You Do Not Care About Tiberius Gracchus

[kingtycoon]

 

As the year 133 BCE rounded into Summer and into the political campaigning season at Rome Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus prepared to cross a political Rubicon. Deciding to seek, as we are told, for his own protection, a second consecutive term as one of Rome’s 10 Tribunes of the Plebeians. Our ancient sources tell us that Tiberius sought the office not for prestige or the legislative authority it held (though as we shall see Tiberius Gracchus made ready, even controversial use of that power) but rather, he sought the office for the sacred power of inviolability that the Tribunes had enjoyed for centuries. Tiberius’ fears were warranted for his term as Tribune had been largely exercised in opposition to the newly evolving social norms at Rome. As the polling day closed and the Mediterranean sun set on the day – nothing was decided. By morning everything had changed though perhaps none of the principals of this story knew it, save of course for Tiberius Gracchus, who, Tribune or no, lay dead in the streets, clubbed to death by the Senate & their creatures.

 

How had it come to this? The original class-conflict of Rome, that of the Patricians against the Plebeians had boiled over into the notorious secession of the Plebs in 494, which controversy was remedied by the creation of the Tribunate, a magistracy devoted to the representation of the previously unrepresented Plebeians. Though the secession had been lifted by this measure – the rifts in Roman polity arising from class-conflict had not been mended.

 

By Tiberius own time, centuries after the plebeian secession, it was possible for him, a Plebeian, to claim descent from a leading family, if not a wealthy one. The class division that so marked Roman polity, and which was so often & perniciously exploited for personal gain (Spurius Maelius) had shifted. No longer simply a competitive conflict between Gens and affiliated families – the conflict had descended to Rich, the Notables, against a rise class of urban poor- the Proletarii. Where the Tribunes had been created as inviolable representatives of the Plebeians, Tiberius Gracchus seems to have conceived of the role as being by needs, one in opposition to the Senate. The Roman Senate was largely peopled by former office holders and as such represented the wealth of Rome – for magisterial campaigns were not inexpensive to mount. What’ more those Senators who had owned the premier title of Consul constituted a formidable block within the Senate – the crème de la crème of Rome’s elite.

 

Now, far from being an alien and hostile force against this seated power, Tiberius Gracchus was to-the manor-born. His pedigree was of the highest order for his time. The son of a Consul, and relative by marriage to the Scipio family – previously preeminent but by 133 relaxing their dominion over Rome’s upper echelons. So Tiberius Gracchus was a plebeian, but the long establishment of that coinage had given it a dearer value than might be obviously applied. He was among great and powerful seen as a comer. Which leads us to ask why the Senate, which certainly aught have been Tiberius Gracchus final political home, would blasphemously conspire to murder him on the night of his election. We are told that the senatorial clique that enacted the crime claimed to be driven in opposition to Tiberius’ naked ambition, evidenced by his seeking a second term and his potential violation of the Tribunician sanctity of his fellow Tribune of 133 Marcus Octavius, as well as his rather irregular use of the Concillim Plebus. Such acts may have demanded censure, but the context of the these attacks on the status quo make all the difference.

In the century preceding his own Tiberius’ city had waged campaigns of conquest throughout the Mediterranean. What’s more, Rome’s legions had met with far more success than the city on the Tiber was logistically able to govern. Without the political infrastructure required to govern the newly created provinces in Africa, Macedon, Asia and Spain – let alone the nearer territories of Samnium & Cisalpine Gaul – Rome’s wealthy classes stepped in to fill the void. Italian lands won through generations of conquest were, Tiberius, famously observed firsthand, no longer populated and serviced natives, citizens or even Italians. Rather, these lands, were operated as speculative enterprises by Rome’s upper crust and maintained in absentia overwhelmingly by slave labor. Never at a loss for what to do with prisoners of war, the ancients regarded those overwhelmed by force of arms as part and parcel of their war booty. Thus the adventures in Celtiberea, Africa and Greece provided Rome’s generals with masses of captured slaves, ready for use in the lands claimed for the Roman Public.

 

At the conclusion of the Punic Wars in 146 BCE Rome had amassed vast landholdings in the form of both territories it governed directly and through the intercession of its politicians; as well as subordinate territories throughout the Balkans, Africa and Spain. These territories were won at the cost of at least one generation of farm labor as the campaigns, especially those in Spain, continued to drain the Republic of men. Now the construction of the Roman military under the Servian system mandated that the wealthier classes of citizens provide the most materiel in terms of defense, and on a sliding scale downward the soldiers of Rome would be equipped according to whatever arms and armor they could afford to bring to the conflict. By having soldiers finance themselves on what amounts to a speculative adventure in search of war booty, the Romans were setting a limit, not only to how much territory they could comfortably control, but to how long a term of service her soldiers would tolerate. Since the soldiers were in fact citizens, and citizens of some means, who were required at home to safeguard those means, they would grow to resent long campaigns and in particular the extension of the campaigning season to fill the entire year. Of course in the time of Tiberius Gracchus exactly this was happening in Iberia. Not satisfied to seize and hold Carthage's territories on the peninsula, the Romans pursued a program of conquest themselves. In particular Tiberius was involved in the campaign against the Numantines under Caius Mancinus. Tiberius has already proven himself in Africa, according to Plutarch, and was made the Queastor, or paymaster of the legions committed against the Numantines in Spain. The conflict had several decisive elements for Tiberius' later life, but we are told that the events that most informed his policies later were related to merely traveling to the battlefields¹. Plutarch explains:

But his brother Caius has left it us in writing, that when Tiberius went through Tuscany to Numantia, and found the countryside almost depopulated, there being hardly any free husbandmen or shepherds, but for the most part only barbarian, imported slaves, he then first conceived the course of policy which in the sequel proved so fatal to his family².

 

This depopulation of the Etrurian countryside became a common cause in Rome, carried forward by a predecessor of Tiberius, the issue of the displaced Roman farmer was abandoned at its inception. This predecessor reformer, the statesman Caius Laelius, Plutarch tells us, was named Sapiens, for his wisdom in abandoning the contentious issue. Tiberius, by comparison is rendered less wise seeming. We can examine the narration of Plutarch, however, to suggest that by the time Tiberius was able to take up the cause, the situation had grown more dire. In fact it is instructive that Tiberius' observance of the Etrurian countryside took place on his way to Numantia, particularly in light of what he experienced there. Following the Numantine rout of the consul Mancinus, Tiberius enters the Numantine camp and makes an embassy with them. Plutarch states that Tiberius was requested as ambassador by the Numantines in remembrance of his Consul father who had developed good relations with the Numantines during his own Spanish campaigns. But here, having to entreat with a victorious enemy, Tiberius begins to establish himself as a politically complex figure. Rather than demanding the surrender of the Numantines he bargains for a peace and pleads to have his account books returned. The Numantines appear to be satisfied with Tiberius' and Rome's capitulation and sue for peace. Plutarch illuminates the consequence of this pacific solution:

When he returned to Rome, he found the whole transaction censured and reproached, a a proceeding that was base and scandalous to the Romans. But the relations and friends of the soldiers, forming a large body among the people, came flocking to Tiberius, whom they acknowledged as the preserver of so may citizens...³

We can interpret this response in a few ways. Tiberius' senatorial adversaries seem to have concluded that this was a naked attempt by Tiberius to grasp at status among the rabble. But we find the account, of a Roman suing for peace against a barbarian tribe and this seems somewhat incongruous in our experience of the Romans. Why surrender peacefully what can be won by force? The Romans had after all defeated rival nations of far more significance than the Numantine tribe by this point. The answer lies in the telling. The Roman army was staffed by citizens, farmers, who had to provide their own equipment and who had to manage for themselves in the field, gambling that they would win some lucrative booty. These Spanish campaigns were not profitable to common soldiers, and their continuous nature in fact robbed the land of farmers and thus soldiers of their income. In all we can interpret Tiberius observance of the depopulated landscape along with his negotiated peace as the sides of a coin. Rome had not enough soldiers to wage a successful campaign in Spain, and she lacked the soldiers because the land had been given over to slaves to operate. Here is a self reinforcing feedback loop – the more campaigns that Rome's citizen soldiers won, the more land and more slaves to farm the land would be received. This surplus land and surplus manpower in turn made the Roman farmer-soldier obsolete, leaving him landless and poor, increasingly to be found among the newly emerging class in Rome itself- the Proletariat.

 

Plutarch, with the benefit of hindsight regards Tiberius' efforts as mainly guileless and perpetrated in service to the state, rather than his own mere ambition. Having composed his biographies of both Sulla and Marius Plutarch was of course aware of the menace that privately armed soldiers would create in Rome in the decades following Tiberius' attempts to reform the state. Of course the Senatorial opposition to Tiberius Gracchus' plan may well have been, as Plutarch suggest, cynically biased in favor of preserving their personal fortunes – but perhaps it is meritorious for us to give them some amount of benefit in this doubt. Nevertheless, the wealthy had much to loose by the enactment of the Lex Sempronius Agraria, and so we should look at the law itself.

 

Appian gives a good account of the rationale behind the Lex Agraria as well as what we can suppose to be its contents:

[Tiberius Gracchus]inveighed against the multitude of slaves as useless in war and never faithful to their masters, and adduced the recent calamity brought upon the masters by their slaves in Sicily, where the demands of agriculture had greatly increased the number of the latter; recalling also the war waged against them by the Romans, which was neither easy nor short, but long-protracted and full of vicissitudes and dangers. After speaking thus he again brought forward the law, providing that nobody should hold more than the 500 jugera of the public domain. But he added a provision to the former law, that the sons of the occupiers might each hold one-half of that amount, and that the remainder should be divided among the poor by three elected commissioners, who should be changed annually.⁴

The Lex Sempronia then has as its virtues both a remedy for the problem of staffing the army and alleviating poverty; as well as adherence to both the letter and custom of Roman law⁵. The limit of the 500 jugera had been long established and long ignored. The novelty of the Law was not that it sought redress of the landlord's excesses – but rather that it essentially forgave their theft. The poor would inherit the public land, but so too would the sons of the scofflaw possessores, and in fact inherit before their time⁶. The measure then, on its face, seems to be eminently reasonable. It was equitable to all, and punitive to none. Or so we may suppose.

 

Clearly the law was not popular among members of the Senate, and here we must begin to wonder why. Some understanding of the contemporary uses of the land is needful, fortunately we are supplied with an insight into the agricultural practices of the time by one of its practitioners. Cato indicates that vines precede vegetable gardening which in turn is more profitable than willow cultivation (for basket weaving) which precedes olive cultivation which precedes graze-lands in terms of the profitable uses of land⁷. Last in Cato's ordering is cereal production. This usage tends to imply that land usage for cash crops far exceeded the value of land used for subsistence, as would be the case for a citizen farmer. In fact we can't truly regard Cato's prescription as ideal since we are not privy to the details of the Roman marketplace at this time. One fair assumption, however, is that free labor was an expectation. All of the ancient sources make common statements regarding the presence, even the preponderance of slave labor. This slave labor was clearly highly prized, since there are numerous accounts and examples of uprisings throughout Sicily and Italy at this time we can assume that the trouble of keeping potentially rebellious slaves was merited by the value gained from keeping them. A Latifundia populated by captive workers then must have provided the possessore with a great tide of income. This income would in turn leverage still greater enterprise. Once the wealth of these public holdings was realized, more slaves could be bought, more land and seed could be obtained and a cycle of consolidation would occur. The smallholder would be exiled from the land – all the more quickly if he was called to serve abroad in another military campaign. And so we have the situation of the vast concentration of wealth working to perpetuate itself and at this moment, in opposition to the continuity of the state⁸.

 

In some sense we must assume the opposition to the Lex Sempronia was based upon the greed of the opposition clique within the Senate. We take Plutarch and Appian's word for the crisis, and we tend to assume the best in Tiberius Gracchus – but such a view is ahistorical. Again, these two ancient historians had the benefit of hindsight to guide their judgments, nevertheless their chronological proximity gives them preference when questioning their assumptions. The crises that ultimately toppled the Republic seem to have an origin in the life of Tiberius Gracchus effectively because of his origination of certain innovations. Not the least of these is his removal of his fellow Tribune in the stormy year 133. Informed by the example of Caius Laelius, Tiberius chose not to propose his law in the Senate, but to bring it forward to the Concillium Plebus, a rather more democratic assembly than the aristocratic Senate. Meeting with apparently overwhelming approval the law was nevertheless vetoed by Marcus Octavius, another of that year's Tribunes – moved, Appian concludes, by the influence of the wealthy men who stood to lose from passage of the law.⁹

 

Thus rebuked Tiberius seems to have played up the role of the demagogue his opponents reserved for him. Resolving to seek satisfaction in the Senate, only after he had bypassed their traditional role in the legislative process, he found no support for his position, and was forced to confront Marcus Octavius in the comitia the next day. As Octavius remained committed to his opposition, Tiberius, seized upon the great popularity of his law and position to have the Concilium rebuke Octavius Tribunician title, which that body promptly accomplished. Thus unobstructed the law passed through the Concilium Plebus and was then to be enacted¹⁰.

 

Appointing himself and his brother Caius Gracchus as two of the three required commissioners tasked with assessing the then current use of the public land was perhaps a misstep on Tiberius' part. Certainly wary of the influence that the rich could exert, as they had over his friend Marcus Octavius, Tiberius, we can infer, was determined to preserve the integrity of the law by seeing it through himself. Naturally his political opponents did not see it that way and announced that once his term as Tribune had ended that he would fall into their hands and be made to answer in blood for his actions. The ancient sources conclude that threats against him motivated Tiberius to seek a second term as Tribune, which would enable him to see his law enacted and more to the point, preserve his life. Here, it seems, he had finally transgressed a line of boundary within the hearts of his enemies. Having illegally deposed Octavius he was declared liable for the very affront that he sought to remedy through a second term as Tribune. It was concluded that his removal of a fellow Tribune was an act against the Tribune's sacred inviolability. Now his life hung by an election, an election deemed likewise outlaw.

 

The ultimate straw was then applied to the camel’s back. Apparently without warning Attalus III’s sudden death and bequest of his kingdom to the people of Rome catalyzing the mounting tensions – leading to a debate regarding the proper disposition of the bequest. Tiberius insistence that Pergamon should be shared out to the landless was beyond the capacity of the Senate to countenance and clearly all they needed to convince themselves (or to at least cynically charge) that Tiberius was seeking not an equitable settlement, but a demagogue’s crown. The naked assertion by Scaevola that Tiberius was intriguing in this vein was sufficient to light the pyre Tiberius himself had built. Plutarch settles into this narration on the night of the election and takes hold. He provides us with lurid details and and exciting foray into the Roman streets. We are made to see the dreadful melee that broke out between the partisans of Tiberius, the Gracchans and the Senatorial clique so opposed to his career. Seizing the capital, the Gracchans were informed that the Senate had concluded to assassinate Tiberius Gracchus, they in turn armed themselves to provide his defense. The Senators, likewise armed met their countrymen on the Capital where now, blood would flow.

 

The whole scene is very difficult to countenance. Here the leading men of the city were engaged in open conflict at the foot of their capital. One is compelled to imagine our own political leaders engaged in a brutal fight to establish right, in total defiance of law and tradition, and doing so, is left stunned. Here the whole Roman polity disintegrated into a partisan bloodbath in which the leaders of one legislative body slaughtered the head of another, for after the melee, Tiberius Gracchus was no more, his head stove in by the leader of the Senate. Appian's eulogy is valuable:

 

So perished on the Capitol, and while still tribune, Gracchus, the son of that Gracchus who was twice consul, and of Cornelia, daughter of that Scipio who robbed Carthage of her supremacy. He lost his life in consequence of a most excellent design too violently pursued; and this abominable crime, the first that was perpetrated in the public assembly, was seldom without parallels thereafter from time to time.¹¹

Here, I will resist the urge that Plutarch succumbs to and will not comment on the career of Caius Gracchus, Tiberius' younger brother and political heir. Rather, it is worthwhile to contemplate the nature of the crimes perpetrated by and against Tiberius Gracchus. It is clear that his sacred inviolability was transgressed in the ultimate sense, but slightly less obvious that his senatorial adversaries had justification in their actions owing to Tiberius' milder transgression of the same sacred law. What is made clear by his own daring and the convoluted method of his legislative and electoral processes is that the matters at hand were of vital significance. Tiberius Gracchus paid the ultimate penalty in service to his idealistic efforts to remedy Rome's ills. That he died in the pursuit of his efforts is proof enough that he regarded agricultural reform to be mortally important in the course of events. What strikes us equally is the vehemence of the Senatorial opposition. Were these men motivated by the fear of being divested of their vast wealth? Or were they as suspicious of Tiberius' personal ambitions as they are portrayed by our sources. Once again we must not make the error of granting historical actors our gift of broader vision. Their experience is their own and their knowledge is unknown to us. When we compare the years and decades that would follow 133 we can see that those who lived through, and even those who carried out the murder of Tiberius Gracchus had a difficult path ahead. They would endure the seven consulships of Marius only a generation later, as well as the Civil War that Appian recounts and surviving those they would have to endure the despotic rule of Sulla. Looking back, we can see the slippery slope into the abolition of the Republic approached on that summer night in 133. We can mark the murder of Tiberius as a the unprecedented step that marks the descent into the maelstrom of unprecedented violations of the Roman's laws. Here we grasp the tail of the beast, because we can, looking back, understand the violence and the danger that were about to be unleashed. But the ancients were in the maw of that monster and devoid of a path that made sense, they were compelled to forge ahead and blaze new trails. Tiberius Gracchus firmly upheld his vision of what Rome should be, and his opponents killed him for it, not blindly out of greed, but out of the same fear that motivated Gracchus – they sought to preserve without knowing how¹². This is best illustrated by Marcus Octavius' refusal to relent in his veto¹³. The strange territory Tiberius was entering by proposing his law outside the auspices of the Senate was too unfamiliar to him, persuaded by those who could gain from his veto, he refused, eloquently, to stand down. And so more laws and traditions were overthrown. And still more would precipitate from that overthrow. In all the unraveling of the Republic is visible to us as developing a velocity during 133. We can find the threads fraying earlier, far earlier, but here the forces that would unintentionally undo the Republic had met and could see beyond what was allowed, and at last, appreciate what was possible, and confronting the possible, open the way for every outrage.

 

Works Cited

Barbette, Stanley Spaeth. "The Goddess Ceres and the Death of Tiberius Gracchus." Historia: Zeitschrift Fur Alte Geschichte 39.2 (1990): 182-95. Print.

Boren, Henry C. "Tiberius Gracchus: the Opposition View." The Journal of American Philology 82.4 (1961): 358-69. Print.

Briscoe, John. "Supporters and Opponents of Tiberius Gracchus." The Journal of Roman Studies 64 (1974): 125-35. Print.

Brunt, P. A. "The Army and the Land in Roman Revolution." The Journal of Roman Studies 52 (1962): 69-86. Print.

Cato, Marcus Porcius, Marcus Terentius. Varro, and Fairfax Harrison. Roman Farm Management: the Treatises of Cato and Varro. Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar, 2006. Print.

Hornblower, Simon, and Antony Spawforth. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Print.

Ligt, L. De., and Simon Northwood. People, Land, and Politics: Demographic Developments and the Transformation of Roman Italy 300 BC-AD 14. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Print.

Nagle, D. Brendan. "The Etruscan Journey of Tiberius Gracchus." Historia: Zeitschrift Fur Alte Geschichte 25.4 (1976): 487-89. Print.

Plutarch, John Dryden, and Arthur Hugh Clough. Plutarch: the Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. New York: Modern Library, 1992. Print.

Richardson, J. S. "The Ownership of Roman Land: Tiberius Gracchus and the Italians." The Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980): 1-11. Print.

Stockton, D. L. The Gracchi. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979. Print.

Strachan-Davidson, J. L. Appian: Civil War ; Book I. London: Oxford UP, 1951. Print.

 

1See Nagle for a discussion on the likeliness of the route described by Caius Gracchus. Regardless of the actual course of the journey, Tiberius Gracchus was certainly well traveled enough to have plausibly been in Etruria.

2Plutarch's Life of the Gracchi

3ibid

4Appian, the Civil War 1.9

5Northwood, 489

6Stockton 41

7Stockton 12-13, citing Cato de agricult 1.7. His discussion of Cato's prescriptions is not without critics, but still serves to describe the value per jugera that one could derive from the Latifundia.

8Brunt IM 426

9Appian The Civil War 1.12

10Though Appian's account is truncated, I have relied on it for simplicity's sake. Plutarch's narration produces the same resluts, but with characteristically elaborate narrative excess.

11Appian Civil War 2.17

12Boren gives an excellent analysis of the opposition to Tiberius Gracchus and points out quite interestingly that by station and wealth he was more aligned with his murders than those who he sought to uplift.

13I have chosen to look at Marcus Octavius, not for his preeminence among Tiberius opposition, but because of the parity of his title and their attested friendship. For the daunting list of all of Tiberius Gracchus opponents see Briscoe

Comments

[gislebertus.livejournal.com]

I know this completely ignores the rest of your post, which I need to digest, but ---

Can you metaphorically cross a Rubicon before the Rubicon is crossed, establishing the metaphor?

OH GOD MY BRAIN HURTS

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

Totally pandering to the professor there - she's a Caesar fan.

I seriously, seriously hate doing research papers for classical history. I mean, you have to pretend like you have no conviction, you have to act like every bit of information provided is totally spurious - and then... You're up against people who are all way smarter than you and far, far better writers - check this line out:

and the history of the Gracchi is enisled in a sea of obscurity and doubt which laps against both its nearer and its further shore in time.

Fucking ENISLED. How are we supposed to proceed in the wake of that shit?!

[gislebertus.livejournal.com]

Well, for starters, that's not good writing. What it is is a prime example of bullshit academic inflation in writing. It's peacocks strutting for peacocks. Classicists are some of the worst, because they generally have some of the least power on the modern university campus, so they have to make up for it with the sheer power of snobbery.

That being said, you should try to teach a survey class of business majors about Greek archaic sculpture sometime. Seriously. It's almost entertaining.