History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0144/01444.txt

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Title:       Gracchi And Their Reforms
Author:      Mommsen, Theodor

Gracchi And Their Reforms

B.C. 133

Introduction

     Cornelia, whose father was Scipio Africanus, preferred to be called
"Mother of the Gracchi" rather than daughter of the conqueror of Numantia.
Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, her sons, were born at a time when the social
condition of Rome was rank with corruption.  The small farmer class were
deprived of holdings, the soil was being worked by slaves, and its products
wasted on pleasure and debauchery by the rich; the law courts were controlled
by the wealthy and powerful, while oppression, bribery, and fraud were
generally rampant in the city.

     On December 10, B.C. 133, Tiberius Gracchus entered upon the office of
tribune, to which he had been elected, and pledged himself to the abolition of
crying abuses.  His first movement was in the direction of agrarian
legislation.  He proposed to vest all public lands in the hands of three
commissioners (triumviri), who were to distribute the public lands, at that
time largely monopolized by the wealthy, to all citizens in needy
circumstances.  The bill met with bitter opposition from the rich landholders,
but was eventually passed, and Gracchus rose to the summit of popular power.
He also brought forward a measure limiting the necessary period of military
service; a second bill was drawn up by him for the reformation of the law
courts, and a third established a right of appeal from the law courts to the
popular assembly.  These measures were afterward carried by his brother Caius.
Tiberius Gracchus was killed in a tumult which was raised in the Forum by the
nobles and their partisans, and three hundred of his followers lost their
lives in the fray.

     Caius Gracchus, his brother, returned to Rome B.C. 124 from Sardinia,
where he had been engaged in subduing the mountaineers.  For ten years he had
kept aloof from public life, but was at once elected tribune, in the discharge
of which office he showed distinguished powers as an orator.  He brought forth
the important measures known as the Sempronian Laws, the provisions of which
were quite revolutionary in character.  The first of these laws renewed and
extended the agrarian laws of his brother and instituted new colonies in Italy
and the provinces.  By the second Sempronian law the State undertook to
furnish corn at a low price to all Roman citizens.

     Other measures aimed at diminishing the great administrative power of the
senate, which had so far monopolized all judicial offices.  By the law of
Gracchus the administration of justice was entirely transferred to a body of
three hundred persons who possessed the equestrian rate of property.  The
Sempronian law for the assignment of consular provinces, which hitherto had
been left to the senate, made the allotment of two designated provinces to be
decided by the newly elected consuls themselves.  The power of the senate was
also crippled by the law of Gracchus in which he transferred to the tribunes
the burden of improving the roads of Italy contracts for which had hitherto
been awarded by the censor under the approval of the senate.  These movements
were all in the direction of increasing popular and democratic power, and the
work of the Gracchi tended to the extension of political freedom.  In the
history of politics these social struggles are among the most important events
illustrative of the gradual dawn of civil liberty among a people which had
been dominated and oppressed by a selfish aristocracy.

The Gracchi And Their Reforms

     The power of Gracchus rested on the mercantile class and the proletariat;
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 proletariat 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
Caius Gracchus.

     The institutions of Gracchus stood, for the moment at least, immovably
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.

     As a matter of course the senate offered to the proletariat not merely
the same advantages as Gracchus had already assured to it in corn and
otherwise, but advantages still greater.  Commissioned by the senate, the
tribune of the people, Marcus Livius Drusus, proposed to relieve those who
received land under the laws of Gracchus from the rent imposed on them, and to
declare their allotments to be free and alienable property; and, further, to
provide for the proletariat not in transmarine, but in twelve Italian,
colonies, each of three thousand colonists, for the planting of which the
people might nominate suitable men; only Drusus himself declined - in contrast
with the family complexion of the Gracchan commission - to take part in this
honorable duty.  Presumably the Latins were named as those who would have to
bear the costs of the plan, for there does not appear to have existed then in
Italy other occupied domain land of any extent save that which was enjoyed by
them.

     We find isolated enactments of Drusus - such as the regulation that the
punishment of scourging might only be inflicted on the Latin soldier by the
Latin officer set over him, and not by the Roman officer - which were to all
appearance intended to indemnify the Latins for other losses.  The plan was
not the most refined.  The attempt at rivalry was too clear; the endeavor to
draw the fair bond between the nobles and the proletariat still closer by
their exercising jointly a tyranny over the Latins was too transparent; the
inquiry suggested itself too readily.

     In what part of the peninsula, now that the Italian domains had been
mainly given away already - even granting that the whole domains assigned to
the Latins were confiscated - was the occupied domain land requisite for the
formation of twelve new, numerous, and compact burgess communities to be
discovered?  Lastly, the declaration of Drusus that he would have nothing to
do with the execution of his law was so dreadfully prudent as to border on
sheer folly.  But the clumsy snare was quite suited to the stupid game which
they wished to catch.  There was the additional and perhaps decisive
consideration that Gracchus, on whose personal influence everything depended,
was just then establishing the Carthaginian colony in Africa, and that his
lieutenant in the capital, Marcus Flaccus, played into the hands of his
opponents by his vehement and maladroit acts.  The "people" accordingly
ratified the Livian laws as readily as it had before ratified the Sempronian.
It then as usual repaid its latest by inflicting a gentle blow on its earlier
benefactor, declining to reelect him when he stood for the third time as a
candidate for the tribunate for the year B.C. 120.  On this occasion, however,
there are alleged to have been unjust proceedings on the part of the tribune
presiding at the election, who had been offended by Gracchus.

     Thus the foundation of his despotism gave way beneath him.  A second blow
was inflicted on him by the consular elections, which not only proved, in a
general sense, adverse to the democracy, but which placed at the head of the
State Lucius Opimius, one of the least scrupulous chiefs of the strict
aristocratic party and a man firmly resolved to get rid of their dangerous
antagonist at the earliest opportunity.  Such an opportunity soon occurred. On
the 10th of December, B.C. 121, Gracchus ceased to be tribune of the people.
On the 1st of January, B.C. 120, Opimius entered upon his office.

     The first attack, as was fair, was directed against the most useful and
the most unpopular measure of Gracchus, the reestablishment of Carthage, while
the transmarine colonies had hitherto been only indirectly assailed through
the greater allurements of the Italian.  African hyenas, it was now alleged,
dug up the newly placed boundary stones of Carthage, and the Roman priests
when requested certified that such signs and portents ought to form an express
warning against rebuilding on a site accursed by the gods. The senate thereby
found itself in its conscience compelled to have a law proposed which
prohibited the planting of the colony of Sunonia.  Gracchus, who with the
other men nominated to establish it was just then selecting the colonists,
appeared on the day of voting at the Capitol, whither the burgesses were
convoked, with a view to procure by means of his adherents the rejection of
the law.

     He wished to shun acts of violence that he might not himself supply his
opponents with the pretext which they sought, but he had not been able to
prevent a great portion of his faithful partisans - who remembered the
catastrophe of Tiberius, and were well acquainted with the designs of the
aristocracy - from appearing in arms, fearing that, amid the immense
excitement on both sides, quarrels could hardly be avoided.  The consul Lucius
Opimius offered the usual sacrifice in the porch of the Capitoline temple, one
of the attendants assisting at the ceremony.  Quintus Antullius, with the holy
entrails in his hands, haughtily ordered the "bad citizens" to quit the porch,
and seemed as though he would lay hands on Caius himself; whereupon a zealous
Gracchan drew his sword and cut the man down.  A fearful tumult arose.
Gracchus vainly sought to address the people and to disclaim the
responsibility for the sacrilegious murder; he only furnished his antagonists
with a further formal ground of accusation, as, without being aware of it in
the confusion, he interrupted a tribune in the act of speaking to the people -
an offence for which an obsolete statute, originating at the time of the old
dissensions between the orders (I. 353), had prescribed the severest penalty.
The consul Lucius Opimius took his measures to put down by force of arms the
insurrection for the overthrow of the republican constitution, as they were
fond of designating the events of this day.  He himself passed the night in
the temple of Castor in the Forum.  At early dawn the Capitol was filled with
Cretan archers, the senate house and Forum with the men of the government
party (the senators and that section of the equites adhering to them), who by
order of the consul had all appeared in arms, each attended by two armed
slaves.  None of the aristocracy was absent; even the aged and venerable
Quintus Metellus, well disposed to reform, had appeared with shield and sword.
An officer of ability and experience acquired in the Spanish wars, Decimus
Brutus, was intrusted with the command of the armed force; the senate
assembled in the senate house.  The bier with the corpse of Antullius was
deposited in front of it, the senate as if surprised appeared en masse at the
door in order to view the dead body, and then retired to determine what should
be done.

     The leaders of the democracy had gone from the Capitol to their houses;
Marcus Flaccus had spent the night in preparing for the war in the streets,
while Gracchus apparently disdained to strive with destiny.  Next morning when
they learned of the preparations made by their opponents at the Capitol and
the Forum, both proceeded to the Aventine, the old stronghold of the popular
party in the struggles between the patricians and the plebeians. Gracchus went
thither silent and unarmed.  Flaccus called the slaves to arms and intrenched
himself in the temple of Diana, while he at the same time sent his younger son
Quintus to the enemy's camp in order if possible to arrange a compromise.  The
latter returned with the announcement that the aristocracy demanded
unconditional surrender.  At the same time he brought a summons from the
senate to Gracchus and Flaccus to appear before it and to answer for their
violation of the majesty of the tribunes.

     Gracchus wished to comply with the summons, but Flaccus prevented him
from doing so, and repeated the equally weak and mistaken attempt to move such
antagonists to a compromise.  When instead of the two cited leaders the young
Quintus Flaccus once more presented himself alone, the consul treated their
refusal to appear as the beginning of open insurrection against the
Government.  He ordered the messenger to be arrested and gave the signal for
attack on the Aventine, while at the same time he caused proclamations to be
made in the streets that the Government would give to whomsoever should bring
the head of Gracchus or of Flaccus its literal weight in gold; and that they
would guarantee complete indemnity to everyone who should leave the Aventine
before the beginning of the conflict.  The ranks on the Aventine speedily
thinned; the valiant nobility in conjunction with the Cretans and the slaves
stormed the almost undefended mount, and killed all whom they found - about
two hundred and fifty persons, mostly of humble rank.  Marcus Flaccus fled
with his eldest son to a place of concealment, where they were soon afterward
hunted out and put to death.  Gracchus had at the beginning of the conflict
retired into the temple of Minerva and was there about to pierce himself with
his sword when his friend Publius Laetorius seized his arm and besought him to
preserve himself, if possible, for better times.

     Gracchus was induced to make an attempt to escape to the other bank of
the Tiber, but when hastening down the hill he fell and sprained his foot. To
gain time for him to escape, his two attendants turned, and facing his
pursuers allowed themselves to be cut down.  As Marcus Pomponius at the Porta
Trigemina under the Aventine; Publius Laetorius at the bridge over the Tiber -
where Horatius Cocles was said to have once withstood, singly, the Etruscan
army - so Gracchus, attended only by his slave Euporus, reached the suburb on
the right bank of the Tiber.

     There, in the grove of Furrina, afterward were found the two dead bodies.
It seemed as if the slave had put to death first his master, and then himself.
The heads of the two fallen leaders were handed over to the Government as
required.  The stipulated price, and more, was paid to Lucius Septumuleius, a
man of quality, the bearer of the head of Gracchus; while the murderers of
Flaccus, persons of humble rank, were sent away with empty hands.  The bodies
of the dead were thrown into the river, and the houses of the leaders were
abandoned to the pillage of the multitude.  The welfare of prosecution against
the partisans of Gracchus began on the grandest scale; as many as three
thousand of them are said to have been strangled in prison, among whom was
Quintus Flaccus, eighteen years of age, who had taken no part in the conflict,
and was universally lamented on account of his youth and his amiable
disposition.  On the open space beneath the Capitol, where the altar
consecrated by Camillus after the restoration of internal peace (I. 382), and
other shrines - erected on similar occasions to Concord - were situated, the
small chapels were pulled down, and out of the property of the killed or
condemned traitors - which was confiscated, even to the portions of their
wives - a new and splendid temple of Concord, with the basilica belonging to
it, was erected in accordance with a decree of the senate by the consul Lucius
Opimius.

     Certainly it was an act in accordance with the spirit of the age to
remove the memorials of the old and to inaugurate a new Concord over the
remains of the three grandsons of Zama, all of whom - first, Tiberius
Gracchus, then Scipio Aemilianus, and lastly the youngest and the mightiest,
Caius Gracchus - had now been engulfed by the revolution.  The memory of the
Gracchi remained officially proscribed; Cornelia was not allowed even to put
on mourning for the death of her last son; but the passionate attachment which
very many had felt toward the two noble brothers, and especially toward Caius,
during their life, was touchingly displayed also after their death, in the
almost religious veneration which the multitude, in spite of all precautions
of the police, continued to pay to their memory and to the spots where they
had fallen.