The History of Rome, Book IV - Theodor Mommsen
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This order of the equites--that is to say, substantially, of the
wealthy merchants--in various ways came roughly into contact with
the governing senate. There was a natural antipathy between the
genteel aristocrats and the men to whom money had brought rank.
The ruling lords, especially the better class of them, stood just
as much aloof from speculations, as the men of material interests
were indifferent to political questions and coterie-feuds. The two
classes had already frequently come into sharp collision, particularly
in the provinces; for, though in general the provincials had far more
reason than the Roman capitalists had to complain of the partiality of
the Roman magistrates, yet the ruling lords of the senate did not lend
countenance to the greedy and unjust doings of the moneyed men, at
the expense of the subjects, so thoroughly and absolutely as those
capitalists desired. In spite of their concord in opposing a common
foe such as was Tiberius Gracchus, a deep gulf lay between the nobility
and the moneyed aristocracy; and Gaius, more adroit than his brother,
enlarged it till the alliance was broken up and the mercantile class
ranged itself on his side.
Insignia of the Equites
That the external privileges, through which afterwards the men of
equestrian census were distinguished from the rest of the multitude--
the golden finger-ring instead of the ordinary ring of iron or copper,
and the separate and better place at the burgess-festivals--were first
conferred on the equites by Gaius Gracchus, is not certain, but is not
improbable. For they emerged at any rate about this period, and, as
the extension of these hitherto mainly senatorial privileges(19) to
the equestrian order which he brought into prominence was quite in
the style of Gracchus, so it was in very truth his aim to impress on
the equites the stamp of an order, similarly close and privileged,
intermediate between the senatorial aristocracy and the common multitude;
and this same aim was more promoted by those class-insignia, trifling
though they were in themselves and though many qualified to be equites
might not avail themselves of them, than by many an ordinance far
more intrinsically important. But the party of material interests,
though it by no means despised such honours, was yet not to be
gained through these alone. Gracchus perceived well that it would
doubtless duly fall to the highest bidder, but that it needed a high
and substantial bidding; and so he offered to it the revenues of Asia
and the jury courts.
Taxation of Asia
The system of Roman financial administration, under which the indirect
taxes as well as the domain-revenues were levied by means of
middlemen, in itself granted to the Roman capitalist-class the most
extensive advantages at the expense of those liable to taxation.
But the direct taxes consisted either, as in most provinces, of fixed
sums of money payable by the communities--which of itself excluded
the intervention of Roman capitalists--or, as in Sicily and Sardinia,
of a ground-tenth, the levying of which for each particular community
was leased in the provinces themselves, so that wealthy provincials
regularly, and the tributary communities themselves very frequently,
farmed the tenth of their districts and thereby kept at a distance
the dangerous Roman middlemen. Six years before, when the province
of Asia had fallen to the Romans, the senate had organized it
substantially according to the first system.(20) Gaius Gracchus(21)
overturned this arrangement by a decree of the people, and not only
burdened the province, which had hitherto been almost free from
taxation, with the most extensive indirect and direct taxes,
particularly the ground-tenth, but also enacted that these taxes
should be exposed to auction for the province as a whole and in Rome--
a rule which practically excluded the provincials from participation,
and called into existence in the body of middlemen for the -decumae-,
-scriptura-, and -vectigalia- of the province of Asia an association of
capitalists of colossal magnitude. A significant indication, moreover,
of the endeavour of Gracchus to make the order of capitalists
independent of the senate was the enactment, that the entire or
partial remission of the stipulated rent was no longer, as hitherto,
to be granted by the senate at discretion, but was under definite
contingencies to be accorded by law.
Jury Courts
While a gold mine was thus opened for the mercantile class, and the
members of the new partnership constituted a great financial power
imposing even for the government--a "senate of merchants"-a definite
sphere of public action was at the same time assigned to them in
the jury courts. The field of the criminal procedure, which by right
came before the burgesses, was among the Romans from the first very
narrow, and was, as we have already stated,(22) still further narrowed
by Gracchus; most processes--both such as related to public crimes, and
civil causes--were decided either by single jurymen [-indices-], or by
commissions partly permanent, partly extraordinary. Hitherto both the
former and the latter had been exclusively taken from the senate;
Gracchus transferred the functions of jurymen--both in strictly civil
processes, and in the case of the standing and temporary commissions--
to the equestrian order, directing a new list of jurymen to be
annually formed after the analogy of the equestrian centuries from
all persons of equestrian rating, and excluding the senators
directly, and the young men of senatorial families by the fixing of
a certain limit of age, from such judicial functions.(23) It is not
improbable that the selection of jurymen was chiefly made to fall
on the same men who played the leading part in the great mercantile
associations, particularly those farming the revenues in Asia and
elsewhere, just because these had a very close personal interest in
sitting in the courts; and, if the lists of jurymen and the societies
of -publicani- thus coincided as regards their chiefs, we can all
the better understand the significance of the counter-senate thus
constituted. The substantial effect of this was, that, while hitherto
there had been only two authorities in the state--the government as the
administering and controlling, and the burgesses as the legislative,
authority--and the courts had been divided between them, now the moneyed
aristocracy was not only united into a compact and privileged class on
the solid basis of material interests, but also, as a judicial and
controlling power, formed part of the state and took its place almost
on a footing of equality by the side of the ruling aristocracy. All
the old antipathies of the merchants against the nobility could not
but thenceforth find only too practical an expression in the sentences
of the jurymen; above all, when the provincial governors were called
to a reckoning, the senator had to await a decision involving his
civic existence at the hands no longer as formerly of his peers,
but of great merchants and bankers. The feuds between the Roman
capitalists and the Roman governors were transplanted from the
provincial administration to the dangerous field of these processes
of reckoning. Not only was the aristocracy of the rich divided, but
care was taken that the variance should always find fresh nourishment
and easy expression.
Monarchical Government Substituted for That of the Senate
With his weapons--the proletariate and the mercantile class--thus
prepared, Gracchus set about his main work, the overthrow of the
ruling aristocracy. The overthrow of the senate meant, on the one
hand, the depriving it of its essential functions by legislative
alterations; and on the other hand, the ruining of the existing
aristocracy by measures of a more personal and transient kind.
Gracchus did both. The function of administration, in particular,
had hitherto belonged exclusively to the senate; Gracchus took it away,
partly by settling the most important administrative questions by means
of comitial laws or, in other words, practically through tribunician
dictation, partly by restricting the senate as much as possible
in current affairs, partly by taking business after the most
comprehensive fashion into his own hands. The measures of the
former kind have been mentioned already: the new master of the state
without consulting the senate dealt with the state-chest, by imposing
a permanent and oppressive burden on the public finances in the
distribution of corn; dealt with the domains, by sending out colonies
not as hitherto by decree of the senate and people, but by decree of
the people alone; and dealt with the provincial administration, by
overturning through a law of the people the financial constitution given
by the senate to the province of Asia and substituting for it one
altogether different. One of the most important of the current duties
of the senate--that of fixing at its pleasure the functions for the
time being of the two consuls--was not withdrawn from it; but the
indirect pressure hitherto exercised in this way over the supreme
magistrates was limited by directing the senate to fix these functions
before the consuls concerned were elected. With unrivalled
activity, lastly, Gaius concentrated the most varied and most
complicated functions of government in his own person. He himself
watched over the distribution of grain, selected the jurymen, founded
the colonies in person notwithstanding that his magistracy legally
chained him to the city, regulated the highways and concluded building-
contracts, led the discussions of the senate, settled the consular
elections--in short, he accustomed the people to the fact that one man
was foremost in all things, and threw the lax and lame administration
of the senatorial college into the shade by the vigour and versatility
of his personal rule. Gracchus interfered with the judicial
omnipotence, still more energetically than with the administration,
of the senate. We have already mentioned that he set aside the
senators as jurymen; the same course was taken with the jurisdiction
which the senate as the supreme administrative board allowed to itself
in exceptional cases. Under severe penalties he prohibited--
apparently in his renewal of the law -de provocatione-(24)--the
appointment of extraordinary commissions of high treason by decree
of the senate, such as that which after his brother's murder had sat
in judgment on his adherents. The aggregate effect of these measures
was, that the senate wholly lost the power of control, and retained
only so much of administration as the head of the state thought fit
to leave to it. But these constitutive measures were not enough; the
governing aristocracy for the time being was also directly assailed.
It was a mere act of revenge, which assigned retrospective effect to
the last-mentioned law and thereby compelled Publius Popillius--the
aristocrat who after the death of Nasica, which had occurred in the
interval, was chiefly obnoxious to the democrats--to go into exile.
It is remarkable that this proposal was only carried by 18 to 17
votes in the assembly of the tribes--a sign how much the influence
of the aristocracy still availed with the multitude, at least in
questions of a personal interest. A similar but far less justifiable
decree--the proposal, directed against Marcus Octavius, that whoever
had been deprived of his office by decree of the people should be
for ever incapable of filling a public post--was recalled by Gaius
at the request of his mother; and he was thus spared the disgrace
of openly mocking justice by legalizing a notorious violation of
the constitution, and of taking base vengeance on a man of honour,
who had not spoken an angry word against Tiberius and had only acted
constitutionally and in accordance with what he conceived to be
his duty. But of very different importance from these measures was
the scheme of Gaius--which, it is true, was hardly carried into effect--
to strengthen the senate by 300 new members, that is, by just about as
many as it hitherto had contained, and to have them elected from the
equestrian order by the comitia--a creation of peers after the most
comprehensive style, which would have reduced the senate into the most
complete dependence on the chief of the state.
Character of the Constitution of Gaius Gracchus
This was the political constitution which Gaius Gracchus projected
and, in its most essential points, carried out during the two years
of his tribunate (631, 632), without, so far as we can see,
encountering any resistance worthy of mention, and without requiring
to apply force for the attainment of his ends. The order of sequence
in which these measures were carried can no longer be recognized in
the confused accounts handed down to us, and various questions that
suggest themselves have to remain unanswered. But it does not seem
as if, in what is missing, many elements of material importance have
escaped us; for as to the principal matters we have quite trustworthy
information, and Gaius was by no means, like his brother, urged on
further and further by the current of events, but evidently had a well-
considered and comprehensive plan, the substance of which he fully
embodied in a series of special laws. Now the Sempronian constitution
itself shows very clearly to every one who is able and willing to
see, that Gaius Gracchus did not at all, as many good-natured
people in ancient and modern times have supposed, wish to place
the Roman republic on new democratic bases, but that on the contrary
he wished to abolish it and to introduce in its stead a -tyrannis---
that is, in modern language, a monarchy not of the feudal or of the
theocratic, but of the Napoleonic absolute, type--in the form of a
magistracy continued for life by regular re-election and rendered
absolute by an unconditional control over the formally sovereign
comitia, an unlimited tribuneship of the people for life. In fact
if Gracchus, as his words and still more his works plainly testify,
aimed at the overthrow of the government of the senate, what other
political organization but the -tyrannis- remained possible, after
overthrowing the aristocratic government, in a commonwealth which
had outgrown primary assemblies and for which parliamentary government
did not exist? Dreamers such as was his predecessor, and knaves such
as after-times produced, might call this in question; but Gaius
Gracchus was a statesman, and though the formal shape, which that great
man had inwardly projected for his great work, has not been handed
down to us and may be conceived of very variously, yet he was beyond
doubt aware of what he was doing. Little as the intention of
usurping monarchical power can be mistaken, as little will those
who survey the whole circumstances on this account blame Gracchus.
An absolute monarchy is a great misfortune for a nation, but it is
a less misfortune than an absolute oligarchy; and history cannot
censure one who imposes on a nation the lesser suffering instead
of the greater, least of all in the case of a nature so vehemently
earnest and so far aloof from all that is vulgar as was that of Gaius
Gracchus. Nevertheless it may not conceal the fact that his whole
legislation was pervaded in a most pernicious way by conflicting
aims; for on the one hand it aimed at the public good, while on the
other hand it ministered to the personal objects and in fact the
personal vengeance of the ruler. Gracchus earnestly laboured to find
a remedy for social evils, and to check the spread of pauperism; yet
he at the same time intentionally reared up a street proletariate of
the worst kind in the capital by his distributions of corn, which were
designed to be, and became, a premium to all the lazy and hungry civic
rabble. Gracchus censured in the bitterest terms the venality of
the senate, and in particular laid bare with unsparing and just
severity the scandalous traffic which Manius Aquillius had driven with
the provinces of Asia Minor;(25) yet it was through the efforts of
the same man that the sovereign populace of the capital got itself
alimented, in return for its cares of government, by the body of its
subjects. Gracchus warmly disapproved the disgraceful spoliation of
the provinces, and not only instituted proceedings of wholesome
severity in particular cases, but also procured the abolition of the
thoroughly insufficient senatorial courts, before which even Scipio
Aemilianus had vainly staked his whole influence to bring the most
decided criminals to punishment. Yet he at the same time, by the
introduction of courts composed of merchants, surrendered the
provincials with their hands fettered to the party of material
interests, and thereby to a despotism still more unscrupulous than
that of the aristocracy had been; and he introduced into Asia a
taxation, compared with which even the form of taxation current after
the Carthaginian model in Sicily might be called mild and humane--
just because on the one hand he needed the party of moneyed men,
and on the other hand required new and comprehensive resources to
meet his distributions of grain and the other burdens newly imposed
on the finances. Gracchus beyond doubt desired a firm administration
and a well-regulated dispensing of justice, as numerous thoroughly
judicious ordinances testify; yet his new system of administration
rested on a continuous series of individual usurpations only formally
legalized, and he intentionally drew the judicial system--which every
well-ordered state will endeavour as far as possible to place, if not
above political parties, at any rate aloof from them--into the midst
of the whirlpool of revolution. Certainly the blame of these
conflicting tendencies in Gaius Gracchus is chargeable to a very great
extent on his position rather than on himself personally. On the
very threshold of the -tyrannis- he was confronted by the fatal
dilemma, moral and political, that the same man had at one and the
same time to maintain his ground, we may say, as a robber-chieftain
and to lead the state as its first citizen--a dilemma to which
Pericles, Caesar, and Napoleon had also to make dangerous sacrifices.
But the conduct of Gaius Gracchus cannot be wholly explained from
this necessity; along with it there worked in him the consuming
passion, the glowing revenge, which foreseeing its own destruction
hurls the firebrand into the house of the foe. He has himself
expressed what he thought of his ordinance as to the jurymen and similar
measures intended to divide the aristocracy; he called them daggers
which he had thrown into the Forum that the burgesses--the men of
rank, obviously--might lacerate each other with them. He was a
political incendiary. Not only was the hundred years' revolution which
dates from him, so far as it was one man's work, the work of Gaius
Gracchus, but he was above all the true founder of that terrible
urban proletariate flattered and paid by the classes above it, which
through its aggregation in the capital--the natural consequence of
the largesses of corn--became at once utterly demoralized and aware
of its power, and which--with its demands, sometimes stupid, sometimes
knavish, and its talk of the sovereignty of the people--lay like
an incubus for five hundred years upon the Roman commonwealth and
only perished along with it And yet--this greatest of political
transgressors was in turn the regenerator of his country. There is
scarce a structural idea in Roman monarchy, which is not traceable
to Gaius Gracchus. From him proceeded the maxim--founded doubtless
in a certain sense in the nature of the old traditional laws of war,
but yet, in the extension and practical application now given to it,
foreign to the older state-law--that all the land of the subject
communities was to be regarded as the private property of the state;
a maxim, which was primarily employed to vindicate the right of the
state to tax that land at pleasure, as was the case in Asia, or to
apply it for the institution of colonies, as was done in Africa,
and which became afterwards a fundamental principle of law under the
empire. From him proceeded the tactics, whereby demagogues and
tyrants, leaning for support on material interests, break down the
governing Aristocracy, but subsequently legitimize the change of
constitution by substituting a strict and efficient administration
for the previous misgovernment. To him, in particular, are traceable
the first steps towards such a reconciliation between Rome and the
provinces as the establishment of monarchy could not but bring in its
train; the attempt to rebuild Carthage destroyed by Italian rivalry
and generally to open the way for Italian emigration towards the
provinces, formed the first link in the long chain of that momentous
and beneficial course of action. Right and wrong, fortune and
misfortune were so inextricably blended in this singular man
and in this marvellous political constellation, that it may well
beseem history in this case--though it beseems her but seldom--
to reserve her judgment.
The Question As to the Allies
When Gracchus had substantially completed the new constitution
projected by him for the state, he applied himself to a second and
more difficult work. The question as to the Italian allies was still
undecided. What were the views of the democratic leaders regarding
it, had been rendered sufficiently apparent.(26) They naturally
desired the utmost possible extension of the Roman franchise, not
merely that they might bring in the domains occupied by the Latins for
distribution, but above all that they might strengthen their body of
adherents by the enormous mass of the new burgesses, might bring the
comitial machine still more fully under their power by widening the
body of privileged electors, and generally might abolish a distinction
which had now with the fall of the republican constitution lost all
serious importance. But here they encountered resistance from their
own party, and especially from that band which otherwise readily gave
its sovereign assent to all which it did or did not understand.
For the simple reason that Roman citizenship seemed to these people,
so to speak, like a partnership which gave them a claim to share in
sundry very tangible profits, direct and indirect, they were not at
all disposed to enlarge the number of the partners. The rejection
of the Fulvian law in 629, and the insurrection of the Fregellans
arising out of it, were significant indications both of the obstinate
perseverance of the fraction of the burgesses that ruled the comitia,
and of the impatient urgency of the allies. Towards the end of his
second tribunate (632) Gracchus, probably urged by obligations which
he had undertaken towards the allies, ventured on a second attempt.
In concert with Marcus Flaccus--who, although a consular, had again
taken the tribuneship of the people, in order now to carry the law
which he had formerly proposed without success--he made a proposal
to grant to the Latins the full franchise, and to the other Italian
allies the former rights of the Latins. But the proposal encountered
the united opposition of the senate and the mob of the capital.
The nature of this coalition and its mode of conflict are clearly and
distinctly seen from an accidentally preserved fragment of the speech
which the consul Gaius Fannius made to the burgesses in opposition to
the proposal. "Do you then think," said the Optimate, "that, if you
confer the franchise on the Latins, you will be able to find a place
in future--just as you are now standing there in front of me--in the
burgess-assembly, or at the games and popular amusements? Do you not
believe, on the contrary, that those people will occupy every spot?"
Among the burgesses of the fifth century, who on one day conferred
the franchise on all the Sabines, such an orator might perhaps have
been hissed; those of the seventh found his reasoning uncommonly clear
and the price of the assignation of the Latin domains, which was
offered to it by Gracchus, far too low. The very circumstance, that
the senate carried a permission to eject from the city all non-
burgesses before the day for the decisive vote, showed the fate in
store for the proposal. And when before the voting Livius Drusus,
a colleague of Gracchus, interposed his veto against the law, the
people received the veto in such a way that Gracchus could not
venture to proceed further or even to prepare for Drusus the fate
of Marcus Octavius.
Overthrow of Gracchus
It was, apparently, this success which emboldened the senate to
attempt the overthrow of the victorious demagogue. The weapons of
attack were substantially the same with which Gracchus himself had
formerly operated. The power of Gracchus rested on the mercantile
class and the proletariate; primarily on the latter, which in this
conflict, wherein neither side had any military reserve, acted as
it were the part of an army. It was clear that the senate was not
powerful enough to wrest either from the merchants or from the
proletariate their new privileges; any attempt to assail the corn-
laws or the new jury-arrangement would have led, under a somewhat
grosser or somewhat more civilized form, to a street-riot in presence
of which the senate was utterly defenceless. But it was no less
clear, that Gracchus himself and these merchants and proletarians were
only kept together by mutual advantage, and that the men of material
interests were ready to accept their posts, and the populace strictly so
called its bread, quite as well from any other as from Gaius Gracchus.
The institutions of Gracchus stood, for the moment at least,
immoveably firm with the exception of a single one--his own supremacy.
The weakness of the latter lay in the fact, that in the constitution of
Gracchus there was no relation of allegiance subsisting at all between
the chief and the army; and, while the new constitution possessed all
other elements of vitality, it lacked one--the moral tie between ruler
and ruled, without which every state rests on a pedestal of clay.
In the rejection of the proposal to admit the Latins to the franchise
it had been demonstrated with decisive clearness that the multitude
in fact never voted for Gracchus, but always simply for itself.
The aristocracy conceived the plan of offering battle to the author
of the corn-largesses and land-assignations on his own ground.