered outlaws by their deeds. The sentiment of the moment had been
cleverly stirred by the nature of the issue which was put before them.
Had the voters been Gracchans at heart, they would probably have paid
but little attention to these unusual appeals to the fundamental
principles of political life, and would have shown themselves supporters
of the spirit, as well as of the letter, of the enactment whose author
they had just pronounced an outlaw. For there could be no question that
the Gracchan law, which no one dared assail, was meant to cover just the
very acts of which Opimius had been guilty after the slaughter of the
Gracchans in the streets had ended. The right to kill in an _emeute_
might be a questionable point; but the power of establishing a military
court for the trial of captured offenders was notoriously illegal, and
could under very few circumstances have been justified even on the
ground of necessity. The decision of the people also seemed to give a
kind of recognition to the utterance of the senate which had preceded
Opimius's display of force. It is quite true that no successful defence
of violence could ever be rested on the formula itself. This "ultimate
decree of the senate" was valued as a weighty and emphatic declaration
of the existence of a situation which demanded extreme measures, rather
than as a legal permit which justified the disregard of the ordinary
rights of the citizen. But formulae often have a power far in excess of
their true significance; they impose on the ignorant, and furnish both a
shield and a weapon to their cunning framers. The armoury of the senate,
or of any revolutionary who had the good fortune to overawe the senate,
was materially strengthened by the people's judgment in Opimius's
favour.[755] The favourable situation was immediately used to effect the
recall of Publius Popillius Laenas. His restoration was proposed to the
people by Lucius Bestia a tribune;[756] and the people which had just
sanctioned Opimius's judicial severities, did not betray the
inconsistency of continuing to resent the far more restricted
persecution of Popillius. Yet the step was an advance on their previous
action; for they were now actually rescinding a legal judgment of their
own, and approving of the actions of a court which had been established
by the senate on its own authority without any previous declaration of
the outlawry of its victims--a court whose proceedings were known to
have directed the tenor of that law of Caius Gracchus, the validity of
which was still unquestioned.

But even on the swell of this anti-Gracchan tide the nobility had still
to steer its course with caution and circumspection. Personal prejudices
were stronger than principles with the masses. They might sanction
outrages which already had the blessing of men who represented,
externally at least, the more respectable portion of Roman society; but
they continued to detest individuals whose characters seemed to have
grown blacker rather than cleaner by participation in, or even
justification of, the recent acts of violence. One of our authorities
would have us believe that even the aged Publius Lentulus, once chief of
the senate, was sacrificed by his peers to the fate which had attended
Scipio Nasica. He had climbed the Aventine with Opimius's troops and had
been severely wounded in the ensuing struggle.[757] But neither his age
nor his wounds sufficed to overcome the strange prejudice of the mob.
Obloquy and abuse dogged his footsteps, until at length he was forced,
in the interest of his own peace or security, to beg of the senate one
of those honorary embassies which covered the retirement of a senator
either for private business or for leisure, and to seek a home in
Sicily.[758] His last public utterance was an impassioned prayer that he
might never return to his ungrateful country: and the gods granted him
his request. If this story is true, it proves that public opinion was
stronger even than the voice of the Comitia. Lentulus, if put on his
trial, would probably have been acquitted; but the resentful minority,
which was powerless in the assembly, may have been sufficiently strong
to make life unbearable to its chosen victim by its demeanour at public
gatherings and in the streets. But even the Comitia had limits to its
endurance. During the year which followed Opimius's acquittal there
appeared before them a suppliant for their favour who had about equal
claims to the gratitude and the hatred of both sections of the people.
They were the self-destructive or corroborative claims of the statesman
who is called a convert by his friends and a renegade by his foes. No
living man of the age had stood in a stronger political light than
Carbo. An active assistant of Tiberius Gracchus, and so embittered an
opponent of Scipio Aemilianus as to be deemed the author of his death,
he had severed his connection with the party of reform, probably in
consequence of the view that the extension of the franchise which had
become embedded in their programme was either impracticable or
undesirable. He must have proved a welcome ally to the nobility in their
struggle with Caius Gracchus, and their appreciation of his value seems
proved by the fact that he was elected to the consulship in the very
year of the tribune's fall, when the influence of the senate, and
therefore in all probability their power of controlling the elections,
had been fully re-established. The debt was paid by a vigorous
championship of the cause of Opimius, which was heard during the
consulship of Carbo.[759] The chief magistrate spoke warmly in defence
of his accused predecessor in office, and declared that the action of
Opimius in succouring his country was an act incumbent on the consul as
the recognised guardian of the State.[760] No man had greater reason to
feel secure than Carbo, who had so lately tested the suffrages of the
people as electors and as judges; yet no man was in greater peril. It
seems that, while exposed on the side of his former associates to the
impotent rage which is excited by the success of the convert, who is
believed to have been rewarded for his treachery, he had not won the
confidence, or at least could not arouse the whole-hearted support, of
his new associates and their following in the assembly. Perhaps the
landlords had not forgiven the agrarian commissioner, nor the moderates
the vehement opponent of Scipio; to the senate he had served his
purpose, and they may not have thought him serviceable enough to deserve
the effort which had rescued Opimius. Carbo was, in fact, an inviting
object of attack for any young political adventurer who wished to
inaugurate his career by the overthrow of a distinguished political
victim, and to sound a note of liberalism which should not grate too
harshly in the ears of men of moderate views. The assailant was Lucius
Crassus,[761] destined to be the greatest orator of his day, and a youth
now burning to test his eloquence in the greatest field afforded by the
public life of Rome, but scrupulous enough to take no unfair advantage
of the object of his attack.[762] We do not know the nature of the
charge on which Carbo was arraigned. It probably came under the
expansive conception of treason, and was possibly connected with those
very proceedings in consequence of which Opimius had been accused and
acquitted.[763] That the charge was of a character that had reference to
recent political events, or at least that the prosecutor felt himself
bound to maintain some distinct political principle of a liberal kind,
is proved by the regret which Crassus expressed in his maturer years
that the impetus of youth had led him to take a step which limited his
freedom of action for the future.[764] Some compunction may also have
been stirred by the unexpected consequence of his attack; for Carbo,
perhaps realising the animosity of his judges and the weakness or
coldness of his friends, is said to have put an end to his life by
poison.[765] Voluntary exile always lay open to the Roman who dared not
face the final verdict; and the suicide of Carbo cannot be held to have
been the sole refuge of despair; it is rather a sign of the bitterness
greater than that of death, which may fall on the soul of a man who can
appeal for sympathy to none, who knows that he has been abandoned and
believes that he has been betrayed. The hostility of his countrymen
pursued him beyond the grave; the aristocratic historian could not
forget the seditious tribune, and the contemporary chronicles which
moulded and handed on the conception of Carbo's life, showed the usual
incapacity of such writings to appreciate the possibility of that honest
mental detachment from a suspected cause which often leads, through
growing dissension with past colleagues and increasing co-operation with
new, to a more violent advocacy of a new faith than is often shown by
its habitual possessors.

The records of the political contests which occupied the two years
succeeding the downfall of Caius Gracchus, are sufficient to prove that
political thought was not stifled, that practically any political
views--saving perhaps such as expressed active sympathy with the final
efforts of Caius Gracchus and his friends--might be pronounced, and that
the nobility could only maintain its influence by bending its ear to the
chatter of the streets and employing its best instruments to mould the
opinion of the Forum by a judicious mixture of deference and
exhortation. The senate knew itself to be as weak as ever in material
resources; government could not be maintained for ever by a series of
_coups d'etat_, and the only method of securing the interests of the
rulers was to maintain the confidence of the majority and to presume
occasionally on its apathy or blindness. This was the attitude adopted
with reference to the proposals which had lately been before the people.
Drusus's scheme of colonisation was not withdrawn, but its execution was
indefinitely postponed,[766] and the same treatment was meted out to the
similar proposals of Caius Gracchus. Two of his Italian colonies,
Neptunia near Tarentum and Scylacium, seem actually to have survived;
but this may have been due to the fact that the work of settlement had
already commenced on these sites, and that the government did not
venture to rescind any measure which had been already put into
execution. It was indeed possible to stifle the settlement on the site
of Carthage, for here the superstition of the people supported the
objections of the senate, and the question of the abrogation of this
colony had been raised to such magnitude by the circumstances of
Gracchus's fall that to withdraw would have been a sign of weakness. But
even this objectionable settlement in Africa gave proof of the scruples
of the senate in dealing with an accomplished fact. When the Rubrian law
was repealed, it was decided not to take from the _coloni_ the lands
which had already been assigned; no religious pretext could be given for
their disturbance, for the land of Carthage was not under the ban that
doomed the city to desolation; and the colonists remained in possession
of allotments, which were free from tribute, were held as private
property, and furnished one of the earliest examples of a Roman tenure
of land on provincial soil.[767] The assignment was by the nature of the
case changed from that of the colonial to that of the purely agrarian
type; the settlers were members of Rome alone and had no local
citizenship, although it is probable that some modest type of urban
settlement did grow up outside the ruined walls of Carthage to satisfy
the most necessary requirements of the surrounding residents.