The History of Rome, Book IV - Theodor Mommsen
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War was thus declared against the great landholders, who now, as
three centuries ago, found substantially their organ in the senate;
and once more, after a long interval, a single magistrate stood forth
in earnest opposition to the aristocratic government. It took up the
conflict in the mode--sanctioned by use and wont for such cases--of
paralyzing the excesses of the magistrates by means of the magistracy
itself.(31) A colleague of Gracchus, Marcus Octavius, a resolute man
who was seriously persuaded of the objectionable character of the
proposed domain law, interposed his veto when it was about to be put
to the vote; a step, the constitutional effect of which was to set
aside the proposal. Gracchus in his turn suspended the business
of the state and the administration of justice, and placed his seal
on the public chest; the government acquiesced--it was inconvenient,
but the year would draw to an end. Gracchus, in perplexity, brought his
law to the vote a second time. Octavius of course repeated his -veto-;
and to the urgent entreaty of his colleague and former friend, that
he would not obstruct the salvation of Italy, he might reply that on
that very question, as to how Italy could be saved, opinions differed,
but that his constitutional right to use his veto against the proposal
of his colleague was beyond all doubt. The senate now made an attempt
to open up to Gracchus a tolerable retreat; two consulars challenged
him to discuss the matter further in the senate house, and the tribune
entered into the scheme with zeal. He sought to construe this
proposal as implying that the senate had conceded the principle of
distributing the domain-land; but neither was this implied in it,
nor was the senate at all disposed to yield in the matter; the
discussions ended without any result. Constitutional means were
exhausted. In earlier times under such circumstances men were not
indisposed to let the proposal go to sleep for the current year, and
to take it up again in each succeeding one, till the earnestness of
the demand and the pressure of public opinion overbore resistance.
Now things were carried with a higher hand. Gracchus seemed to himself
to have reached the point when he must either wholly renounce his
reform or begin a revolution. He chose the latter course; for he
came before the burgesses with the declaration that either he or
Octavius must retire from the college, and suggested to Octavius
that a vote of the burgesses should be taken as to which of them
they wished to dismiss. Octavius naturally refused to consent to
this strange challenge; the -intercessio- existed for the very purpose
of giving scope to such differences of opinion among colleagues. Then
Gracchus broke off the discussion with his colleague, and turned to
the assembled multitude with the question whether a tribune of the
people, who acted in opposition to the people, had not forfeited his
office; and the assembly, long accustomed to assent to all proposals
presented to it, and for the most part composed of the agricultural
proletariate which had flocked in from the country and was
personally interested in the carrying of the law, gave almost
unanimously an affirmative answer. Marcus Octavius was at the bidding
of Gracchus removed by the lictors from the tribunes' bench; and then,
amidst universal rejoicing, the agrarian law was carried and the
first allotment-commissioners were nominated. The votes fell on the
author of the law along with his brother Gaius, who was only twenty
years of age, and his father-in-law Appius Claudius. Such a family-
selection augmented the exasperation of the aristocracy. When the
new magistrates applied as usual to the senate to obtain the moneys
for their equipment and for their daily allowance, the former was
refused, and a daily allowance was assigned to them of 24 -asses-
(1 shilling). The feud spread daily more and more, and became
more envenomed and more personal. The difficult and intricate task
of defining, resuming, and distributing the domains carried strife
into every burgess-community, and even into the allied Italian towns.
Further Plans of Gracchus
The aristocracy made no secret that, while they would acquiesce perhaps
in the law because they could not do otherwise, the officious legislator
should never escape their vengeance; and the announcement of Quintus
Pompeius, that he would impeach Gracchus on the very day of his
resigning his tribunate, was far from being the worst of the threats
thrown out against the tribune. Gracchus believed, probably with
reason, that his personal safety was imperilled, and no longer
appeared in the Forum without a retinue of 3000 or 4000 men--a step
which drew down on him bitter expressions in the senate, even from
Metellus who was not averse to reform in itself. Altogether, if
he had expected to reach the goal by the carrying of his agrarian
law, he had now to learn that he was only at the starting-point.
The "people" owed him gratitude; but he was a lost man, if he had
no farther protection than this gratitude of the people, if he did
not continue indispensable to them and did not constantly attach
to himself fresh interests and hopes by means of other and more
comprehensive proposals. Just at that time the kingdom and wealth
of the Attalids had fallen to the Romans by the testament of the
last king of Pergamus;(32) Gracchus proposed to the people that the
Pergamene treasure should be distributed among the new landholders for
the procuring of the requisite implements and stock, and vindicated
generally, in opposition to the existing practice, the right of the
burgesses to decide definitively as to the new province. He is said
to have prepared farther popular measures, for shortening the period
of service, for extending the right of appeal, for abolishing the
prerogative of the senators exclusively to do duty as civil jurymen,
and even for the admission of the Italian allies to Roman
citizenship. How far his projects in reality reached, cannot be
ascertained; this alone is certain, that Gracchus saw that his only
safety lay in inducing the burgesses to confer on him for a second
year the office which protected him, and that, with a view to obtain
this unconstitutional prolongation, he held forth a prospect of
further reforms. If at first he had risked himself in order to save
the commonwealth, he was now obliged to put the commonwealth at stake
in order to his own safety.
He Solicits Re-election to the Tribunate
The tribes met to elect the tribunes for the ensuing year, and
the first divisions gave their votes for Gracchus; but the opposite
party in the end prevailed with their veto, so far at least that
the assembly broke up without having accomplished its object, and
the decision was postponed to the following day. For this day Gracchus
put in motion all means legitimate and illegitimate; he appeared to the
people dressed in mourning, and commended to them his youthful son;
anticipating that the election would once more be disturbed by the
veto, he made provision for expelling the adherents of the aristocracy
by force from the place of assembly in front of the Capitoline
temple. So the second day of election came on; the votes fell as on
the preceding day, and again the veto was exercised; the tumult began.
The burgesses dispersed; the elective assembly was practically dissolved;
the Capitoline temple was closed; it was rumoured in the city, now that
Tiberius had deposed all the tribunes, now that he had resolved to
continue his magistracy without reelection.
Death of Gracchus
The senate assembled in the temple of Fidelity, close by the temple
of Jupiter; the bitterest opponents of Gracchus spoke in the sitting;
when Tiberius moved his hand towards his forehead to signify
to the people, amidst the wild tumult, that his head was in danger,
it was said that he was already summoning the people to adorn his
brow with the regal chaplet. The consul Scaevola was urged to have
the traitor put to death at once. When that temperate man, by no
means averse to reform in itself, indignantly refused the equally
irrational and barbarous request, the consular Publius Scipio Nasica,
a harsh and vehement aristocrat, summoned those who shared his views
to arm themselves as they could and to follow him. Almost none of the
country people had come into town for the elections; the people of the
city timidly gave way, when they saw men of quality rushing along with
fury in their eyes, and legs of chairs and clubs in their hands.
Gracchus attempted with a few attendants to escape. But in his
flight he fell on the slope of the Capitol, and was killed by a
blow on the temples from the bludgeon of one of his furious pursuers
--Publius Satureius and Lucius Rufus afterwards contested the infamous
honour--before the statues of the seven kings at the temple of
Fidelity; with him three hundred others were slain, not one by
weapons of iron. When evening had come on, the bodies were thrown
into the Tiber; Gaius vainly entreated that the corpse of his
brother might be granted to him for burial. Such a day had never
before been seen by Rome. The party-strife lasting for more than
a century during the first social crisis had led to no such
catastrophe as that with which the second began. The better portion
of the aristocracy might shudder, but they could no longer recede.
They had no choice save to abandon a great number of their most
trusty partisans to the vengeance of the multitude, or to assume
collectively the responsibility of the outrage: the latter course was
adopted. They gave official sanction to the assertion that Gracchus
had wished to seize the crown, and justified this latest crime by
the primitive precedent of Ahala;(33) in fact, they even committed
the duty of further investigation as to the accomplices of Gracchus
to a special commission and made its head, the consul Publius Popillius,
take care that a sort of legal stamp should be supplementarily impressed
on the murder of Gracchus by bloody sentences directed against a large
number of inferior persons (622). Nasica, against whom above all
others the multitude breathed vengeance, and who had at least the
courage openly to avow his deed before the people and to defend it,
was under honourable pretexts despatched to Asia, and soon afterwards
(624) invested, during his absence, with the office of Pontifex
Maximus. Nor did the moderate party dissociate themselves from these
proceedings of their colleagues. Gaius Laelius bore a part in the
investigations adverse to the partisans of Gracchus; Publius Scaevola,
who had attempted to prevent the murder, afterwards defended it in the
senate; when Scipio Aemilianus, after his return from Spain (622), was
challenged publicly to declare whether he did or did not approve the
killing of his brother-in-law, he gave the at least ambiguous reply
that, so far as Tiberius had aspired to the crown, he had been
justly put to death.
The Domain Question Viewed in Itself
Let us endeavour to form a judgment regarding these momentous events.
The appointment of an official commission, which had to counteract
the dangerous diminution of the farmer-class by the comprehensive
establishment of new small holdings from the whole Italian landed
property at the disposal of the state, was doubtless no sign of a
healthy condition of the national economy; but it was, under the
existing circumstances political and social, suited to its purpose.
The distribution of the domains, moreover, was in itself no political
party-question; it might have been carried out to the last sod without
changing the existing constitution or at all shaking the government
of the aristocracy. As little could there be, in that case, any
complaint of a violation of rights. The state was confessedly
the owner of the occupied land; the holder as a possessor on mere
sufferance could not, as a rule, ascribe to himself even a bonafide
proprietary tenure, and, in the exceptional instances where he could
do so, he was confronted by the fact that by the Roman law prescription
did not run against the state. The distribution of the domains was not
an abolition, but an exercise, of the right of property; all jurists
were agreed as to its formal legality. But the attempt now to carry
out these legal claims of the state was far from being politically
warranted by the circumstance that the distribution of the domains
neither infringed the existing constitution nor involved a violation
of right. Such objections as have been now and then raised in our
day, when a great landlord suddenly begins to assert in all their
compass claims belonging to him in law but suffered for a long period
to lie dormant in practice, might with equal and better right be
advanced against the rogation of Gracchus. These occupied domains
had been undeniably in heritable private possession, some of them for
three hundred years; the state's proprietorship of the soil, which
from its very nature loses more readily than that of the burgess the
character of a private right, had in the case of these lands become
virtually extinct, and the present holders had universally come
to their possessions by purchase or other onerous acquisition.
The jurist might say what he would; to men of business the measure
appeared to be an ejection of the great landholders for the benefit
of the agricultural proletariate; and in fact no statesman could give
it any other name. That the leading men of the Catonian epoch formed
no other judgment, is very clearly shown by their treatment of a similar
case that occurred in their time. The territory of Capua and the
neighbouring towns, which was annexed as domain in 543, had for
the most part practically passed into private possession during
the following unsettled times. In the last years of the sixth
century, when in various respects, especially through the influence
of Cato, the reins of government were drawn tighter, the burgesses
resolved to resume the Campanian territory and to let it out for
the benefit of the treasury (582). The possession in this instance
rested on an occupation justified not by previous invitation but
at the most by the connivance of the authorities, and had continued
in no case much beyond a generation; but the holders were not
dispossessed except in consideration of a compensatory sum disbursed
under the orders of the senate by the urban praetor Publius Lentulus
(c. 589).(34) Less objectionable perhaps, but still not without
hazard, was the arrangement by which the new allotments bore
the character of heritable leaseholds and were inalienable. The most
liberal principles in regard to freedom of dealing had made Rome
great; and it was very little consonant to the spirit of the Roman
institutions, that these new farmers were peremptorily bound down
to cultivate their portions of land in a definite manner, and that
their allotments were subject to rights of revocation and all the
cramping measures associated with commercial restriction.
It will be granted that these objections to the Sempronian agrarian
law were of no small weight. Yet they are not decisive. Such a
practical eviction of the holders of the domains was certainly a
great evil; yet it was the only means of checking, at least for a
long time, an evil much greater still and in fact directly destructive
to the state--the decline of the Italian farmer-class. We can well
understand therefore why the most distinguished and patriotic men
even of the conservative party, headed by Gaius Laelius and Scipio
Aemilianus, approved and desired the distribution of the domains
viewed in itself.
The Domain Question before the Burgesses
But, if the aim of Tiberius Gracchus probably appeared to
the great majority of the discerning friends of their country
good and salutary, the method which he adopted, on the other hand,
did not and could not meet with the approval of a single man of note
and of patriotism. Rome about this period was governed by the senate.
Any one who carried a measure of administration against the majority
of the senate made a revolution. It was revolution against the spirit
of the constitution, when Gracchus submitted the domain question to the
people; and revolution also against the letter, when he destroyed not
only for the moment but for all time coming the tribunician veto--
the corrective of the state machine, through which the senate
constitutionally got rid of interferences with its government--by the
deposition of his colleague, which he justified with unworthy sophistry.
But it was not in this step that the moral and political mistake of
the action of Gracchus lay. There are no set forms of high treason
in history; whoever provokes one power in the state to conflict with
another is certainly a revolutionist, but he may be at the same time
a discerning and praiseworthy statesman. The essential defect of the
Gracchan revolution lay in a fact only too frequently overlooked--in
the nature of the then existing burgess-assemblies. The agrarian law
of Spurius Cassius(35) and that of Tiberius Gracchus had in the main
the same tenor and the same object; but the enterprises of the two
men were as different, as the former Roman burgess-body which shared
the Volscian spoil with the Latins and Hernici was different from
the present which erected the provinces of Asia and Africa. The former
was an urban community, which could meet together and act together;
the latter was a great state, as to which the attempt to unite those
belonging to it in one and the same primary assembly, and to leave to
this assembly the decision, yielded a result as lamentable as it was
ridiculous.(36) The fundamental defect of the policy of antiquity
--that it never fully advanced from the urban form of constitution to
that of a state or, which is the same thing, from the system of
primary assemblies to a parliamentary system--in this case avenged
itself. The sovereign assembly of Rome was what the sovereign
assembly in England would be, if instead of sending representatives
all the electors of England should meet together as a parliament--an
unwieldy mass, wildly agitated by all interests and all passions, in
which intelligence was totally lost; a body, which was neither able
to take a comprehensive view of things nor even to form a resolution
of its own; a body above all, in which, saving in rare exceptional
cases, a couple of hundred or thousand individuals accidentally
picked up from the streets of the capital acted and voted in name of
the burgesses. The burgesses found themselves, as a rule, nearly as
satisfactorily represented by their de facto representatives in the
tribes and centuries as by the thirty lictors who de jure represented
them in the curies; and just as what was called the decree of the
curies was nothing but a decree of the magistrate who convoked the
lictors, so the decree of the tribes and centuries at this time was
in substance simply a decree of the proposing magistrate, legalised
by some consentients indispensable for the occasion. But while in
these voting-assemblies, the -comitia-, though they were far from
dealing strictly in the matter of qualification, it was on the whole
burgesses alone that appeared, in the mere popular assemblages on the
other hand--the -contiones---every one in the shape of a man was
entitled to take his place and to shout, Egyptians and Jews, street-
boys and slaves. Such a "meeting" certainly had no significance
in the eyes of the law; it could neither vote nor decree. But it
practically ruled the street, and already the opinion of the street
was a power in Rome, so that it was of some importance whether this
confused mass received the communications made to it with silence or
shouts, whether it applauded and rejoiced or hissed and howled at
the orator. Not many had the courage to lord it over the populace
as Scipio Aemilianus did, when they hissed him on account of his
expression as to the death of his brother-in-law. "Ye," he said,
"to whom Italy is not mother but step-mother, ought to keep silence!"
and when their fury grew still louder, "Surely you do not think
that I will fear those let loose, whom I have sent in chains
to the slave-market?"
That the rusty machinery of the comitia should be made use of for the
elections and for legislation, was already bad enough. But when those
masses--the -comitia- primarily, and practically also the -contiones---
were permitted to interfere in the administration, and the instrument
which the senate employed to prevent such interferences was wrested out
of its hands; when this so-called burgess-body was allowed to decree
to itself lands along with all their appurtenances out of the public
purse; when any one, whom circumstances and his influence with the
proletariate enabled to command the streets for a few hours, found it
possible to impress on his projects the legal stamp of the sovereign
people's will, Rome had reached not the beginning, but the end of
popular freedom--had arrived not at democracy, but at monarchy.
For that reason in the previous period Cato and those who shared
his views never brought such questions before the burgesses,
but discussed them solely in the senate.(37) For that reason
contemporaries of Gracchus, the men of the Scipionic circle,
described the Flaminian agrarian law of 522--the first step in
that fatal career--as the beginning of the decline of Roman greatness.
For that reason they allowed the author of the domain-distribution
to fall, and saw in his dreadful end, as it were, a rampart against
similar attempts in future, while yet they maintained and turned
to account with all their energy the domain-distribution itself
which he had carried through--so sad was the state of things in
Rome that honest patriots were forced into the horrible hypocrisy
of abandoning the evil-doer and yet appropriating the fruit of
the evil deed. For that reason too the opponents of Gracchus were
in a certain sense not wrong, when they accused him of aspiring to the
crown. For him it is a fresh impeachment rather than a justification,
that he himself was probably a stranger to any such thought.
The aristocratic government was so thoroughly pernicious, that
the citizen, who was able to depose the senate and to put
himself in its place, might perhaps benefit the commonwealth
more than he injured it.
Results
But such a bold player Tiberius Gracchus was not. He was a tolerably
capable, thoroughly well-meaning, conservative patriot, who simply
did not know what he was doing; who in the fullest belief that he
was calling the people evoked the rabble, and grasped at the crown
without being himself aware of it, until the inexorable sequence of
events urged him irresistibly into the career of the demagogue-tyrant;
until the family commission, the interferences with the public
finances, the further "reforms" exacted by necessity and despair,
the bodyguard from the pavement, and the conflicts in the streets
betrayed the lamentable usurper more and more clearly to himself and
others; until at length the unchained spirits of revolution seized and
devoured the incapable conjurer. The infamous butchery, through which
he perished, condemns itself, as it condemns the aristocratic faction
whence it issued; but the glory of martyrdom, with which it has
embellished the name of Tiberius Gracchus, came in this instance,
as usually, to the wrong man. The best of his contemporaries judged
otherwise. When the catastrophe was announced to Scipio Aemilianus,
he uttered the words of Homer:
"--Os apoloito kai allos, otis toiauta ge pezoi--"
and when the younger brother of Tiberius seemed disposed to come forward
in the same career, his own mother wrote to him: "Shall then our house
have no end of madness? Where shall be the limit? Have we not yet
enough to be ashamed of, in having confused and disorganized the state?"
So spoke not the anxious mother, but the daughter of the conqueror of
Carthage, who knew and experienced a misfortune yet greater than the
death of her children.
Chapter III
The Revolution and Gaius Gracchus
The Commisssion for Distributing the Domains
Tiberius Gracchus was dead; but his two works, the distribution
of land and the revolution, survived their author. In presence
of the starving agricultural proletariate the senate might venture
on a murder, but it could not make use of that murder to annul
the Sempronian agrarian law; the law itself had been far more
strengthened than shaken by the frantic outbreak of party fury.
The party of the aristocracy friendly towards reform, which openly
favoured the distribution of the domains--headed by Quintus Metellus,
just about this time (623) censor, and Publius Scaevola--in concert with
the party of Scipio Aemilianus, which was at least not disinclined to
reform, gained the upper hand for the time being even in the senate;
and a decree of the senate expressly directed the triumvirs to begin
their labours. According to the Sempronian law these were to be
nominated annually by the community, and this was probably done: but
from the nature of their task it was natural that the election should
fall again and again on the same men, and new elections in the proper
sense occurred only when a place became vacant through death. Thus in
the place of Tiberius Gracchus there was appointed the father-in-law
of his brother Gaius, Publius Crassus Mucianus; and after the fall of
Mucianus in 624(1) and the death of Appius Claudius, the business of
distribution was managed in concert with the young Gaius Gracchus by
two of the most active leaders of the movement party, Marcus Fulvius
Flaccus and Gaius Papirius Carbo. The very names of these men are
vouchers that the work of resuming and distributing the occupied
domain-land was prosecuted with zeal and energy; and, in fact, proofs
to that effect are not wanting. As early as 622 the consul of that
year, Publius Popillius, the same who directed the prosecutions of
the adherents of Tiberius Gracchus, recorded on a public monument that
he was "the first who had turned the shepherds out of the domains and
installed farmers in their stead"; and tradition otherwise affirms that
the distribution extended over all Italy, and that in the formerly
existing communities the number of farms was everywhere augmented--for
it was the design of the Sempronian agrarian law to elevate the farmer-
class not by the founding of new communities, but by the strengthening
of those already in existence. The extent and the comprehensive effect
of these distributions are attested by the numerous arrangements
in the Roman art of land-measuring that go back to the Gracchan
assignations of land; for instance, a due placing of boundary-stones
so as to obviate future mistakes appears to have been first called
into existence by the Gracchan courts for demarcation and the land-
distributions. But the numbers on the burgess-rolls give the
clearest evidence. The census, which was published in 623 and actually
took place probably in the beginning of 622, yielded not more than
319,000 burgesses capable of bearing arms, whereas six years afterwards
(629) in place of the previous falling-off(2) the number rises to
395,000, that is 76,000 of an increase--beyond all doubt solely
in consequence of what the allotment-commission did for the Roman
burgesses. Whether it multiplied the farms among the Italians in
the same proportion maybe doubted; at any rate what it did accomplish
yielded a great and beneficent result. It is true that this
result was not achieved without various violations of respectable
interests and existing rights. The allotment-commission, composed
of the most decided partisans, and absolute judge in its own cause,
proceeded with its labours in a reckless and even tumultuary fashion;
public notices summoned every one, who was able, to give information
regarding the extent of the domain-lands; the old land-registers were
inexorably referred to, and not only was occupation new and old
revoked without distinction, but in various cases real private
property, as to which the holder was unable satisfactorily to prove
his tenure, was included in the confiscation. Loud and for the most
part well founded as were the complaints, the senate allowed the
distributors to pursue their course; it was clear that, if the
domain question was to be settled at all, the matter could not
be carried through without such unceremonious vigour of action.