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

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Meanwhile Eunus and his immediate following had learnt news of the
arch-enemy Damophilus, He was known to be staying in his pleasance near
to the city. Thence he and his wife were fetched with every mark of
ignominy, and the unhappy pair were dragged into the town with their
hands bound behind their backs. The masters of the city now mustered in
the theatre for an act of justice; but Damophilus did not lose his wits
even when he scanned that sea of hostile faces and accusing eyes. He
attempted a defence and was listened to in silence--nay, with approval,
for many of his auditors were visibly stirred by his words. But some
bolder spirits were tired of the show or fearful of its issue. Hermeias
and Zeuxis, two of his bitterest enemies, shouted out that he was an
Impostor[275] and rushed upon him. One of the two thrust a sword through
his side, the other smote his head off with an axe. It was then the
women's turn. Megallis's female slaves were given the power to treat her
as they would. They first tortured her, then led her up to a high place
and dashed her to the ground. Eunus avenged his private wrongs by the
death of his own masters, Antigenes and Python. The scene in the theatre
had perhaps revealed more than the desire for a systematised revenge. It
may have shown that there was some sense of justice, of order in the
savage multitude. And indeed vengeance was not wholly indiscriminate.
Eunus concealed and sent secretly away the men who had given him meat
from their tables.[276] Even the whole house of Damophilus did not
perish. There was a daughter, a strange product of such a home, a maiden
with a pure simplicity of character and a heart that melted at the sight
of pain. She had been used to soothe the anguish of those who had been
scourged by her parents and to relieve the necessities of such as were
put in bonds. Hence the abounding love felt for her by the slaves, the
pity that thrilled them when her home was doomed. An escort was selected
to convey her in safety to some relatives at Catana. Its most devoted
member was Hermeias,[277] perhaps the very man whose hands were stained
by her father's blood.

The next step in the progress of the revolt was to form a political and
military organisation that might command the respect of the countless
slaves who were soon to break their bonds in the other districts of
Sicily. Eunus was elected king. His name became Antiochus, his subjects
were "Syrians." [278] It was not the first time that a slave had assumed
the diadem; for was it not being worn for the moment by Diodotus
surnamed Tryphon, the guardian and reputed murderer of Alexander of
Syria?[279] The elevation of Eunus to the throne was due to no belief in
his courage or his generalship. But he was the prophet of the movement,
the cause of its inception, and his very name was considered to be of
good omen for the harmony of his subjects. When he had bound the diadem
on his brow and adopted regal state, he elevated the woman who had been
his companion (a Syrian and an Apamean like himself) to the rank of
queen. He formed a council of such of his followers as were thought to
possess wits above the average, and he set himself to make Enna the
adequate centre of a lengthy war. He put to death all his captives in
Enna who had no skill in fashioning arms; the residue he put in bonds
and set to the task of forging weapons.

Eunus was no warrior, but he had the regal gift of recognising merit.
The soul of the military movement which spread from Enna was
Achaeus,[280] a man pre-eminent both in counsel and in action,[281] one
who did not permit his reason to be mastered by passion and whose anger
was chiefly kindled by the foolish atrocities committed by some of his
followers.[282] Under such a leader the cause rapidly advanced. The
original four hundred had swelled in three days to six thousand; it soon
became ten thousand. As Achaeus advanced, the _ergastula_ were broken
open and each of these prison-houses furnished a new multitude of
recruits.[283] Soon a vast addition to the available forces was effected
by a movement in another part of the island. In the territory of
Agrigentum one Cleon a Cilician suddenly arose as a leader of his
fellows. He was sprung from the regions about Mount Taurus and had been
habituated from his youth to a life of brigandage. In Sicily he was
supposed to be a herdsman of horses. He was also a highwayman who
commanded the roads and was believed to have committed murders of varied
types. When he heard of the success of Eunus, he deemed that the moment
had come for raising a revolt on his own account. He gathered a band of
followers, overwhelmed the city of Agrigentum and ravaged the
surrounding territory.[284]

The terrified Siceliots, and perhaps some of the slaves themselves,
believed that this dual movement might ruin the servile cause. There
were daily expectations that the armies of Eunus and Cleon would meet in
conflict. But such hopes or fears were disappointed. Cleon put himself
absolutely under the authority of Eunus and performed the functions of a
general to a king. The junction of the forces occurred about thirty days
after the outbreak at Enna, and the Cilician brought five thousand men
to the royal standard. The full complement of the slaves when first they
joined battle with the Roman power amounted to twenty thousand men;
before the close of the war their army numbered over sixty
thousand.[285]

The Roman government exhibited its usual slowness in realising the
gravity of the situation; yet it may be excused for believing that it
had only to deal with local tumults such as those which had been so
easily suppressed in Italy. The force of eight thousand men which it put
into the field under the praetor Lucius Hypsaeus may have seemed more
than sufficient. Yet it was routed by the insurgent army, now numbering
twenty thousand men, and in the skirmishes which followed the balance of
success inclined to the rebels. The immediate progress of the struggle
cannot be traced in any detail, but there is a general record of the
storming of Roman camps and the flight of Roman generals.[286]

The theatre of the war was certainly extending at an alarming rate. The
rebels had first controlled the centre and some part of the South
Western portion of the island, the region between Enna and Agrigentum;
but now they had pushed their conquests up to the East, had reached the
coast and had gained possession of Catana and Tauromenium.[287] The
devastation of the conquered districts is said to have been more
terrible than that which followed on the Punic War.[288] But for this
the slaves were not wholly, perhaps not mainly, responsible. The rebel
armies, looking to a settlement in the future when they should enjoy the
fruit of their victories, left the villas standing, their furniture and
stores uninjured, and did no harm to the implements of husbandry. It was
the free peasantry of Sicily that now showed a savage resentment at the
inequality of fortune and of life which severed them from the great
landholders. Under pretext of the servile war[289] they sallied out, and
not only plundered the goods of the conquered, but even set fire to
their villas.

The words of Eunus when, at the beginning of the revolt, he claimed Enna
as the metropolis of the new nation, and the conduct of his followers in
sparing the grandeur and comfort which had fallen into their hands, are
sufficient proofs that the revolted slaves, in spite of their possession
of the seaports of Catana and Tauromenium, had no intention of escaping
from Sicily. Perhaps even if they had willed it, such a course might
have been impossible. They had no fleet of their own; the Cilician
pirates off the coast might have refused to accept such dangerous
passengers and to imperil their reputation as honest members of the
slave trade. And, if the fugitives crossed the sea, what homes had they
to which they could return? To their own cities they were dead, and the
long arm of Rome stretched over her protectorates in the East.[290]

It was therefore with a power which intended a permanent settlement in
Sicily, that the Roman government had to cope. Its sense of the gravity
of the situation was seen in the despatch of consular armies. The first
under Caius Fulvius Flaccus seems to have effected little.[291] The
second under Lucius Calpurnius Piso, the consul of the following year,
laid siege to Enna,[292] and captured a stronghold of the rebels. Eight
thousand of the slaves were slain by the sword, all who could be seized
were nailed to the cross.[293] The crowning victories, and the nominal
pacification of the island, remained for Piso's successor, Publius
Rupilius. He drove the rebels into Tauromenium and sat down before the
city until they were reduced to unspeakable straits by famine. The town
was at length yielded through treachery; Sarapion a Syrian betrayed the
acropolis, and the Roman commander found a multitude of starving men at
his mercy, He was pitiless in his use of victory. The captives were
first tortured, then taken up to a high place and dashed downwards to
the ground. The consul then moved on Enna. The rebels defended their
last stronghold with the utmost courage and persistence. Achaeus seems
to have already fallen, but the brave Cilician leaders still held out
with all the native valour of their race. Cleon made a sortie from the
town and fought heroically until he fell covered with wounds. Cleon's
brother Coma[294] was captured during the siege and brought before
Rupilius, who questioned him about the strength and the plans of the
remaining fugitives. He asked for a moment to collect his thoughts,
covered his head with his cloak, and died of suffocation, in the hands
of his guard and in sight of the general, before a compromising word had
passed his lips. King Eunus was not made of such stern stuff. When Enna,
impregnable in its natural strength, had been taken by treachery, he
fled with his bodyguard of a thousand men to still more precipitous
regions. His companions, knowing that it was impossible to escape their
fate (for Rupilius was already moving) fell on each others swords. But
Eunus could not face this death. He took refuge in a cave, from which he
was dragged with the last poor relics of his splendid court--his cook,
his baker, his bath attendant and his buffoon. The Romans for some
reason spared his life, or at least did not doom him to immediate death.
He was kept a prisoner at Morgantia, where he died shortly afterwards
of disease.

It is said that by the date of the fall of Enna more than twenty
thousand slaves had perished.[295] Even without this slaughter, the
capture of their seaport and their armoury would have been sufficient to
break the back of the revolt.[296] It only remained to scour the country
with picked bands of soldiers for organised resistance to be shattered,
and even for the curse of brigandage to be rooted out for a while. Death
was no longer meted out indiscriminately to the rebels. Such of the
slave-owners as survived would probably have protested against wholesale
crucifixion, and the destruction of all of the fugitives would have
impaired the resources of Sicily. Thus many were spared the cross and
restored to their bonds.[297] The extent to which reorganisation was
needed before the province could resume its normal life, is shown by the
fact that the senate thought it worth while to give Sicily a new
provincial charter. Ten commissioners were sent to assist Rupilius in
the work, which henceforth bore the proconsul's name.[298] The work, as
we know it, was of a conservative character; but it is possible that no
complete charter had ever existed before, and the war may have revealed
defects in the arrangements of Sicily that had heretofore been
unsuspected.

A climax of the type of the servile war in Sicily was perhaps needed to
bring the social problem home to thinking men in Rome. Not that it by
any means sufficed for all who pondered on the public welfare or
laboured at the business of the State. The men who measured happiness by
wealth and empire might still have retained their unshaken confidence in
the Fortune of Rome. Had a Capys of this class arisen, he might have
given a thrilling picture of the immediate future of his city, dark but
grimly national in its emergence from trial to triumph. He might have
seen her conquering arms expanding to the Euphrates and the Rhine, and
undreamed sources of wealth pouring their streams into the treasury or
the coffers of the great. If there was blood in the picture, when had it
been absent from the annals of Rome? Even civil strife and a new Italian
war might be a hard but a necessary price to pay for a strong government
and a grand mission. If an antiquated constitution disappeared in the
course of this glorious expansion, where was the loss?

But there were men in Rome who measured human life by other canons: who
believed that the State existed for the individual at least as much as
the individual for the State: who, even when they were imperialists, saw
with terror the rotten foundations on which the empire rested, and with
indignation the miserable returns that had been made to the men who had
bought it with their blood. To them the brilliant present and the
glorious future were veiled by a screen that showed the ghastly spectres
of commercial imperialism. It showed luxury running riot amongst a
nobility already impoverished and ever more thievishly inclined, a
colossal capitalism clutching at the land and stretching out its
tentacles for every source of profitable trade, the middle class fleeing
from the country districts and ousted from their living in the towns,
and the fair island that was almost a part of their Italian home, its
garden and its granary, in the throes of a great slave war.

CHAPTER II

A cause never lacks a champion, nor a great cause one whom it may render
great. Failure is in itself no sign of lack of spirit and ability, and
when a vast reform is the product of a mean personality, the individual
becomes glorified by identification with his work. From this point of
view it mattered little who undertook the task of the economic
regeneration of the Roman world. Any senator of respectable antecedents
and moderate ability, who had a stable following amongst the ruling
classes, might have succeeded where Tiberius Gracchus failed; it was a
task in which authority was of more importance than ability, and the
sense that the more numerous or powerful elements of society were united
in the demand for reform, of more value than individual genius or
honesty of purpose. This was the very circumstance that foreshadowed
failure, for the men of wide connections and established fame had shrunk
from an enterprise with which they sympathised in various degrees. In
the proximate history of the Republic there had been three men who
showed an unwavering belief in the Italian farmer and the blessings of
agriculture. These were M. Porcius Cato, P. Cornelius Scipio and Ti.
Sempronius Gracchus. But the influence of Cato's house had become
extinct with its first founder. The elder son, an amiable man and an
accomplished jurist, had not out-lived his father; the second still
survived, but seems to have inherited little of the fighting qualities
of the terrible censor. The traditions of a Roman house needed to be
sustained by the efforts of its existing representative, and the
"newness" of the Porcii might have necessitated generations of vigorous
leaders to make them a power in the land. Scipionic traditions were now
represented by Aemilianus, and the glow of the luminary was reflected in
paler lights, who received their lustre from moving in that charmed
orbit. One of these, the indefatigable henchman Laelius, had risen to
the rank of consul, and stimulated by the vigorous theorisings of his
hellenised environment, he contemplated for a moment the formation of a
plan which should deal with some of the worst evils of the agrarian
question. But he looked at the problem only to start back in affright.
The strength and truculency of the vested interests with which he would
have to deal were too much for a man whose nerve was weakened by
philosophy and experience, and Laelius by his retreat justified, if he
did not gain, the soubriquet which proclaimed his "sapience".[299] But
why was Scipio himself idle? The answer is to be found both in his
temperament and in his circumstances. With all his dash and energy, he
was something of a healthy hedonist. As the chase had delighted him in
his youth, so did war in his manhood. While hating its cruelties, he
gloried in its excitement, and the discipline of the camp was more to
his mind than the turbulence of an assembly. His mind, too, belonged to
that class which finds it almost impossible to emancipate itself from
traditional politics. His vast knowledge of the history of other
civilisations may have taught him, as it taught Polybius, that Rome was
successful because she was unique.[300] Here there was to be no break
with the past, no legislator posing as a demi-god, no obedience to the
cries of the masses who, if they once got loose, might turn and rend the
enlightened few, and reproduce on Italian soil the shocking scenes of
Greek socialistic enterprise. As things were, to be a reformer was to be
a partisan, and Scipio loved the prospect of his probable supporters as
little as that of his probable opponents. The fact of the Empire, too,
must have weighed heavily with a man who was no blind imperialist. Even
though economic reform might create an added efficiency in the army,
Scipio must have known, as Polybius certainly knew, that soldiers are
but pawns in the great game, and that the controlling forces were the
wisdom of the conservative senator, the ambition of the wealthy noble,
and the capital of the enterprising knight. The wisdom of disturbing
their influence, and awakening their resentment, could scarcely appeal
to a mind so perfectly balanced and practical as Scipio's.
Circumstances, too, must have had their share in determining his
quiescence. The Scipios had been a power in Rome in spite of the
nobility. They were used because they were needed, not because they were
loved, and the necessary man was never in much favour with the senate.
Although there was no tie of blood between Aemilianus and the elder
Scipio, they were much alike both in fortune and in temperament. They
had both been called upon to save military situations that were thought
desperate; their reputation had been made by successful war; and though
neither was a mere soldier, they lacked the taste and the patience for
the complicated political game, which alone made a man a power amidst
the noble circles and their immediate dependants at Rome.

But the last generation had seen in Tiberius Gracchus a man whose
political influence had been vast, a noble with but scant respect for
the indefeasible rights of the nobility and as stern as Cato in his
animadversions on the vices of his order, a man whose greatest successes
abroad had been those of diplomacy rather than of war, one who had
established firm connections and a living memory of himself both in West
and East, whose name was known and loved in Spain, Sardinia, Asia and
Egypt. It would have been too much to hope that this honest old
aristocrat would attempt to grapple with the evils which had first
become manifest during his own long lifetime; but it was not unnatural
that people should look to a son of his for succour, especially as this
son represented the blood of the Scipios as well as of the Gracchi. The
marriage of the elderly Gracchus with the young Cornelia had marked the
closing of the feud, personal rather than political, which had long
separated him from the elder Scipio: and a further link between the two
families was subsequently forged by the marriage of Sempronia, a
daughter of Cornelia, to Scipio Aemilianus. The young Tiberius Gracchus
may have been born during one of his father's frequent absences on the
service of the State.[301] Certainly the elder Gracchus could have seen
little of his son during the years of his infancy. But the closing years
of the old man's life seem to have been spent uninterruptedly in Italy,
and Tiberius must have been profoundly influenced by the genial and
stately presence that Rome loved and feared. But he was little more than
a boy when his father died, and the early influences that moulded his
future career seem to have been due mainly to his mother. Cornelia would
have been the typical Roman matron, had she lived a hundred years
earlier; she would then have trained sons for the battlefield, not for
the Forum. As it was, the softening influences of Greek culture had
tempered without impairing her strength of character, had substituted
rational for purely supernatural sanctions, and a wide political outlook
for a rude sense of civic duty. Herself the product of an education such
as ancient civilisations rarely bestowed upon their women, she wrote and
spoke with a purity and grace which led to the belief that her sons had
learnt from her lips and from her pen their first lessons in that
eloquence which swayed the masses and altered the fortunes of Rome.[302]
But her gifts had not impaired her tenderness. Her sons were her
"Jewels," and the successive loss of nine of the children which she had
borne to Gracchus must have made the three that remained doubly dear.
The two boys had a narrow escape from becoming Eastern princes: for the
hand of the widow Cornelia was sought in marriage by the King of
Egypt.[303] Such an alliance with the representative of the two houses
of the Gracchi and the Scipios might easily seem desirable to a
protected king, although the attractions of Cornelia may also have
influenced his choice. She, however, had no aspirations to share the
throne of the Lagidae, and the hellenism of Tiberius and of his younger
brother Caius, though deep and far-reaching, was of a kind less violent
than would have been gained by transportation to Alexandria. They were
trained in rhetoric by Diophanes an exile from Mitylene, and in
philosophy by Blossius of Cumae, a stoic of the school of Antipater of
Tarsus.[304] Many held the belief that Tiberius was spurred to his
political enterprise by the direct exhortation of these teachers; but,
even if their influence was not of this definite kind, there can be
little doubt that the teaching of the two Greeks exercised a powerful
influence on the political cast of his mind. Ideals of Greek liberty,
speeches of Greek statesmen who had come forward as champions of the
oppressed, stories of social ruin averted by the voice and hand of the
heaven-sent legislator, pictures of self-sacrifice and of resigned
submission to a standard of duty--these were lessons that may have been
taught both by rhetorician and philosopher. Nor was the teaching of
history different. In the literary environment in which the Gracchi
moved, ready answers were being given to the most vital questions of
politics and social science. Every one must have felt that the
approaching struggle had a dual aspect, that it was political as well as
social. For social conservatism was entrenched behind a political
rampart: and if reform, neglected by the senate, was to come from the
people, the question had first to be asked, Had the people a legal right
to initiate reform? The historians of that and of the preceding
generation would have answered this question unhesitatingly in the
affirmative. The _de facto_ sovereignty of the senate had not even
received a sanction in contemporary literature, while to that of the
immediate past it was equally unknown. The Roman annalists from the time
of the Second Punic War had revealed the sovereignty of the people as
the basis of the Roman constitution,[305] and the history of the long
struggle of the Plebs for freedom made the protection of the commons the
sole justification of the tribunate. From the lips of Polybius himself
Tiberius may have heard the impression which the Roman polity made on
the mind of the educated Greek: and the fact that this was a Greek
picture did not lessen its validity; for the Greek was moulding the
orthodox history of Rome, and the victims of his genius were the best
Roman intellects of the day. He might have learnt how in this mixed
constitution the people still retained their inalienable rights, how
they elected, ratified, and above all how they punished.[306] He might
have gathered that the identification of the tribunate with the
interests of the nobility was a perversion of its true and vital
function: that the tribune exists but to assist the commons and can be
subject to no authority but the people's will, whether expressed
directly by them or indirectly through his colleagues.[307] The history
of the Punic wars did indeed reveal, in the fate of a Varro or a
Minucius, how popular insubordination might be punished, when its end
was wrong. Polybius's own voice was raised in prophetic warning against
a possible demagogy of the future.[308] But that history showed the
healthy discipline of a healthy people--a people that had vanquished
genius through subordination, a peasant class whose loyalty and tenacity
were as great as those of its leaders, and without whom those leaders
would have been helpless. Where was such a class to be found now? Change
the subject or turn the page, and the Greek statesman and historian
could point to the dreadful reverse of this picture.[309] He could show
a Greek nation, gifted with political genius but doomed to political
decay--a nation whose sons accumulated money, lived in luxury with
little forethought for the future, and refused to beget children for the
State: a nation with a wealthy and cultured upper class, but one that
was literally perishing for the lack of men.[310] Was this the fate in
store for Rome? A temperament that was merely vigorous and keen might
not have been affected by such reflections. One that was merely
contemplative might have regarded them only as a subject for curious
study. But Tiberius's mind ran to neither of these two extremes. He was
a thoughtful and sensitive man of action. Sweet in temper, staid in
deportment, gentle in language, he attracted from his dependants a
loyalty that knew no limits, and from his friends a devotion that did
not even shrink from death on his behalf. Even in his pure and polished
oratory passion revealed itself chiefly in appeals to pity, not in the
harsher forms of invective or of scorn. His mode of life was simple and
restrained, but apparently with none of the pedantic austerity of the
stoic. In an age that was becoming dissolute and frivolous he was moral
and somewhat serious.[311] But his career is not that of the man who
burdens society with the impression that he has a solemn mission to
perform. Such men are rarely taken as seriously as they take themselves;
they do not win aged men of experience to support their cause; the
demeanour that wearies their friends is even likely to be found irksome
by the mob.