The common destiny which had attended the Gracchi was manifested even in
the consequences of their fall. At both crises a brilliant but
disturbing element had vanished, the work of the reformer remained,
because it was the utterance of the people before whose sacred name the
nobility continued to bow, the political atmosphere was cleared, the
legitimate organs of government resumed their acknowledged sway. To
speak of a restoration of power to the nobility after the fall of Caius
Gracchus is to belie both the facts of history and the impressions of
the times. There is little probability that either the nobles or the
commons felt that the two years of successful agitation amounted to a
change of government, or that the senate ever abandoned the conviction
that the reformer, embarrassing as his proceedings might be on account
of the obvious necessity for their acceptance, must succumb to the
devices which had long formed the stock-in-trade of a successful
senatorial campaign; while the transition from the guidance of Gracchus
to that of the accredited representatives of the nobility was rendered
all the easier by the facts that the authority of the tribune had long
been waning, and that, for some months before his death, a large section
of the people had been greedily fixing its eyes on an attractive
programme which had been presented in the name of the senate. The
suppression of the final movement had, it is true, been marked by an
unexampled severity; but these stern measures had followed on an actual
appeal to arms, which had elicited a response from the passive or
quaking multitude and had made them in some sense participants in the
slaughter. If it was terrible to think that three thousand citizens had
been butchered in the streets or in the Tullianum, it was comforting to
remember that they had been officially denounced as public enemies by
the senate. There was no haunting sense of an inviolable wrong inflicted
on the tribunate, for Caius Gracchus had not been tribune when he fell;
there was no memory, half bitter, half grotesque, of indiscriminate
slaughter dealt by a mob of infuriated senators, for this latter and
greater _émeute_ had been suppressed by the regular forces of the State,
led by its highest magistrate. The position of the government was more
secure, the conscience of the people more easy than it had been after
the massacre of Tiberius Gracchus and his followers. This feeling of
security on the part of the government, and of acquiescence on that of
the people, was soon put to the test by the prosecution of the ex-consul
Lucius Opimius. His impeachment before the people by the tribune
Decius[753] raised the vital question whether the novel powers which he
had exercised in crushing Gracchus and his adherents, could be justified
on the ground that they were the necessary, and in fact the only, means
of maintaining public security. It was practically a question whether a
new form of martial law should be admitted to recognition by the highest
organ of the State, the voice of the sovereign people itself; and the
discussion was rendered all the more piquant by the fact that that very
sovereign was reminded that it had lately sanctioned an ordinance which
forbade a capital penalty to be pronounced against a Roman citizen
except by consent of the people, The arguments used on either side were
of the most abstract and far-reaching character.[754] In answer to
Decius's objection that the proceedings of Opimius were an obvious
contravention of statute law, and that the most wanton criminality did
not justify death without trial, the view, never unwelcome to the Roman
mind, that there was a higher justice than law, was advanced by the
champions of the accused. It was maintained that an ultimate right of
self-defence was as necessary to a state as to an individual. The man
who attempted to overturn the foundations of society was a public enemy
beyond the pale of law; the man who resisted his efforts by every means
that lay to hand was merely fulfilling the duty to his country which was
incumbent on a citizen and a magistrate. If this view were accepted, the
complex issue at law resolved itself into a simple question of fact. Had
the leader and the party that had been crushed shown by their actions
that they were overt enemies of the State? The majority which acquitted
Opimius practically decided that Gracchus and his adherents had been
rendered outlaws by their deeds. The sentiment of the moment had been
cleverly stirred by the nature of the issue which was put before them.
Had the voters been Gracchans at heart, they would probably have paid
but little attention to these unusual appeals to the fundamental
principles of political life, and would have shown themselves supporters
of the spirit, as well as of the letter, of the enactment whose author
they had just pronounced an outlaw. For there could be no question that
the Gracchan law, which no one dared assail, was meant to cover just the
very acts of which Opimius had been guilty after the slaughter of the
Gracchans in the streets had ended. The right to kill in an _émeute_
might be a questionable point; but the power of establishing a military
court for the trial of captured offenders was notoriously illegal, and
could under very few circumstances have been justified even on the
ground of necessity. The decision of the people also seemed to give a
kind of recognition to the utterance of the senate which had preceded
Opimius's display of force. It is quite true that no successful defence
of violence could ever be rested on the formula itself. This "ultimate
decree of the senate" was valued as a weighty and emphatic declaration
of the existence of a situation which demanded extreme measures, rather
than as a legal permit which justified the disregard of the ordinary
rights of the citizen. But formulae often have a power far in excess of
their true significance; they impose on the ignorant, and furnish both a
shield and a weapon to their cunning framers. The armoury of the senate,
or of any revolutionary who had the good fortune to overawe the senate,
was materially strengthened by the people's judgment in Opimius's
favour.[755] The favourable situation was immediately used to effect the
recall of Publius Popillius Laenas. His restoration was proposed to the
people by Lucius Bestia a tribune;[756] and the people which had just
sanctioned Opimius's judicial severities, did not betray the
inconsistency of continuing to resent the far more restricted
persecution of Popillius. Yet the step was an advance on their previous
action; for they were now actually rescinding a legal judgment of their
own, and approving of the actions of a court which had been established
by the senate on its own authority without any previous declaration of
the outlawry of its victims--a court whose proceedings were known to
have directed the tenor of that law of Caius Gracchus, the validity of
which was still unquestioned.
But even on the swell of this anti-Gracchan tide the nobility had still
to steer its course with caution and circumspection. Personal prejudices
were stronger than principles with the masses. They might sanction
outrages which already had the blessing of men who represented,
externally at least, the more respectable portion of Roman society; but
they continued to detest individuals whose characters seemed to have
grown blacker rather than cleaner by participation in, or even
justification of, the recent acts of violence. One of our authorities
would have us believe that even the aged Publius Lentulus, once chief of
the senate, was sacrificed by his peers to the fate which had attended
Scipio Nasica. He had climbed the Aventine with Opimius's troops and had
been severely wounded in the ensuing struggle.[757] But neither his age
nor his wounds sufficed to overcome the strange prejudice of the mob.
Obloquy and abuse dogged his footsteps, until at length he was forced,
in the interest of his own peace or security, to beg of the senate one
of those honorary embassies which covered the retirement of a senator
either for private business or for leisure, and to seek a home in
Sicily.[758] His last public utterance was an impassioned prayer that he
might never return to his ungrateful country: and the gods granted him
his request. If this story is true, it proves that public opinion was
stronger even than the voice of the Comitia. Lentulus, if put on his
trial, would probably have been acquitted; but the resentful minority,
which was powerless in the assembly, may have been sufficiently strong
to make life unbearable to its chosen victim by its demeanour at public
gatherings and in the streets. But even the Comitia had limits to its
endurance. During the year which followed Opimius's acquittal there
appeared before them a suppliant for their favour who had about equal
claims to the gratitude and the hatred of both sections of the people.
They were the self-destructive or corroborative claims of the statesman
who is called a convert by his friends and a renegade by his foes. No
living man of the age had stood in a stronger political light than
Carbo. An active assistant of Tiberius Gracchus, and so embittered an
opponent of Scipio Aemilianus as to be deemed the author of his death,
he had severed his connection with the party of reform, probably in
consequence of the view that the extension of the franchise which had
become embedded in their programme was either impracticable or
undesirable. He must have proved a welcome ally to the nobility in their
struggle with Caius Gracchus, and their appreciation of his value seems
proved by the fact that he was elected to the consulship in the very
year of the tribune's fall, when the influence of the senate, and
therefore in all probability their power of controlling the elections,
had been fully re-established. The debt was paid by a vigorous
championship of the cause of Opimius, which was heard during the
consulship of Carbo.[759] The chief magistrate spoke warmly in defence
of his accused predecessor in office, and declared that the action of
Opimius in succouring his country was an act incumbent on the consul as
the recognised guardian of the State.[760] No man had greater reason to
feel secure than Carbo, who had so lately tested the suffrages of the
people as electors and as judges; yet no man was in greater peril. It
seems that, while exposed on the side of his former associates to the
impotent rage which is excited by the success of the convert, who is
believed to have been rewarded for his treachery, he had not won the
confidence, or at least could not arouse the whole-hearted support, of
his new associates and their following in the assembly. Perhaps the
landlords had not forgiven the agrarian commissioner, nor the moderates
the vehement opponent of Scipio; to the senate he had served his
purpose, and they may not have thought him serviceable enough to deserve
the effort which had rescued Opimius. Carbo was, in fact, an inviting
object of attack for any young political adventurer who wished to
inaugurate his career by the overthrow of a distinguished political
victim, and to sound a note of liberalism which should not grate too
harshly in the ears of men of moderate views. The assailant was Lucius
Crassus,[761] destined to be the greatest orator of his day, and a youth
now burning to test his eloquence in the greatest field afforded by the
public life of Rome, but scrupulous enough to take no unfair advantage
of the object of his attack.[762] We do not know the nature of the
charge on which Carbo was arraigned. It probably came under the
expansive conception of treason, and was possibly connected with those
very proceedings in consequence of which Opimius had been accused and
acquitted.[763] That the charge was of a character that had reference to
recent political events, or at least that the prosecutor felt himself
bound to maintain some distinct political principle of a liberal kind,
is proved by the regret which Crassus expressed in his maturer years
that the impetus of youth had led him to take a step which limited his
freedom of action for the future.[764] Some compunction may also have
been stirred by the unexpected consequence of his attack; for Carbo,
perhaps realising the animosity of his judges and the weakness or
coldness of his friends, is said to have put an end to his life by
poison.[765] Voluntary exile always lay open to the Roman who dared not
face the final verdict; and the suicide of Carbo cannot be held to have
been the sole refuge of despair; it is rather a sign of the bitterness
greater than that of death, which may fall on the soul of a man who can
appeal for sympathy to none, who knows that he has been abandoned and
believes that he has been betrayed. The hostility of his countrymen
pursued him beyond the grave; the aristocratic historian could not
forget the seditious tribune, and the contemporary chronicles which
moulded and handed on the conception of Carbo's life, showed the usual
incapacity of such writings to appreciate the possibility of that honest
mental detachment from a suspected cause which often leads, through
growing dissension with past colleagues and increasing co-operation with
new, to a more violent advocacy of a new faith than is often shown by
its habitual possessors.
The records of the political contests which occupied the two years
succeeding the downfall of Caius Gracchus, are sufficient to prove that
political thought was not stifled, that practically any political
views--saving perhaps such as expressed active sympathy with the final
efforts of Caius Gracchus and his friends--might be pronounced, and that
the nobility could only maintain its influence by bending its ear to the
chatter of the streets and employing its best instruments to mould the
opinion of the Forum by a judicious mixture of deference and
exhortation. The senate knew itself to be as weak as ever in material
resources; government could not be maintained for ever by a series of
_coups d'état_, and the only method of securing the interests of the
rulers was to maintain the confidence of the majority and to presume
occasionally on its apathy or blindness. This was the attitude adopted
with reference to the proposals which had lately been before the people.
Drusus's scheme of colonisation was not withdrawn, but its execution was
indefinitely postponed,[766] and the same treatment was meted out to the
similar proposals of Caius Gracchus. Two of his Italian colonies,
Neptunia near Tarentum and Scylacium, seem actually to have survived;
but this may have been due to the fact that the work of settlement had
already commenced on these sites, and that the government did not
venture to rescind any measure which had been already put into
execution. It was indeed possible to stifle the settlement on the site
of Carthage, for here the superstition of the people supported the
objections of the senate, and the question of the abrogation of this
colony had been raised to such magnitude by the circumstances of
Gracchus's fall that to withdraw would have been a sign of weakness. But
even this objectionable settlement in Africa gave proof of the scruples
of the senate in dealing with an accomplished fact. When the Rubrian law
was repealed, it was decided not to take from the _coloni_ the lands
which had already been assigned; no religious pretext could be given for
their disturbance, for the land of Carthage was not under the ban that
doomed the city to desolation; and the colonists remained in possession
of allotments, which were free from tribute, were held as private
property, and furnished one of the earliest examples of a Roman tenure
of land on provincial soil.[767] The assignment was by the nature of the
case changed from that of the colonial to that of the purely agrarian
type; the settlers were members of Rome alone and had no local
citizenship, although it is probable that some modest type of urban
settlement did grow up outside the ruined walls of Carthage to satisfy
the most necessary requirements of the surrounding residents.
The benefits conferred by the Gracchi on the poorer members of the
proletariate were also respected. The corn law may have been left
untouched for the time being[768]--a natural concession, for the senate
could only hope to rule by its influence with the urban mob, and, in the
case of so simple an institution, any modification would have been so
patent an infringement of the rights of the recipients as to have
immediately excited suspicion and anger. With the agrarian law it was
different. Its repeal was indeed impossible; but the land-hunger of the
dispossessed capitalists might to some extent be appeased by a measure
that was not only tolerable, but welcome; and modifications, so gradual
and subtle that their meaning would be unintelligible to the masses,
might subsequently be introduced to remedy observed defects, to calm the
apprehensions of the allies, and perhaps to secure the continuance of
large holdings, if economic causes should lead to their revival. The
agrarian legislation of the ten years that followed the fall of Caius
Gracchus, seems to have been guided by the wishes of the senate; but
much of it does not bear on its surface the signs which we might expect
of capitalistic influence or oligarchic neglect of the poor. Large
portions of it seem rather to reveal the desire of banishing for ever a
harrowing question which was the opportunity of the demagogue; and the
peculiar mixture of prudence, liberality, and selfishness which this
legislation reveals, can only be appreciated by an examination of its
separate stages.
Shortly after the death of Caius Gracchus--perhaps in the very year of
his fall--a law was passed permitting the alienation of the
allotments.[769] This measure must have been as welcome to the lately
established possessors as it was to the large proprietors; it removed
from the former a galling restraint which, like all such legal
prohibitions, formed a sentimental rather than an actual grievance, but
one that was none the less keenly felt on that account; while to the
latter it offered the opportunity of satisfying those expectations,
which the initial struggles of the newly created farmers must in many
cases have aroused. The natural consequence of the enactment was that
the spurious element amongst the peasant-holders, represented by those
whose tastes and capacities utterly unfitted them for agriculture,
parted with their allotments, which went once more to swell the large
domains of their wealthier neighbours.[770] We do not know the extent or
rapidity of this change, or the stage which it had reached when the
government thought fit to introduce a new agrarian law, which may have
been two or three years later than the enactment which permitted
alienation.[771] The new measure contained three important
provisions.[772] Firstly, it forbade the further distribution of public
land, and thus put an end to the agrarian commission which had never
ceased to exist, and had continued to enjoy, if not to exercise, its
full powers since the restoration of its judicial functions by Caius
Gracchus. We cannot say to what extent the commission was still
Encountering claims on its jurisdiction and powers of distribution at
the time of its disappearance; but fourteen years is a long term of
power for such an extraordinary office, whose work was necessarily one
of perpetual unsettlement; and the disappearance of the triumvirs must
have been welcome, not only to the existing Roman occupants of land
which still remained public, but to those of the Italians to whom the
commission had ever been a source of apprehension. The extinction of the
office must have been regarded with indifference by those for whom the
commission had already provided, and by the large mass of the urban
proletariate which did not desire this type of provision. The residuum
of citizens which still craved land may be conceived to have been small,
for eagerness to become an agriculturist would have suggested an earlier
claim; and the passing of the commission was probably viewed with no
regret by any large section of the community. The law then proceeded to
establish the rights of all the occupants of land in Italy that had once
been public and had been dealt with by the commission. To all existing
occupants of the land which had been assigned, perfect security of
tenure was given, and this security may have been extended now, as it
certainly was later, to many of the occupants who still remained on
public land which had not been subjected to distribution. So far as the
land which had been assigned was concerned, this law could have made no
specification as to the size of the allotments, for the law permitting
alienation had made it practically private property and given its
purchaser a perfectly secure title. Hence the accumulations which
followed the permit to alienate were secured to their existing
possessors, and a legal recognition was given to the formation of such
large estates as had come into existence during the last three years.
But the security of tenure was conditioned by the reimposition of the
dues payable to the State, which had been abolished by Drusus. We are
not informed whether these dues were to be henceforth paid only by those
who had received allotments from the land commission, or by all in whose
hands such allotments were at the moment to be found; perhaps the
intention was to impose them on all lands that had been public before
the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus; although many of the larger
proprietors, who had recently added to their holdings, might have urged
in their defence that they had acquired the land as private property and
that it was burdened by no dues at the time of its acquisition. But,
even if this burden fell mainly on the class of smaller possessors, it
could scarcely be regarded as a grievance, for it had formed part of the
Gracchan scheme, and there was no legitimate reason why the newly
established class of cultivators should be placed in a better position
than the older occupants of the public domain, who still paid dues both
on arable land and for the privilege of pasturing their flocks. The
temporary motive which had led to their abolition had now ceased to
exist, for the agricultural colonies of Drusus, who had promised land
free from all taxes, had not been established, and the chief, almost the
sole, example of a recent assignment on such liberal principles was to
be discovered in distant Africa. But, even if the cultivators grumbled,
their complaints were not dangerous to the government. They would have
found no echo at Rome, where the urban proletariate was content with the
easier provision which had been made for its support; and the new
revenues from the public land were made still more acceptable to the
eyes of the masses by the provision contained in this agrarian law that
they should be employed solely for the benefit of needier citizens. The
precise nature of the promised employment is unhappily unknown, our
authority merely informing us that "they were to be used for purposes of
distribution". We cannot understand by these words free gifts either in
money or corn; for such extreme measures never entered even into the
social ideals of Caius Gracchus, and the senate to its credit never
deigned to purchase popularity through the pauperising institutions by
which the Caesars maintained the security of their rule in Rome. The
words might imply an extension of the system of the sale of cheap corn,
or a cheapening of the rates at which it was supplied; but the Gracchan
system seems hardly to have admitted of extension, so far as the number
of recipients was concerned, and cheaper sales would hardly have been
encouraged by a government, which, anxious as it was to secure
popularity, was responsible for the financial administration of the
State and looked with an anxious eye upon the existing drain on the
resources of the treasury.[773] Perhaps the new revenues were held up to
the people as a guarantee that the sale of cheap corn would be
continued, and public confidence was increased when it was pointed out
that there was a special fund available for the purpose. If we abandon
the view that the promised employment of the revenues in the interest of
the people referred to the distribution of corn, there remains the
possibility that it had reference to the acquisition of fresh land for
assignation. This promise would indeed have rendered practicable the
partial realisation of the shadowy schemes of Drusus, which had never
been officially withdrawn; but it is doubtful whether it would have done
much to strengthen the hold of the government upon the urban voter; for
the whole scheme of this new land law seems to prove that the agrarian
question was viewed with indifference, and no pressure seems to have
been put on the government to carry their earlier promises into effect.
Apart from the welcome prospect implied in the abolition of the agrarian
commission, no positive guarantee against disturbance had yet been given
to the Latins and Italians. This was formally granted, in terms unknown
to us, at the appropriate hands of Marcus Livius Drusus during his
tenure of the consulship.[774] The senate, now that it had satisfied the
larger proprietors and the urban proletariate, and could boast that it
had at least not injured the smaller cultivators, completed its work of
pacification by holding out the hand of fellowship to the allies. It was
tacitly understood that the new friend was not to ask for more, but he
might be induced to look to the senate as his refuge against the
rapacity of the mob and the recklessness of its leaders.
Shortly afterwards the tribune Spurius Thorius[775] carried a law which
again abolished the _vectigal_ on the allotments. If we regard this
measure as an independent effort on the part of the tribune, it may have
been an answer to the protests of the smaller agriculturists still
struggling for existence; if it was dictated by the senate, it may have
been due to the absorption of the allotments by the larger proprietors
and their unwillingness to pay dues for land which they had added to
their private property. But, to whatever party we may assign it, we may
see in it also the desire to reach a final settlement of the agrarian
question by abolishing all the invidious distinctions between the
different tenures of land which had once formed part of the public
domain. It removed the injustice of burdening the small holding with a
rent which was not exacted from estates that had been partly formed by
accretions of such allotments; and by the abolition of all dues[776] it
tended to remove all land which had been assigned, from the doubtful
category to which it had hitherto belonged of possessions which, though
in a sense private, still recognised the overlordship of the State, and
to revive in all its old sharpness the simple distinction between public
and private land. This tendency makes it probable that the law of
Thorius is identical with one of which we possess considerable
fragments; for this partially preserved enactment is certainly as
sweeping a measure as could have been devised by any one eager to see
the agrarian question, so far as it affected Italian soil, finally
removed from the region of political strife.
Internal evidence makes it probable that this law was passed in the year
111 B.C.,[777] and consequently at the close of that period of
comparative quiescence which was immediately followed by the political
storm raised by the conduct of the war in Numidia. It may, therefore, be
regarded as a product of senatorial enlightenment, although its
provisions would be quite as consistent with the views of a tolerably
sober democrat. The main scope of the enactment is to give the character
of absolute private ownership, unburdened by any restrictions such as
the payment of dues to the State, to nearly all the land which had been
public at the time of the passing of the agrarian law of Tiberius
Gracchus. The first provisions refer to lands which had not been dealt
with by the agrarian commissioners. Any occupant of the public domain,
who has been allowed to preserve his allotment intact, because it does
not exceed the limit fixed by the earlier laws, and any one who has
received public land from the State in exchange for a freehold which he
has surrendered for the foundation of a colony, is henceforth to hold
such portions of the public domain as his private property. The same
provision holds for all land that has been assigned, whether by colonial
or agrarian commissioners. The first class of assignments are those
incidental to the one or two colonies of Caius Gracchus, and perhaps of
Drusus, that were actually established in Italy. Even at the time of
settlement such land must have been made the private property of its
holders; and this law, therefore, but confirms the tenure, and implies
the validity of the act of colonisation. Such land is mentioned as
having been "given and assigned in accordance with a resolution of the
people and the plebs," and all eases in which recent colonial laws had
been repealed or dropped--cases which would include Caius Gracchus's
threatened partition of the Campanian territory--are tacitly excluded.
The second class of assignments refer to those made by the
land-commissioners during the whole period of their chequered existence,
and the land whose private character is thus confirmed, must have
covered much the larger part of what had once been the State's domain
in Italy.
A certain portion of this domain still remains, however, the property of
the State and is not converted into private land. The whole of the soil
which had been given in usufruct to colonies and municipal towns, is
retained in its existing condition; the holders, whether Latin colonists
or Roman citizens, are confirmed in their possessions; but, as the land
still remains public, they are doubtless expected to continue to pay
their quit-rent to the State. Similar provision is made for a peculiar
class of land, which had been given by Rome as security for a national
debt. The debt had never been liquidated, probably because the creditors
preferred the land. This they were now to retain on condition of
continued payment of the quit-rent, which marked the fact that the State
was still its nominal owner. A public character is also maintained for
land which had been assigned for the maintenance of roads. Here we find
the only instance of an actual assignation of the Gracchan commissioners
which was not converted, into private property; the obvious reason for
this exception being that these occupants performed a specific and
necessary duty, which would disappear if their tenure was converted into
absolute ownership. Exception against ownership was also made for those
commons on which the occupants of surrounding farms had an exclusive
right of sending their flocks to pasture;[778] for the conversion of
such grazing land into private lots would have injured the collective
interests, and conferred little benefit on the individuals of the
group.[779] The remaining classes of land which still remain the
property of the State, are the roads of Italy, such public land as had
been specially exempted from distribution by the legislation of the
Gracchi, and such as had remained public on other grounds. The only
known instance of the first class is the Campanian territory, which
continued to be let on leases by the State and to bring to the treasury
a sure and considerable revenue; the second class was probably
represented by land which was not arable and had for this reason escaped
distribution. The law provides that it is not to be occupied but to
serve the purposes of grazing-land, and a limit is fixed to the number
of cattle and sheep belonging to a single owner to which it is to afford
free pasturage. For the enjoyment of grazing-rights beyond this limit
dues are to be paid to the contractors who have purchased the right of
collection from the State.
The law then quits the public domains of Italy for those of Africa and
Corinth, partly for the purpose of specifying with exactitude the rights
of the various occupiers and tenants who were settled on the
territories, but chiefly with the object of effecting the sale of some
of the public domain in the province of Africa and the dependency of
Achaea. This intention of alienation is perhaps the chief reason why the
great varieties of tenure of the African soil are marshalled before us
with such detail and precision; for it was necessary, in view of the
contemplated sale, to re-assert the stability of rights that should be
secure by their very nature or had been guaranteed by solemn compact.
But the occasion of a comprehensive settlement of the agrarian question
in Italy was no doubt gladly seized as affording the right opportunity
for surveying, revising, and establishing the claims of those who were
in enjoyment of what was, or had been, the provincial domain of Rome
across the seas. The rights of Roman citizens and subjects are
indifferently considered, and amongst the former those of the settlers
who had journeyed to Africa in accordance with the promises of the
Rubrian law are fully recognised. The degree of permanence accorded to
the manifold kinds of tenure passed in review can not be determined from
our text; but, even when all claims that deserved a permanent
recognition had been subtracted, there still remained a residuum of
land, leased at quinquennial intervals by the censors, which might be
alienated without the infliction of injury on established rights. We do
not know to what extent this sale, the mechanism for which was minutely
provided for in the law, was carried in Africa; its application to the
domain land of Corinth was either withdrawn or, if carried out, was but
slight or temporary; for Corinthian land remained to be threatened by
later agrarian legislation. It is not easy to suggest a motive for this
sale; for it would seem a short-sighted policy to part, on an extensive
scale and therefore presumably at a cheapened rate, with some of the
most productive land in the world, such as was the African domain of the
period, in order to recoup the treasury for the immediate pecuniary
injury which it was suffering in the loss of the revenues from the
public land of Italy. Perhaps the government had grown suspicious of the
operations of the middle-men, and, since they had restricted their
activity by limiting the amount of public land in Italy, deemed a
similar policy advisable in relation to some of their foreign
dependencies.
The length at which we have dwelt on this law is proportionate to its
importance in the political history of the times, and if we possessed
fuller knowledge of its effects, we should doubtless be able to add, in
their social history as well. Its economic results, however, are
exceedingly obscure, and possibly it produced none worthy of serious
consideration; for the artificial stability which it may have seemed to
give to the existing tenure of land could in no way check the play of
economic forces. If these tendencies were still in favour of large
holdings,[780] the process of accumulation must have continued, and, as
we have before remarked, the accumulator was in a securer position when
purchasing land which was admittedly the private property of its owner,
than when buying allotments which might be held to be still liable to
the public dues. On the other hand, the remission of the impost must
have relieved, and the sense of private ownership inspired, the labours
of the smaller proprietors; and the perpetuation of a considerable
proportion of the Gracchan settlers is probable on general grounds. The
reason why it is difficult to give specific reasons for this belief is
that, at the time when we next begin to get glimpses of the condition of
the Italian peasant class, the great reform had been effected which
incorporated the nations of Italy into Rome. The existence of numerous
small proprietors in the Ciceronian period is attested, but many of
these may have been citizens recently given to Rome by the Italian
stocks, amongst whom agriculture on a small scale had never
become extinct.
But the political import of this measure is considerable. By restricting
to narrow limits all the land of Italy to which the State could make a
claim, it altered the character of agrarian agitation for the future. It
did not indeed fulfil its possible object of obviating such measures;
but it rendered the vested interests of all Italian cultivators secure,
with the exception of the lessees of the leased domain, who perhaps had
no claim to permanence of tenure. This domain was represented chiefly by
the Campanian land: and the reformer who would make this territory his
prey, injured the finances of the State more than the interests of the
individual. If he desired more, he must seek it either in the foreign
domains of Rome or by the adoption of some scheme of land purchase.
Assignment of lands in particular districts of Italy or in the provinces
naturally took the form of colonisation, and this is the favourite shape
assumed by the agrarian schemes of the future. Rome was still to witness
many fierce controversies as to the merits of the policy of colonial
expansion, and as to the wisdom of employing public property and public
revenues to this end; the rights of the conqueror to the lands of his
vanquished fellow-citizens were also to be cruelly asserted, and the
civil wars also invited a species of brigandage for the attainment of
possession which too often replaced the judgments of the courts; but
never again do we find a regular political warfare waged between the
rich and the poor for the possession of territories to which each of the
disputants laid claim. The storm which had burst on the Roman world with
the land law of Tiberius Gracchus had now spent its force. It had
undoubtedly produced a great change on the face of Italy; but this was
perhaps more striking in appearance than in reality; neither the work of
demolition, nor the opportunities offered for renewal, attained the
completeness which they had presented in the reformer's dreams.
But the peace of the citizen body was not the only blessing believed to
be secured by this removal of a temptation to tamper with Italian lands.
The anxieties of the Latins and Italians were also quieted, although it
may be questioned whether the memory of past wrongs, now rendered
irrevocable by the progress of recent agrarian experiments, did not
enter into the agitation for the conferment of the franchise, which they
still continued to sustain. The last great law, following the spirit of
the enactment of Drusus which had preceded it by about a year, does
indeed show traces of an anxiety to respect Italian claims. Apart from
the fact, which we have already mentioned, that all lands which had been
granted in usufruct to colonists, were still to be public and were,
therefore, in the case of Latin colonies, to be at the disposal of the
communities to which they had been granted by treaty, the law contains a
special provision for the maintenance of the rights of Latins and
Italians, so far as they are in harmony with the rights allowed to Roman
citizens by the enactment.[781] The guarantees which had been sanctioned
by Drusus, were therefore respected; but their observance was
conditioned by the rule that all prohibitions now created for Romans
should be extended to the allies. As we do not know the purport of
Drusus's measure, or the practices current on the Roman domains occupied
by Latins, we cannot say whether this clause produced any derogation of
their rights; but it must have limited the right of free pasturage on
the public commons, if they had possessed this in a higher degree than
was now permitted, and the right to occupy public land was also
forbidden them in the future. But it was from the negative point of view
that the law might be interpreted as creating or perpetuating a
grievance; for some of the positive benefits which it conferred seem to
have been limited to Romans. The land which it makes private property,
is land which has been assigned by colonial or agrarian commissioners,
or land which has been occupied up to a certain limit. If colonial land
had really been assigned to Latins by Caius Gracchus, their rights are
retained by this law, if they had been made Roman citizens at the time
of the settlement; but if they had been admitted as participants in the
agrarian distribution throughout Italy, their rights as owners are not
confirmed with those of Roman citizens; and the Latin who merely
occupied land was not given the privilege of the Roman possessor of
becoming the owner of the soil, if his occupation were restricted within
a certain limit.[782] He still retained merely a precarious possession,
for which dues to the State were probably exacted. It was something to
have rights confirmed, but they probably appeared less valuable when
those of others were extended. A more generous treatment could hardly
have been expected from a law of Rome dealing with her own domain,
primarily in the interests of her own citizens; but the Italians were
tending to forget their civic independence, and chose rather to compare
their personal rights with those of the Roman burgesses. Such a
comparison applied to the final agrarian settlement must have done
something to emphasise their belief in the inferiority of
their position.
This review of the legislation on social questions which was initiated
or endured by the senate, shows the tentative attitude adopted by the
nobility in their dealings with the people, and proves either a
statesmanlike view of the needs of the situation or the entire lack of a
proud consciousness of their own immunity from attack. Even had they
possessed the power to dictate to the Comitia, they were hemmed in on
another side; for they had not dared to raise a protest against the law
of Gracchus which transferred criminal jurisdiction over the members of
their own order to the knights. The equestrian courts sat in judgment on
the noblest members of the aristocracy; for the political or personal
motives which urged to prosecution were stronger even than the
camaraderie of the order, and governors of provinces were still in
danger of indictment by their peers. Within two years of the
transference of the courts, Quintus Mucius Scaevola, known in later life
as "the Augur" and famed for his knowledge of the civil law, returned
from his province of Asia to meet the accusation of Titus Albucius.[783]
The knights did not begin by a vindictive exercise of their authority.
Although Asia was the most favoured sphere of their activity, Scaevola
was acquitted. Seven years later they gave a stern and perhaps righteous
example of their severity in the condemnation of Caius Porcius
Cato.[784] The accused when consul had obtained Macedonia as his
province, and had waged a frontier war with the Scordisci, which ended
in the annihilation of his forces and his own narrow escape from the
field of battle. His ill-success perhaps deepened the impression made by
his extortions in Macedonia, and he was sentenced to the payment of a
fine. Neither in the case of the acquittal nor in that of the
condemnation does political bias seem to have influenced the judgment of
the courts, and the equestrian jurors may have seemed for a time to
realise the best hopes which had inspired their creation.
The attention of the leading members of the nobility was probably too
absorbed by the problem of adapting senatorial rule to altered
circumstances to allow them the leisure or the inclination to embark on
fresh legislative projects of their own. Our record of these years is so
imperfect that it would be rash to conclude that the scanty proposals on
new subjects which it reveals exhausted the legislative activity of the
senate; but had they done so, the circumstance would be intelligible;
for the work that invited the attention of the senate in its own
interest, was one of consolidation rather than of reform; the political
feeling of the time put measures of a distinctly reactionary character,
such as might have been welcomed by the more conservative members of the
order, wholly out of the question; and the government was not likely,
except under compulsion, to undertake legislation of a progressive type.
The only important law of the period certainly proceeding from
governmental circles, and dealing with a question that was novel, in the
sense that it had not been heard of for a considerable number of years
and had played no part in the Gracchan movements, was one passed by the
consul Marcus Aemilius Scaurus. It dealt with the voting power of the
freedmen,[785] and probably confirmed its restriction to the four city
tribes. It is difficult to assign a political meaning to this law, as we
do not know the practice which prevailed at the time of Scaurus's
intervention; but it is probable that the restriction imposed by the
censors of 169, who had confined the freedmen to a single tribe,[786]
had not been observed, that great irregularity prevailed in the manner
of their registration, and that Scaurus's measure, which was a return to
the arrangement reached at the end of the fourth century, was intended
to restrict the voting privileges of the class. This interpretation of
his intention would seem to show that the increasing liberality of the
Roman master had created a class the larger portion of which was not
dependent on the wealthier and more conservative section of the citizen
body, or was at least enabled to assert its freedom from control through
the secrecy of the ballot. The interests of the class were almost
identical with those of the free proletariate, in which the descendants
of the freedmen were merged: and the law of Scaurus, which strengthened
the country vote by preventing this urban influence spreading through
all the tribes, may be an evidence that the senate distrusted the
present passivity of the urban folk, and looked forward with
apprehension to a time when they might have to rely on the more stable
element which the country districts supplied. We shall see in the sequel
that this anticipation of the freedmen's attitude was not unjustified,
and that the increase of their voting power still continued to be an
effective battle-cry for the demagogue who was eager to increase his
following in the city.
Scaurus was also the author of a sumptuary law.[787] It came
appropriately from a man who had been trained in a school of poverty,
and shows the willingness of the nobility to submit, at least in
appearance, to the discipline which would present it to the world as a
self-sacrificing administration, reaping no selfish reward for its
intense labour, and submitting to that equality of life with the average
citizen which is the best democratic concession that a powerful
oligarchy can make. The activity of the censorship was exhibited in the
same direction. Foreign and expensive dishes were prohibited by the
guardians of public morals, as they were by Scaurus's sumptuary
law:[788] and the censors of 115, Metellus and Domitius, undertook a
scrutiny of the stage which resulted in the complete exclusion from Rome
of all complex forms of the histrionic art and its reduction to the
simple Latin type of music and song.[789] Their energy was also
displayed in a destructive examination of the morals of their own order,
and as a result of the scrutiny thirty-two senators were banished from
the Curia.[790] To guard the senate-house from scandal was indeed the
necessary policy of a nobility which knew that its precarious power
rested on the opinion of the streets; and the efforts of the censors,
directed like those of their predecessors, to a regeneration which had a
national type as its goal, show that that opinion could not yet have
been considered wholly cosmopolitan or corrupt. The frequent splendour
of triumphal processions, such as those which celebrated the victories
of Domitius and Fabius over the Allobroges, of Metellus over the
Dalmatians, and of Scaurus over the Ligurians,[791] produced a
comfortable impression of the efficiency of the government in extending
or preserving the frontiers of the empire; the triumph itself was the
symbol of success, and few could have cared to question the extent and
utility of the achievement. Satisfied with the belief that they were
witnessing the average type of successful administration, the electors
pursued the course, from which they so seldom deflected, of giving their
unreserved confidence to the ancient houses; and this epoch witnessed a
striking instance of hereditary influence, if not of hereditary talent,
when Metellus Macedonicus was borne to his grave by sons, of whom four
had held curule office, three had possessed the consulship, and one had
fulfilled in addition the lofty functions of the censor and enjoyed the
honour of a triumph.[792]
Yet distinction without a certain degree of fitness was now, as at every
other time, an impossibility in Rome. The nobility, although it did not
love originality, extended a helping hand to the capacity that was
willing to support its cause and showed the likelihood of dignifying its
administration; a career was still open to talent and address, if they
were held to be wisely directed; and the man of the period who best
deserves the title of leader of the State, was one who had not even
sprung from the second strata of Roman society, but had struggled with a
poverty which would have condemned an ordinary man to devote such
leisure as he could spare for politics to swelling the babel of the
Forum and the streets. It is true that Marcus Aemilius Scaurus bore a
patrician name, and was one of those potential kings who, once in the
senate, might assume the royal foot-gear and continue the holy task,
which they had performed from the time of Romulus, of guarding and
transmitting the auspices of the Roman people. But the splendour of the
name had long been dimmed. Even in the history of the great wars of the
beginning of the century but one Aemilius Scaurus appears, and he holds
but a subordinate command as an officer of the Roman fleet. The father
of the future chief of the senate had been forced to seek a livelihood
in the humble calling of a purveyor of charcoal.[793] The son, resolute,
ambitious and conscious of great powers, long debated with himself the
question of his future walk in life.[794] He might remain in the ranks
of the business world, supply money to customers in place of coal, and
seize the golden opportunities which were being presented by the
extension of the banking industry in the provincial world. Had he chosen
this path, Scaurus might have been the chief of the knights and the most
resolute champion of equestrian claims against the government. But his
course was decided by the afterthought that the power of words was
greater than that of gold, and that eloquence might secure, not only
wealth, but the influence which wealth alone cannot attain. The fame
which he gained in the Forum led inevitably to service in the field. He
reaped distinction in the Spanish campaigns and served under Orestes in
Sardinia. His narrow means rather than his principles may have been the
reason why his aedileship was not marked by the generous shows to which
the people were accustomed and by which their favour was usually
purchased; in Scaurus's tenure of that office splendour was replaced by
a rigorous performance of judicial duties;[795] but that such an
equivalent could serve his purpose, that it should be even no hindrance
to his career, proves the respect that his strenuous character had won
from the people, and the anticipation formed by the government of the
value of his future services. Now, when he was nearing his fiftieth
year, he had secured the consulship, the bourne of most successful
careers, but not to be the last or greatest prize of a man whose stately
presence, unbending dignity, and apparent simplicity of purpose, could
generally awe the people into respect, and whose keenness of vision and
talent for intrigue impressed the senatorial mind with a sense of his
power to save, when claims were pressing and difficulties acute.[796]
His consulship, though without brilliancy, added to the respectable
laurels that he had already attained. A successful raid on some Illyrian
tribes[797] showed at least that he had retained the physical endurance
of his youth; while his legislation on sumptuary matters and the
freedman's vote showed the spirit of a milder Cato, and the moderate
conservatism, not distasteful to the Roman of pure blood, which would
preserve the preponderance in political power to the citizen untainted
by the stain of servitude. A stormy event of his period of office gave
the crowd an opportunity of seeing the severity with which a magistrate
of the older school could avenge an affront to the dignity of his
office. Publius Decius, who was believed to be a conscious imitator of
Fulvius Flaccus in the exaggerated vehemence of his oratory, and who had
already proved by his prosecution of Opimius that he was ready to defend
certain features of the Gracchan cause even when such championship was
fraught with danger, was in possession of the urban praetorship at the
time when Scaurus held the consulship. One day the consul passed the
open court of justice when the praetor was giving judgment from the
curule chair. Decius remained seated, either in feigned oblivion or in
ostentatious disregard of the presence of his superior. The politic
wrath of Scaurus was aroused; an enemy had been delivered into his
hands, and the people might be given an object-lesson of the way in
which the most vehement champion of popular rights was, even when
covered with the dignity of a magistracy, but a straw in the iron grasp
of the higher Imperium. The consul ordered Decius to rise, his official
robe to be rent, the chair of justice to be shattered in pieces, and
published a warning that no future litigant should resort to the court
of the contumacious praetor.[798] The vulgar mind is impressed, when it
is not angered, by such scenes of violence. A repute for sternness is
the best cloak for the flexibility which, if revealed, would excite
suspicion. Scaurus to the popular mind was an embodiment of stiff
patrician dignity, perhaps happily devoid of that touch of insolence
which is often the mark of a career assured without a struggle; of a
self-complacent dignity, quietly conscious of its own deserts and
demanding their due reward, of the calmness of a soul that is above
suspicion and refuses to admit even in its inmost sanctuary the thought
that its motives can be impugned. Meanwhile certain disrespectful
onlookers were expressing wonder at his mysteriously growing wealth and
marvelling as to its source. But, marvel as they might, they never drove
Scaurus to the necessity of an explanation. We shall find him as an old
man repelling all attacks by the irresistible appeal to his services and
his career. The condemnation of Scaurus appealed to the conservative as
a blow struck at the dignity of the State itself; to the man of a more
open mind it was at least the shattering of a delightful illusion.
The period which witnessed the crowning of the efforts of the poor and
struggling patrician was also sufficiently liberal, or sufficiently poor
in aristocratic talent, to admit the initial steps in the official
career of a genuine son of the people. It was now that Caius Marius was
laboriously climbing the grades of curule rank, and showing in the
pursuit of political influence at home the rugged determination which
had already distinguished him in the field. A Volscian by descent, he
belonged to Rome through the accident of birth in the old municipality
of Arpinum, which since the early part of the second century had enjoyed
full Roman citizenship and therefore gave its citizens the right of
suffrage and of honours in the capital. Born of good yeoman stock in the
village of Cereatae in the Arpinate territory,[799] he had passed a
boyhood which derived no polish from the refinements, and no taint from
the corruptions, of city life. In his case there was no puzzling
discrepancy between the outer and the inner man. His frame and visage
were the true index of a mind, somewhat unhewn and uncouth, but with a
massive reserve of strength, a persistence not blindly obstinate, a
patience that could wear out the most brilliant efforts of his rivals
and opponents. He did not court hostility, but simply shouldered his way
sturdily to the front, encouraged by Rome's better spirits, who saw in
him the excellent officer with qualities that might make the future
general, and appealing to the people, when they gradually became
familiar with his presence, as a type of that venerable myth, the rustic
statesman of the past. The poverty of his early lot was perhaps
exaggerated by historians[800] who wished to point the contrast between
his humble origin and his later glory, and to find a suitable cradle for
his rugged nature; even the initial stages of his career afford no
evidence of a struggle against pressing want, nor is there any proof
that he was supported by the bounty of his powerful friends. Even if he
entered the army as a common foot-soldier, he would merely have shared
the lot of many a well-to-do yeoman who obeyed the call of the
conscription. With Marius, however, military service was not to be an
incident, but a profession. The needs of a widening empire were calling
for special capacities such as had never been demanded in the past. The
career of Scaurus had shown the successful pleader surmounting the
obstacle of poverty; even the higher barrier of birth might be leaped
amidst the democratising influences of the camp. The nobility was not
sufficiently self-centred to be wholly blind to its own interests; and
it was easier to patronise a soldier than a pleader. In the latter case
the aspirant's political creed must be examined; in the former the last
question that would be asked was whether the officer possessed any
political creed at all. It might be a question of importance for the
future with respect to the candidature for those offices which alone
conferred high military command, even though there was as yet no dream
of the sword becoming the arbiter of political life; but the genuine
commander, engaged in the difficult task of remodelling an army, had no
eye but for the bearing and qualities of the soldier, and would not
scruple to cast aside his patrician prejudices in a despairing effort to
find the fittest instruments for the perfecting of his great design. It
was Marius's fortunate lot to enter the field at a time of trial, and to
serve his first campaign under a general, who was combating the adverse
forces of influence, licence and incompetence in the official staff
supplied by the government and represented by the young scions of the
nobility. To the camp before Numantia, where Scipio was scourging his
men into obedience, rooting out the amenities of life, and astonishing
his officers with new ideas of the meaning of a campaign, Marius brought
the very qualities on which the general had set his heart. An
unflinching courage, shown on one occasion in single combat when he
overthrew a champion of the foe, a power of physical endurance which
could submit to all changes of temperature and food, a minute precision
in the performance of the detailed duties of the camp, soon led to his
rapid advancement and to his selection as a member of the intimate
circle which surrounded the commander-in-chief. Every great specialist
has a small claim to the gift of prophecy; for he possesses an instinct
which reveals more than his reason will permit him to prove; and we need
not wonder at the story that, when once the debate grew warm round
Scipio's table as to who would succeed him as the chosen commander of
the Roman host, he lightly touched the shoulder of Marius and answered
"Perhaps we shall find him here".[801]
The higher commands in the army could be sought only through a political
career; and Marius, inspired with the highest hopes by Scipio's
commendation, was forced to breathe the uncongenial atmosphere of the
city and to fight his way upwards to the curule offices. There is no
proof that he took advantage of the current of democratic feeling which
accompanied the movements of the Gracchi. It was, perhaps, as well that
he did not; for such an association might have long delayed his higher
political career. The nobles who posed as democrats probably attached
more importance to forensic skill than to military merit; and the
support which Marius enjoyed was sought and found amongst the
representatives of the opposite party. Scipio's death removed a man who
might have been a powerful advocate on his behalf; the vague
relationship of clientship in which the family of Marius had stood to
the clan of the Herennii[802]--a relation common between Roman families
and the members of Italian townships, and in this case probably dating
from a time before Arpinum had received full Roman rights--seems never
to have led to active interference on his behalf on the part of the
representatives of that ancient Samnite house. Perhaps the Herennii were
too weak to assist the fortunes of their client; they certainly give no
names to the Fasti of this period. It is also possible that the proud
soldier was galled by the memory of the hereditary yoke, and sought
assistance where it would be given simply as a mark of merit, not as a
duty conditioned by the claim to irksome reciprocal obligations. The
all-powerful family of the Caecilii Metelli, who were at this time
vigorously fulfilling the destiny of office which heaven had prescribed
for their clan, stretched out a helping hand to the distinguished
soldier;[803] a family born to military command might consult its
interests, while it gratified its sympathies, by attaching to its
_clientèle_ a warrior who had received the best training of the school
of Africanus. After he had held the military tribunate and the
quaestorship,[804] Marius attained the tribunate of the Plebs with the
assistance of Lucius Caecilius Metellus.[805] He was in his thirty-ninth
year when he entered on the first office which gave him the opportunity
of claiming the attention of the people by the initiation of legislative
measures. The slowness of his rise may have led him to believe that he
might accelerate his career by taking his fortune into his own hands;
certainly if the law which bore his name was not unwelcome to the better
portion of the nobility, the methods by which he forced it through did
not commend themselves even to his patron. His proposal was meant to
limit the exercise of undue influence at the Comitia, and although the
law doubtless referred to legislative meetings summoned for every
purpose, it was chiefly directed to securing the independence of the
voter in such public trials as still took place before the people,[806]
and was perhaps inspired by scenes that might have been witnessed at the
acquittal of Opimius one year previously. One of the clauses of the bill
provided that the exits to the galleries, through which the voters filed
to give their suffrages to the tellers, should be narrowed,[807] the
object being to exclude the political agents who were accustomed to
occupy the sides of the passages, and influence or intimidate, by their
presence if not by their words, the voting citizen at the critical
moment when he was about to record his verdict. Such methods were
probably found effective even where the ballot was used, but their
success must have been even greater in trials for treason, at which
voting by word of mouth was still employed. It was difficult for a
government, which had accepted the ballot, to offer a decent resistance
to a measure of this kind. The proposal attacked indifferently political
methods which might be, and probably were, employed by both parties;
and, although its success would no doubt inflict more injury on the
government than on the opposition, it could not be repudiated by the
senate on the ground that it was tainted by an aggressively "popular"
character. The opposition which it actually encountered was apparently
based on the formal ground that the heads of the administration had not
been sufficiently consulted. The law was not the outcome of any
senatorial decree, nor had the senate's opinion been deliberately taken
on the utility of the measure. The consul Cotta persuaded the house to
frame a resolution expressing dissatisfaction with the proposal as it
stood, and to summon Marius for an explanation. The summons was promptly
obeyed, but the expected scene of humiliation of the untried parvenu was
rudely interrupted at an early period of the debate. Marius knew that he
had the people and the tribunician college with him, and that even the
most perverse ingenuity could never construe the measure as a factious
opposition to the interests of the State. Obedience to the senate would
in this instance mean the sacrifice of a reputation for political
honesty and courage; it might be better to burn his boats and to trust
for the future to the generosity of the people for the gifts which the
nobility so grudgingly bestowed. He chose to regard the controversy as
one of those cases of hopeless conflict between the members of the
magistracy, for the solution of which the law had provided regular
though exceptional means. He fell back on the majesty of the tribunician
power, and threatened Cotta with imprisonment if he did not withdraw his
resolution.[808] It is probable that up to this point no decree
expressing wholesale condemnation of the bill had been passed, and the
senate might therefore be coerced through the magistrate, without its
authority being utterly disregarded. Cotta turned to his colleague
Metellus, known to be the friend of the obstinate tribune, and Metellus
rising gave the consul his support. Marius, undaunted by the attitude of
his patron, hurried matters to a close. He summoned his attendant to the
Curia, and bade him take Metellus himself into custody and conduct him
to a place of confinement. Metellus appealed to the other tribunes, but
none would offer his help; and the senate was forced to save the
situation by sacrificing its vote of censure. So rapid and complete a
victory, even on an issue of no great importance, delighted the popular
mind. The senate was then in good favour at Rome; but a chance for
realising their superiority over the greatest of their servants was
always welcome to the people. They also loved those exhibitions of
physical force by which the genius of Rome had solved the difficulties
of her constitution: and the violence of a tribune was as impressive now
as was that of a consul four years later. Marius had gained a character
for sturdy independence and unshaken constancy, which was to produce
unexpected results in the political world of the future, and was to be
immediately tested in a manner that must have proved profoundly
disappointing to many who acclaimed him. It seems as though this victory
over the resolution of the senate may have urged certain would-be
reformers to believe that measures of a Gracchan type might win the
favour of the people, and secure the support of a tribunician college
which seemed to be out of sympathy with the government. Some proposal
dealing with the distribution of corn,[809] perhaps an extension of the
existing scheme, was made. It found no more resolute opponent than
Marius, and his opposition helped to secure its utter defeat. In this
resistance we may perhaps see the genuinely neutral character of the
man; for the attribution of interested motives, although the historian's
favourite revenge for the difficulties of his task, endows his
characters with a foresight which is as abnormal as their lack of
principle; although it is questionable whether Marius would have gained
by identifying himself with a cause which had not yet emerged from the
ruin of its failure.
The lack of official support and the alienation of a section of the
people may perhaps be traced in the successive defeats of his
candidature for the curule and plebeian aedileships,[810] although in
the elections to these offices the attention of the people was so keenly
directed to the candidate's pecuniary means as a guarantee of their
gratification by brilliant shows, that the aedileship must have been of
all magistracies the most difficult of attainment by merit unsupported
by wealth. Even when the rejected candidate had won favour on other
grounds, the electors could salve their consciences with the reflection
that the aedileship was no obligatory step in an official career, and
that, where merit and not money was in question, they could show their
appreciation of personal qualities in the elections to the praetorship.
A year after his repulse Marius turned to the candidature for this
office, which conveyed the first opportunity of the tenure of an
independent military command. He was returned at the bottom of the poll,
and even then had to fight hard to retain his place in the praetorian
college.[811] A charge of undue influence was brought against the man
who had struggled successfully to preserve the purity of the Comitia,
and it was pretended that a slave of one of his closest political
associates had been seen within the barriers mixing with the voters.
That the charge was supported by powerful influences, or was generally
believed to be correct, is perhaps shown by the conduct of the censors
of the succeeding year who expelled this associate from the senate.[812]
The jurors[813] before whom the case was tried--representatives, as we
must suppose, of the equestrian order and therefore presumably
uninfluenced by senatorial hostility--were long perplexed by the
conflict of evidence. During the first days of the trial it seemed as
though the doom of Marius was sealed, and his unexpected acquittal was
only secured by the scrutiny of the tablets revealing an equality of
votes, a condition which, according to the rules of Roman process,
necessitated a favourable verdict.
His praetorship, in accordance with the rules which now governed this
magistracy in consequence of the multiplication of the courts of
justice, confined his energies to Rome. We do not know what department
of this office he administered; but, as the charge of no department
could make an epoch in the career of any one but a lawyer gifted with
original ideas, we are not surprised to find that Marius's tenure of
this magistracy, although creditable, did not excite any marked
attention.[814] After his praetorship he obtained his first independent
military command in Farther Spain. Such a province had always its little
problems of pacification to present to an energetic commander, and
Marius's military talents were moderately exercised by the repression of
the habitual brigandage of its inhabitants.[815] His tenure of a foreign
command may have added to his wealth, for provincial government could be
made to increase the means of the most honest administrator. It was
still more important that his tenure of the praetorship had added him to
the ranks of the official nobility. His birth was now no bar to any
social distinction to which his simple and resolute soul might think it
profitable to aspire: and a family of the patrician Julii was not
ashamed to give one of its daughters to the adventurer from
Arpinum.[816] Thus Marius remained for a while; to Roman society an
interesting specimen of the self-made man, marked by a bluntness and
directness appropriate to the type and provocative of an amused regard;
to the professed politician a man with a fairly successful but puzzling
political career, and one that perhaps needed not to be too seriously
considered. For to all who understood the existent conditions of Roman
public life, his attainment of the consulship and of a dominant position
in the councils of the State must have seemed impossible. There was but
one contingency that could make Marius a necessary man. This was war on
a grand scale. But the contingency was distant, and, even if it arose,
the government might employ his skill while keeping him in a
subordinate position.
The career of Marius is not the only proof that the tradition of
successful opposition to the senate could be easily revived. In the year
following his tribunate a new and successful effort was made in the
direction of transmarine colonisation.[817] The pretext for the measure
was the necessity for preserving command of the territory which had been
won by the great victories of Domitius and Fabius on the farther side of
the Alps; the strategic value of the foundation was undeniable, and the
opposition of the government was probably directed by the form which it
was proposed that the new settlement should take. It was not to be a
mere fort in the enemy's country, like the already-established Aquae
Sextiae,[818] but a true _colonia_ of Roman citizens,[819] the creation
of which was certain to lead to excessive complications in the foreign
policy which dealt with the frontiers of the north. Such a colony would
become the centre of an active trade with the surrounding tribes; though
professedly founded in the people's interest, it would rapidly become a
mere feeler for extending the operations of the great mercantile class;
the growth of Roman trade-interests would necessarily involve a policy
of defence and probably of expansion, which would tell heavily on the
resources of the State. The success of the government was dependent on
the restriction of its efforts, and there is nothing surprising in the
hearty opposition which it offered to the projected colony of Narbo
Martius. Even after the original measure sanctioning the settlement had
passed the Comitia, senatorial influence led to the promulgation of a
new proposal in which the people was asked to reconsider its
decision.[820] But the project had found an ardent champion in the young
Lucius Crassus, who strengthened the position which he had won in the
previous year, by a speech weighty beyond the promise of his age.[821]
In his successful advocacy of a national undertaking he was not afraid
to impugn the authority of the senate, and reaped an immediate reward in
being selected, despite his youth, as one of the commissioners for
establishing the settlement.[822]
It is probable that without the support of the equestrian order the
project for the foundation of Narbo Martius might have fallen through.
The man of popular sympathies whose measures attracted their support was
tolerably certain of success, and the man who posed as the champion of
the order was still more firmly placed. The latter position was occupied
for a considerable time by Caius Servilius Glaucia, whose tribunate
probably belongs to the close of the period which we are
describing.[823] Glaucia himself, probably one of those scions of the
nobility whom an original bent of mind had alienated from the narrow
interests of his order, was a man who, lacking in the gift of passionate
but steadfast seriousness which makes the great reformer, possessed
powers admirably adapted for holding the popular ear and inspiring his
auditors with a kind of robust confidence in himself. Ready, acute and
witty,[824] he possessed the happy faculty of taking the Comitia, under
the guise of the plain and honest man, into his confidence. The very
ignorance of his auditors became a respectable attribute, when it was
figured as ingenuous simplicity which needed protection against the
tortuous wiles of the legislator and the official draughtsman. On one
occasion he told his audience that the essence of a law was its
preamble. If, when read to them, it was found to contain the words
"dictator, consul, praetor or magister equitum," the bill was no concern
of theirs. But, if they caught the utterance "and whosoever after this
enactment," then they must wake up, for some new fetter of law was being
forged to bind their limbs.[825] A man of this unconventional type was
not likely to be popular in the senate, and the opprobrious name, which
he subsequently bore in the Curia,[826] is a proof of the liveliness
which he imparted to debate.
At the time of Glaucia's tribunate some subtle movement seems to have
been on foot for undoing the judiciary law of Caius Gracchus and ousting
the knights from their possession of the court before which senators
most frequently appeared. The law which dealt with the crime of
extortion by Roman officials had been frequently renewed, and, whenever
a proposal was made for recasting the enactment with a view to effecting
improvements in procedure, the equestrian tenure of the court was
threatened; for a new law might state qualifications for the jurors
differing from those which had given this department of jurisdiction to
the knights. The relief of the order was therefore great when the
necessary work of revision was undertaken by one who showed himself an
ardent champion of equestrian claims.[827] Glaucia's alteration in
procedure was thorough and permanent. He introduced the system of the
"second hearing "--an obligatory renewal of the trial, which rendered it
possible for counsel to discuss evidence which had been already given,
and for jurors to get a grasp of the mass of scattered data which had
been presented to their notice--[828] and he also made it possible to
recover damages, not only from the chief malefactor, but from all who
had dishonestly shared his spoils.[829] These principles continued to be
observed in trials for extortion to the close of the Republic, and may
have been the only permanent relic of Glaucia's feverish political
career. But for the moment the clauses of his law which dealt with the
qualifications of the jurors, were those most anxiously awaited and most
heartily acclaimed. He had stemmed a reaction and consolidated, beyond
hope of alteration for a long term of years, the system of dual control
established by Caius Gracchus.
The careers and successes of Marius, Crassus and Glaucia exhibit the
spirit of unrest which broke at intervals through the apathetic
tolerance displayed by the people towards the rule of the nobility.
These alternations of confidence and distrust find their counterpart in
the religious history of the times; but a panic springing from a belief
in the anger of the gods was even more difficult to control than the
alarm excited by the attitude of the government. Such a panic knew no
distinctions of station, sex or age; it seized on citizens who cared
nothing for the problems of administration, it was strong in proportion
to the weakness of its victims, and gathered from the dark thoughts and
wild words of the imbecile the poison which infected the sober mind and
assumed, from the very universality of the sickness, the guise of a
healthy effort at rooting out some deep-seated pollution from the State.
The gloomy record of the religious persecutions of the past made it
still more difficult for a government, which prided itself on the
retention of the ancient control of morals, which gloried in its
monopoly of an historic priesthood that had often set its hand to the
work of extirpation, to stifle such a cry. The demand for atonement was
the voice of the conserver of Rome's moral life, of the patriotic
devotee who was striving earnestly to reclaim the waning favour of her
tutelary gods. If it was further believed that the seat of the
corruption was to be found amidst the families of the nobility itself,
the last barrier to resistance had been broken down, for even to seem to
shield the unholy thing was to make its lurking place an object of
horror and execration.
The nerves of the people were first excited by various prodigies that
had appeared; a confirmation of their fears might have been found in the
utter destruction of the army of Porcius Cato in Thrace;[830] and a
strange calamity soon gave an index to the nature of the offence which
excited the anger of the gods. When Helvius, a Roman knight, was
journeying with his wife and daughter from Rome to Apulia, they were
enveloped in a sudden storm. The alarm of the girl urged the father to
seek shelter with all speed. The horses were loosed from the vehicle,
the maiden was placed on one, and the party was hastening along the
road, when suddenly there was a blinding flash and, when it had passed,
the young Helvia and her horse were seen prone upon the ground. The
force of the lightning had stripped every garment and ornament from her
body, and the dead steed lay a few paces off with its trappings riven
and scattered around it.[831] Death by a thunderbolt had always a
meaning, which was sometimes hard to find; but here the gods had not
left the inquiring votary utterly in doubt. The nakedness of the
stricken maiden was a riddle that the priests could read. It was a
manifest sign that a virginal vow had been broken, and that some of the
keepers of the eternal fire were tainted with the sin of unchastity. The
destruction of the horse seemed to portend that a knight would be found
to be a partner in the crime.[832] Evidence was invited and was soon
forthcoming. The slave of a certain Barrus came forward and deposed to
the corruption of three of the vestal virgins, Aemilia, Licinia and
Marcia.[833] He pretended that the incestuous intercourse had been of
long standing, and he named his own master amongst many other men whom
he declared to be the authors of the sacrilege. The maidens were
believed to have added to their lovers to screen their first offence;
the sacrifice of their honour became the price of silence; and their
first corrupters were forced to be dumb when jealousy was mastered by
fear. The knowledge of the crime is believed to have been widely spread
amongst the circles of the better class, until the conspiracy of silence
was broken down by the action of a slave,[834] and all who would not be
deemed accomplices were forced to add their share to the weight of the
accusing testimony.
A scandal of this magnitude called for a formal trial by the supreme
religious tribunal, and towards the close of the year[835] Lucius
Metellus, the chief pontiff, summoned the incriminated vestals before
the college. Aemilia was condemned, but Licinia and Marcia were
acquitted. There was an immediate outcry; the pontiff's leniency was
severely censured; and the anger and fear of the people emboldened a
tribune, Sextus Peducaeus, to propose for the first time that the
secular arm should wrest from the pontifical college the spiritual
jurisdiction that it had abused. He carried a resolution that a special
commission should be established by the people to continue the
investigation.[836] The judges were probably Roman knights after the
model of the Gracchan jurors; the president was the terrible Lucius
Cassius Longinus, already known for his severity as a censor and famed
for his penetration as a criminal judge. This fatal penetration, which
had endowed his tribunal with the nickname "the reef of the
accused," [837] was now welcomed as a surety that the inquiry would be
searching, and that the innocence which survived it would be so well
established that all doubt and fear would be dissolved. This commission
condemned, not only the two vestals whom the pontiffs had acquitted, but
many of their female intermediaries as well.[838] Some of their supposed
paramours must also have been convicted; amongst the accused was Marcus
Antonius, who was in future days to share the realm of oratory with
Lucius Crassus. He was on the eve of his departure to Asia, where he was
to exercise the duties of a quaestor, when he was summoned to appear
before the court over which Cassius presided. He might have pleaded the
benefit of his obligation to continue his official duties;[839] but he
preferred to waive his claim and face his judges. His escape was
believed to have been mainly due to the heroic conduct of a young slave,
who, presented of his own free will to the torture, bore the anguish of
the rack, the scourge and the fire without uttering a word that might
incriminate his master.[840] The free employment of such methods in
trials for incest throws a grave doubt on the value of the judgment
which they elicited; and, when a court is established for the purpose of
appeasing the popular conscience, a part at least of its conduct may be
easily suspected of being preordained. Cassius's rigour in this matter
was thought excessive;[841] but, even had he and the jurors meted out
nothing but the strictest justice, the memory of their sentence would
long have rankled in the minds of the influential families whose members
they had condemned, and thus perpetuated the tradition of their
unnecessary severity. It may be doubted, however, whether a secular
court was competent to inflict the horrible penalties of pontifical
jurisdiction, to condemn the vestal to a living grave and her paramour
to death by the scourge;[842] interdiction, and perhaps in the more
serious cases the death by strangling usually reserved for traitors, may
have been meted out to the men, while the women may have been handed
over to their relatives for execution. But even this exemplary
visitation of the vices which lurked in the heart of the State was not
deemed sufficient to appease the gods or to quiet the popular
conscience. To punish the guilty was to offer the barest satisfaction to
heaven and to conscience; a fuller atonement was demanded, and the
Sibylline oracles, when consulted on the point, were understood to
ordain the cultivation of certain strange divinities by the living
sacrifice of four strangers, two of Hellenic and two of Gallic
race.[843] The accomplishment of this act must have been a severe strain
on the reason and conscience of a government which sixteen years later
absolutely prohibited the performance of human sacrifice[844] and soon
made efforts to stamp out the barbarous ritual even in its foreign
dependencies.[845] Even this concession to the panic of the times could
not be regarded as fraught with much worldly success. The gods seemed
still to retain an unkind feeling both to the city and the government.
Two years later there was a return of dreadful prodigies, and a great
part of Rome was laid waste by a terrible fire. A few months more and
news was brought from Africa which shook to its very foundations the
fabric of senatorial rule.[846]