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

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But for a time the view prevailed that the interests of the State could
best be served by a combination of powerful directors of financial
corporations with patriotic reformers, invested with the tribunate,
struggling for higher office, and expressing their views of statecraft
chiefly in the form of denunciations of the government. Such a coalition
might form a powerful and healthy organ of criticism; but it could only
become more by serving as a mere basis for a new executive power. As
regards the nature of this power and even the necessity for its
existence, the views of the discontented elements of the time were
probably as indefinite as those of the adherents of Caius Gracchus. The
Republican constitution was an accepted fact, and the senate must at
least be tolerated as a necessary element in that constitution; for no
one could dream of finding a coherent administration either in the
Comitia or in the aggregate of the magistrates of the people. Now, as at
all times since the Roman constitution had attained its full
development, the only mode of breaking with tradition in order to secure
a given end which the senate was supposed to have neglected, was to
employ the services of an individual. There was no danger in this
employment if the individual could be overthrown when his work had been
completed, or when the senate had regained its old prestige. The leader
elevated to a purely civil magistracy by the suffrages of the people was
ever subject to this risk; if his personal influence outgrew the
necessities of his task, if he ceased to be an agent and threatened to
be a master, the mere suspicion of an aspiration after monarchy would
send a shudder of reaction through the mass of men which had given him
his greatness. As long as the cry for reform was based on the existence
of purely internal evils, which the temporary power of a domestic
magistracy such as the tribunate might heal, the breast even of the most
timid constitutionalist did not deserve to be agitated by alarm for the
security of the Republican government. But what if external dangers
called for settlement, if the eyes of the mercantile classes and the
proletariate were turned on the spectacle of a foreign commerce in decay
and an empire in disorder, if the grand justification for the senate's
authority--its government of the foreign dependencies of Rome--were
first questioned, then tossed aside? Would not the Individual makeshift
have in such a case as this to be invested with military authority?
Might not his power be defended and perpetuated by a weapon mightier
than the voting tablet? Might not his supporters be a class of men, to
whom the charms of civil life are few, whose habits have trained them to
look for inspiration to an individual, not to a corporation, still less
to that abstraction called a constitution--of men not subjected to the
dividing influences, or swayed by the momentary passions, of their
fellows of the streets? In such a case might not the power of the
individual be made secure, and what was this but monarchy?

Such were the reflections suggested to posterity by the power which
popularly-elected generals began to hold from the time of the Numidian
war. But such were not the reflections of Marius and his contemporaries.
There was no precedent and no contemporary circumstance which could
suggest a belief in any danger arising from the military power. The
experiment of bearding the senate by entrusting the conduct of a
campaign to a popular favourite had been tried before, and, whether its
immediate results were beneficial or the reverse, it had produced no
ulterior effects. Whether the people had pinned its faith on men of the
nobility such as the two Scipios, or on a man of the people like Varro,
such agents had either retired from public life, confessed their
incapacity, or returned to serve the State. The armies which such
generals had led were composed of well-to-do men who, apart from the
annoyance of the levy, had no ground of complaint against the
commonwealth: and the change in the recruiting system which had been
introduced by Marius, was much too novel and too partial for its
consequences to be forecast. Nor could any one be expected to see the
fundamental difference between the Rome of but two generations past and
the Rome of the day--the difference which sprang from the increasing
divergence of the interests of classes, and the consequent weakening of
confidence in the one class which had "weathered the storm and been
wrecked in a calm". Aristocracy is the true leveller of merit, but, if
it lose that magic power by ceasing to be an aristocracy, then the turn
of the individual has come.

The fact that it was already coming may justify us in descending from
the general to the particular and remarking that the question "Who
deserved the credit of bringing the war with Jugurtha to an end?" soon
excited an interest which appealed equally to the two parties in the
State and the two personalities whom the close of the episode had
revealed. It was natural that the success of Sulla should be exploited
by resentful members of the nobility as the triumph of the aristocrat
over the parvenu, of the old diplomacy and the old bureaucracy over the
coarse and childish methods of the opposition; it was tempting to
circulate the view that the humiliation of Metellus had been avenged,
that the man who had slandered and superseded him had found an immediate
nemesis in a youthful member of the aristocracy.[1199] Such a version,
if it ever reached the ears of the masses, was heard only to be
rejected; the man who had brought Jugurtha in chains to Rome must be his
conqueror, and, even had this evidence been lacking, they did not intend
to surrender the glory which was reflected from the champion whom they
had created. Nor even in the circles of the governing class could this
controversy be for the moment more than a matter for idle or malicious
speculation. Hard fighting had to be done against the barbarians of the
north, a reorganisation of the army was essential, and for both these
purposes even they admitted that Marius was the necessary man. Even the
two men who were most interested in the verdict were content to stifle
for the time, the one the ambitious claim which was strengthened by a
belief in its justice, the other the resentful repudiation, which would
have been rendered all the more emphatic from the galling sense that it
could not be absolute. In the coming campaigns against the Germans Sulla
served first as legate and afterwards as military tribune in the army of
his old commander.[1200] But his own conviction of the part which he had
played in the Numidian war was expressed in a manner not the less
irritating because it gave no reasonable ground for offence. He began
wearing a signet ring, the seal of which showed Bocchus delivering
Jugurtha into his hand.[1201] This emblem was destined to grate on the
nerves of Marius in a still more offensive form, for thirteen years
later, when his work had been done and his glory had begun to wane, Rome
was given an unexpected confirmation of the truthfulness of the scene
which it depicted. The King of Mauretania, eager to conciliate the
people of Rome while he showed his gratitude to Sulla, sent as a
dedicatory offering to the Capitol a group of trophy-bearing Victories
who guarded a device wrought in gold, which showed Bocchus surrendering
to Sulla the person of the Numidian king. Marius would have had it
removed, but Sulla's supporters could now loudly assert the claim, which
had been only whispered when the dark cloud of barbaric invasion hung
over the State and the loyal belief of the people in Marius was
quickened by their fears.[1202]

Yet, although at the close of the Numidian war an appalling danger to
the empire tended to perpetuate the coalition that had been formed
between the mercantile classes and the proletariate, and to wring from
the senate an acceptance of the new military genius with his plans for
reform, there are clear indications which prove that an ebb of political
feeling had been witnessed, even during the last three years--a turn of
the tide which shows how utterly unstable the coalition against the
senate would have been, had it not been reinforced by the continuance of
disasters abroad. The first sign of the reaction was the flattering
reception and the triumph of Metellus; and it may have been this current
of feeling which decided the consular elections for the following year.
The successful candidates were Caius Atilius Serranus and Quintus
Servilius Caepio. Of these Serranus could trace his name back to the
great Reguli of Carthaginian fame;[1203] the family to which he
belonged, although plebeian, had figured amongst the ranks of the
official nobility since the close of the fourth century, although it is
known to have furnished the State with but five consuls since the time
of Caius Regulus. The merit which Serranus possessed in the eyes of the
voters who elevated him to his high office, was a puzzle to posterity;
for such nobility as he could boast seemed the only compensation for the
lack of intelligence which was supposed to characterise his utterances
and his conduct.[1204] But, if we may judge from the resolution which he
subsequently displayed in combating revolution at Rome,[1205] he was
known to be a supporter of the authority of the senate, and his
aristocratic proclivities may have led to his association with his more
distinguished colleague Caepio. The latter belonged to a patrician clan,
and to a branch of that clan which had lately clung to the highest
political prizes with a tenacity second only to that of the Metelli.
Caepio's great-grandfather, his grandfather, his father and his two
uncles had all filled the consulship; and his own hereditary claim to
that office had been rendered more secure by some good service in
Lusitania, which had secured him a military reputation and the triumph
which he enjoyed in the very year that preceded his candidature.[1206]
His political sentiments may have been known before his election; but
the very fact of his elevation to the consulship, and his appreciation
of the direction in which the tide of public feeling seemed to be
running, gave a definiteness to his views and a courage to his reforming
conservatism, which must have surprised his supporters as well as his
opponents, and may not have been altogether pleasing to the extreme
members of the former party. It must have been believed that a rift was
opening between the moneyed classes and the people, and that the latter,
satisfied with their recent political triumph and reconciled by the
honest passivity of the senate, were content to resume their old
allegiance to the governing class. It must even have been held that a
spirit of repentance and indignation could be awakened at the reckless
and selfish use which the knights had made of the judicial power
entrusted to their keeping, that the Mamilian commission could be
represented as an outrage on the public conscience, and the ordinary
cognisance of public crimes as a reign of terror intended merely to
ensure the security of investments.[1207] The knights were to be
attacked in their stronghold, and Caepio came forward with a new
judiciary law. Two accounts of the scope of this measure have come down
to us. According to the one, the bill proposed that jurisdiction in the
standing criminal courts should be shared between the senators and the
equites;[1208] according to the other, this jurisdiction was to be given
to the senate.[1209] That the latter result was meant to be attained in
some way by the law, is perhaps shown by the intense dislike which the
equestrian order entertained in later times to any laudatory reference
to the hated Servilian proposal:[1210] and, although a class which has
possessed and perhaps abused a monopoly of jurisdiction, may object to
seeing even a share of it given to their enemies and their victims, yet
this resentment would be still more natural if the threatened
transference of jurisdiction from their order was to be complete. But,
in any case, we cannot afford to neglect the express testimony to the
fact that the senate was to have possession of the courts; and the only
method of reconciling this view with the other tradition of a partition
of jurisdiction between the orders, is to suppose that Caepio attempted
the effort suggested by Tiberius Gracchus, once advocated by his brother
Caius,[1211] and subsequently taken up by the younger Livius Drusus, of
increasing the senate by admitting a certain number of knights into that
body, and giving the control of the courts to the members of this
enlarged council. It may seem a strange and revolutionary step to
attempt such a reform of the governing body of the State, whose
membership and whose privileges were so jealously guarded, for the
purpose of securing a single political end; it may seem at first sight
as though the admission of a considerable number of the upper middle
class to the power and prizes possessed by the privileged few, would be
a shock even to a mildly conservative mind that had fed upon the
traditions of the past. Yet a closer examination will reveal the truth
that such a change would have meant a very slight modification in the
temper and tendencies of the senate, and would have insured a very great
increase in its security, whether it meant to govern well or ill, to
secure its own advantages or those of its suffering subjects. In reality
a very thin line parted the interests of the senators from those of the
more distinguished members of the equestrian order. It was only when
official probity or official selfishness came into conflict with
capitalistic greed, that recrimination was aroused between the two heads
of the body politic. But what if official power, under either of its
aspects, could make a compromise with greed? The rough features of both
might be softened; but, at the worst, a stronger, more permanent and, in
the long run, more profitable monopoly of the good things of the empire
would be the result of the union. The admission of wealthy capitalists
could not be considered a very marked social detraction to the dignity
of the order. The question of pedigree might be sunk in an amiable
community of taste. In point of lavish expenditure and exotic
refinement, in the taste that displayed itself in the patronage of
literature, the collection of objects of art, the adornment of country
villas, there was little to choose between the capitalist and the noble.
And community of taste is an easy passage to community of political
sentiment. Any one acquainted with the history of the past must have
known that all efforts to temper the exclusiveness of the senatorial
order had but resulted in an increase of the spirit of exclusiveness.
The patrician council had in old days been stormed by a horde of
plebeian chiefs; but these chiefs, when they had once stepped within the
magic circle, had shown not the least inclination to permit their poorer
followers to do the same. The successful Roman, practical, grasping,
commercial and magnificently beneficent, ranking the glory of patronage
as second only in point of worth to the possession and selfish use of
power, scarcely attached a value even to the highest birth when deprived
of its brilliant accessories, and had always found his bond of
fellowship in a close community of interest with others, who helped him
to hold a position which he might keep against the world. How much more
secure would this position be, if the front rank of the assailants were
enticed within the fortress and given strong positions upon the walls!
They would soon drink into their lungs the strong air of possession,
they would soon be stiffened by that electric rigidity which falls on a
man when he becomes possessed of a vested interest. There was little
probability that the knights admitted to the senate would continue to be
in any real sense members of the equestrian order.

But even to a senator who reckoned the increase of profit-sharers,
whatever their present or future sentiments might be, as a loss to
himself, the sacrifice involved in the proposed increase of the members
of his order may have seemed well worthy of the cost. For how could
power be exercised or enjoyed in the face of a hostile judicature? The
knights had recently made foreign administration on the accepted lines
not only impossible in itself, but positively dangerous to the
administrator, and in all the details of provincial policy they could,
if they chose, enforce their views by means of the terrible instrument
which Caius Gracchus had committed to their hands. Even if the business
men, shorn of their most distinguished members, might still have the
power to offer transitory opposition to the senate by coalition with the
mob, the more dangerous, because more permanent, possibilities of harm
which the control of the courts afforded them, would be wholly
swept away.

The attraction of Caepio's proposal to the senatorial mind is,
therefore, perfectly intelligible; but it is very probable that there
were many members of the nobility who were wholly insensible to this
attraction. The men who would descend a few steps in order to secure a
profitable concord between the orders, may have been in the majority;
but there must have been a considerable number of stiff-backed nobles
who, even if they believed that concord could be secured by a measure
which gave away privileges and did not conciliate hostility, were
exceedingly unwilling to descend at all. Caepio is the first exponent of
a fresh phase of the new conservatism which had animated the elder
Drusus. That statesman had sought to win the people over to the side of
the senate by a series of beneficent laws, which should be as attractive
as those of the demagogue and perhaps of more permanent utility than the
blessings showered on them by the irresponsible favourite of the moment;
but he had done nothing for the mercantile class; and his greater son
was left to combine the scheme of conciliation transmitted to him by his
father with that enunciated by Caepio.

The moderation and the tactical utility of the new proposal fired the
imagination of a man, whose support was of the utmost importance for the
success of a measure which was to be submitted to a popular body that
was divided in its allegiance, uncertain in its views, and therefore
open to conviction by rhetoric if not by argument. It was characteristic
of the past career of the young orator Lucius Crassus that he should now
have thrown himself wholly on the side of Caepio and the progressive
members of the senate.[1212] His past career had committed him to no
extremes. He had impeached Carbo, known to have been a radical and
believed to be a renegade, and he had championed the policy of
provincial colonisation as illustrated by the settlement of Narbo
Martius. His action in the former case might have been equally pleasing
to either side; his action in the latter might have been construed as
the work, less of an advanced liberal, than of an imperialist more
enlightened than his peers. He had evidently not compromised his chances
of political success; he was still but thirty-four and had just
concluded his tenure of the tribunate. In the opposite camp stood
Memmius, striving with all his might to keep alive the coalition, which
he had done so much to form, between the popular party and the merchant
class. The knights mustered readily under his banner, for they had no
illusions as to the meaning of the bill; it was impossible to conciliate
an order by the bribery of a few hundreds of its members, whose very
names were as yet unknown. To keep the people faithful to the coalition
was a much more difficult task. It was soon patent to all that the
agitators had not been wrong in supposing that a serious cleft had
opened between the late allies, and in the war of words with which the
Forum was soon filled, Memmius seems to have been no match for his
opponent. Crassus surpassed himself, and the keen but humorous invective
with which he held Memmius up to the ridicule of his former
followers,[1213] was balanced by the grand periods in which he
formulated his detailed indictment of the methods pursued by the
existing courts of justice, and of the terrible dangers to the public
security produced by their methods of administration. He did not merely
impugn the verdicts which were the issue of a jury system so degraded as
to have become the sport of a political "faction," but he dwelt on the
public danger which sprang from the parasites of the courts, the gloomy
brood of public accusers which is hatched by a rotten system, feeds on
the impurities of a diseased judicature, and terrifies the commonwealth
by the peril that lurks in its poisonous sting. This speech was to be
studied by eager students for years to come as a master work in the art
of declamatory argument.[1214] But its momentary efficacy seems to have
been as great as its permanent value. Caepio's bill was acclaimed and
carried.[1215] Then began the turn of the tide. It is practically
certain that the authors of the measure never had the courage, or
perhaps the time, to carry a single one of its proposals Into effect.
The senate was not enlarged, nor was the right of judicature wrested
from the hands of its existing holders.[1216] The bill may have been
repealed within a few months of its acceptance by the people. Caepio
went to Gaul to stake his military reputation on a conflict with the
German hordes; he was to return as the best hated man in Rome, to
receive no mercy from an indignant people. There was probably more than
one cause for this sudden change in political sentiment. The knights may
have been thrown off their guard by the suddenness of Caepio's attack
upon their privileges, and a few months of organisation and canvassing
may have been all that they needed to restore the majority required for
effacing the blot upon their name. But the chief reason is doubtless to
be sought in the external circumstances of the moment, and can only be
fully illustrated by the description which we shall soon be giving of
the great events that were taking place on the northern frontiers of the
empire. It is sufficient for the present to remember that, in the very
year in which Caepio's measure had received the ratification of the
people, Caius Popillius Laenas, a legate of one of the consuls of the
previous year, had been put on his trial before that very people for
making a treaty which was considered still more disgraceful than the
defeat which had preceded it.[1217] The Comitia now heard the whole
story of the conduct of the Roman arms against the barbarians of the
North. The story immediately revived the coalition of the early days of
the Numidian war, and there was no longer any hope for the success of
even moderate counsels proceeding from the senate. Popillius was a
second Aulus Albinus, and a new Marius was required to restore the
fortunes of the day. It was, however, certain that the only Marius could
not be withdrawn from Africa, and men looked eagerly to see what the
consular elections for the next year would produce. We hear of no
candidate belonging to the highest ranks of the nobility who was deemed
to have been defrauded of his birthright on this occasion; but the
disappointment of Quintus Lutatius Catulus was deemed wholly legitimate,
when Cnaeus Mallius Maximus defeated him at the poll. Catulus belonged
to a plebeian family that had been ennobled by the possession of the
consulship at least as early as the First Punic War; but the distinction
had not been perpetuated in the later annals of the house, and if
Catulus received the support of the official nobility, it was because
his tastes and temperament harmonised with theirs, and because it may
have seemed impolitic to advance a man of better birth and more
pronounced opinions in view of the prevailing temper of the people.
Catulus was a man of elegant taste and polished learning, one of the
most perfect Hellenists of the day, and distinguished for the grace and
purity of the Latin style that was exhibited in his writings and
orations.[1218] He was one day to write the history of his own momentous
consulship and of the final struggle with the Cimbri, in which he played
a not ignoble part. Much of our knowledge of those days is due to his
pen, and the modern historian is perhaps likely to congratulate himself
on the blindness of the people, which thrice refused Catulus the
consulship and reserved him to be an actor and a witness in the crowning
victory of the great year of deliverance. He had already been defeated
by Serranus; he was now subordinated to the claims of Maximus. But what
were those claims? Posterity found it difficult to give an answer,[1219]
and the reason for that difficulty was that this second experiment in
the virtues of a "new man" was anything but successful. The family to
which Maximus belonged seems to have been wholly undistinguished, and he
himself is the only member of his clan who is known to have attained the
consulship. An explanation of his present prominence could only be
gathered from a knowledge of his past career, and of this knowledge we
are wholly deprived; but it is manifest that he must have done much,
either in the way of positive service to the State in subordinate
capacities, or in the way of invective against its late administrators,
which caused him to be regarded as a discovery by the leaders of the
multitude. The colleague given to Maximus was a man such as the people
in the present emergency could not well refuse. Publius Rutilius Rufus
was a kind of Cato with a deeper philosophy, a higher culture, and a far
less bewildering activity. As a soldier he had been trained by Scipio in
Spain, and he possessed a theoretical interest in military matters which
issued in practical results of the most important kind.[1220] His tenure
of the urban praetorship seems to have been marked by reforms which
materially improved the condition of the freedmen in matters of private
law, and limited the right of patrons to impose burdensome conditions of
personal service as the price of manumission.[1221] It was he too who
may have introduced the humane system of granting the possession of a
debtor's goods to a creditor, if that creditor was willing to waive his
claim to the debtor's person.[1222] Rutilius, therefore, may have had
strong claims on the gratitude of the lower orders; and his personality
was one that could more readily command a grateful respect than a warm
affection. He was a learned adherent of the Stoic system, the cold and
stern philosophy of which imbued his speeches, already rendered somewhat
unattractive by their author's devotion to the forms of the civil
law.[1223] He was much in request as an advocate, his learning commanded
deep respect, but he lacked or would not condescend to the charm which
would have made him a great personal force with the people at a time
when there was a sore need of men who were at the same time great
and honest.