From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome from 133 B.C. to A.D. 68 (5 page)

Carthage and Corinth, two great cities of the ancient world, crashed to their ruin amid smoke and flame in 146 B.C., destroyed and sacked by Roman troops. Thirteen years later a Roman tribune, Tiberius Gracchus, was clubbed to death in a fracas led by an ex-consul. These tragic episodes showed clearly that Rome’s power throughout the Mediterranean world was dominant and unchallengeable, but that her internal stability was weakened and threatened. She was gaining the whole world: must she at the same time lose her own soul? Could a city-state govern an empire? Could Rome adapt her institutions to meet the challenge of her increasing responsibilities? Above all, could she produce sufficient men of insight and goodwill who would persuade both the governing class and people to face squarely the pressing problems of the day and to seek solutions for the common good even when this might involve some sacrifice of individual gain by leaders and common man alike? If statesmen failed to grapple with urgent political, economic and social problems, and if sections of the community selfishly set their own interests before the well-being of the whole which now embraced Rome, Italy and an overseas Empire, then stresses and tensions might overstrain the stability of the body politic and the days of the Roman Republic would be numbered.
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First, therefore, we must see very briefly how Rome reached this perilous position and glance at the various sections of Rome and her Empire in an attempt to envisage their needs and responsibilities in light of the changes that they were undergoing. Then we come to the two chief themes of this book: first the century in which the Republic failed to meet the challenge and in consequence crashed to its ruin amid civil war and military dictatorship,
and then the following century when the war-weary world was given peace and a stable government though at the cost of seeing the Republic restored only in name by a First Citizen whose authority did not differ widely from that of a constitutional monarch and whose successors became increasingly autocratic.

Since many of the problems which faced Rome in 133 B.C. arose from her acquisition of an empire overseas, we must first see briefly how she had come to possess it. In the course of the preceding four hundred years Rome had developed from a small city-state on the banks of the Tiber into the dominant power throughout the Mediterranean. After the expulsion of the Etruscan king, Tarquinius Superbus, at the end of the Regal Period (510 B.C.), the Romans had established a Republic which gradually came to control all Italy. This process was not achieved by military conquest alone, and in fact Roman religious law (the
ius fetiale
) did not countenance wars of aggression designed to gain new territory. But in alliance with neighbouring Latin cities Rome did not hesitate to hit back when the hill tribes of central Italy began to press down against the more fertile plain of Latium. Very slowly, partly by accident and partly by design, Roman interests extended throughout central Italy and ultimately throughout the peninsula, so that by 264 B.C. she had become the dominant political and military power. But more than that, she had united all Italy within the framework of a Confederacy. Unlike many peoples of the ancient world, the Romans were most generous in sharing their own citizenship with others: thus they had incorporated a considerable part of Italy in their own State by granting all or some of the privileges of Roman citizenship to many of the cities and tribes with which they had come into contact. With the rest of Italy they had contracted alliances of varying conditions, the most favoured allies being the Latin cities. Thus the early period of fighting was ended, Italy was to a large extent united through the central power of Rome, while law and order were maintained the more easily because of the roads which Rome had constructed, and the colonies (both Roman and Latin) which had been established at strategic points.
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One of the chief consequences of the consolidation of Roman power in Italy was that she now stepped into the front rank of the Great Powers. The Greeks and the Hellenistic monarchs, who had carved kingdoms for themselves out of the empire of Alexander the Great, had hitherto regarded the inhabitants of central Italy as barbarians in so far as they had thought of them at all, but they received a sudden shock when news came that Pyrrhus king of Epirus, who had invaded Italy at the request of Tarentum, had been driven out of Italy by Roman arms in 275 B.C. Indeed two years later Ptolemy II king
of Egypt hastened to enter into a formal ‘friendship’ with the Roman Republic. Thereafter for the next half century Rome and the Greek world paid little attention to one another and were content to live and let live. This was also the policy which Rome had hitherto adopted towards the dominant power in the western Mediterranean, Carthage. The main interest of Carthage was commerce, while the Romans were primarily an agricultural people who had no reason to wish to stop the Carthaginians gaining a complete trading monopoly in the western Mediterranean and closing this area to all foreign shipping. But the attention of Carthage was arrested when Rome came to control southern Italy, because at its toe lies Sicily, where both Carthage and Rome’s Greek allies in southern Italy had interests. This led to the First Punic War (264–241 B.C.) when after a long and bitter struggle the Romans drove the Carthaginians out of Sicily. This they achieved only because they ventured on the sea, built up a strong fleet and smashed the naval power of Carthage. For Rome the consequences were far-reaching: she had not only become a naval power, but she had acquired control of Sicily. She decided not to include the island in her Italian confederacy but to govern a considerable part of it directly as the overseas
provincia
of a magistrate whom she sent out annually as governor. She treated in the same way Sardinia and Corsica, which she also took from Carthage.

Carthage, however, built up her influence in Spain, from which Hannibal later launched an attack on Italy (218 B.C.). For fifteen years Rome grappled with him in a life-and-death struggle in Italy until he was forced by Scipio’s landing in N. Africa to return to defend his country, but in vain. Carthage was beaten for a second time, and though Rome sought no territory in Africa she found that, having ejected the Carthaginians from Spain, she had the peninsula left on her hands. This she organized into two new provinces in the south and east, but for the next sixty years she had to spend much time and energy in crushing the wilder independent tribes of the interior: the process was not essentially completed until the Celtiberian capital of Numantia was destroyed in 133 B.C., nor was the yet wilder north-west corner finally pacified until the time of Augustus.

Thus by 200 B.C. Rome had become the unchallenged mistress of the western Mediterranean. She next faced the Hellenistic East, where she intervened in response to appeals from Greek cities who were the victims of aggression by Antiochus of Syria and Philip of Macedon, the latter having in fact sided with Hannibal against Rome during the Second Punic War. After defeating Philip (Second Macedonian War, 200–196), Rome at first proclaimed a policy of ‘freedom for the Greeks’ and withdrew her armies from Greece, but she was soon drawn back in order to eject Antiochus who had entered Greece. After defeating him and pushing him back into his own kingdom, Rome again allowed the Greeks to manage their own internal
affairs, even after Philip’s son Perseus had involved them in another war in Greece (171–167). But Rome gradually and inevitably was becoming the dominant influence throughout the Hellenistic world and when the Greeks failed to live at peace with one another and a pretender attempted to seize the Macedonian throne, her patience at length gave way. She established peace by armed intervention, and then decided after more than fifty years of restraint that peace could only be maintained in the Balkans if she herself governed the area directly; she therefore created a new province, Macedonia, and sacked Cornith as an example to the rest of Greece (146).

In this same year Rome also destroyed Carthage after a three-years’ siege. For half a century after the Hannibalic War Rome and Carthage had lived at peace. Roman interests in N. Africa had been watched by Masinissa, king of Numidia, which lay to the west of Carthaginian territory. He had consolidated and civilized his kingdom, but at length by his eastwards aggressions he had provoked Carthage to war. Rome intervened and decided this time to destroy her old rival completely. Carthaginian intransigence and courage merely postponed her fate for three years. Finally the city was razed to the ground and her territory was turned into a new Roman province named Africa (roughly equivalent to modern Tunisia).

Between 241 and 200 Rome had thus gained four provinces and then after a lull of over fifty years she had acquired two more: and all of them, except Macedonia, had come to her as a result of her prolonged struggles with Carthage. Now throughout the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world there was no state that could hope successfully to challenge the dominant power of Rome, who owed not a little to the central position of Italy in the Mediterranean: East and West had been beaten, and the future lay with Rome. She had in fact introduced a political unity into world history such as Alexander the Great and others had dreamed about. This was Rome’s great achievement. An acute contemporary Greek statesman, Polybius, realizing this challenging fact, wrote a Universal History covering the years 220–145 B.C. because he could not believe that anyone could be so dull as not to want to know how ‘the Romans in less than fifty-three years succeeded in subjugating nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government – an achievement unexampled in history’.
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This spectacular spread of Roman influence naturally created many new problems with which the government must grapple if it was to remain in control of events. But before these problems are considered, a question arises: who was the government? The answer may in theory have been Senatus Populusque Romanus (and each of these two partners must be examined
separately), but in practice the Senate was the effective governing body throughout the second century, until in 133 B.C. Tiberius Gracchus challenged it in the name of the People.

The Senate had acquired this leading position not by constitutional enactment but simply through its own initiative: custom, not law, enabled it to govern. It comprised some three hundred men, drawn mainly from the landed aristocracy; they remained senators for life and held the chief magistracies. It thus contained the men who possessed the greatest administrative experience and political wisdom. Its steady direction of policy during the dark days of the Hannibalic War had given it great prestige, while the growing complication of foreign policy, when the Romans had to master countless details about the domestic affairs of numbers of Greek cities and states, made the Roman People willing to acquiesce in the Senate taking a lead in foreign affairs and also in financial matters. This the People may have been the more ready to do since it was they who elected the magistrates from whom the Senate was normally recruited.

Naturally not all senators had equal influence and the business of the Senate was in fact very largely in the hands of the
nobiles
. These were an inner circle of senators, drawn from a very limited number of families; only a man who could boast a consul among his ancestors could claim to be a noble, and the consulship was the closely guarded prerogative of comparatively few families. During the hundred years preceding the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, practically half the consulships went to only ten
gentes
, while 159 of the 200 were gained by twenty-six
gentes
. Few men outside this charmed circle managed to force their way in: when such a one did win a consulship, he was known as a
novus homo
and ennobled his family for ever. A slightly greater number of ‘outsiders’ might gain a lower magistracy and access to the Senate, but they would not be able to exercise much influence there, because the business of the House was arranged in such a way as to give greater control to senior members who had held the higher (curule) magistracies. Thus the effective management of the State rested in the hands of some twenty or less families: they supplied the men who commanded the armies, governed the provinces, and by guiding senatorial policy shaped the destiny of Rome and the world.

Real power does not always reside where it officially appears to belong. If the Senate exercised its control through customary rather than official recognition, the way in which the nobles maintained their influence was even less ‘constitutional’. One of the most vital, but less advertised, aspects of Roman life was patronage: most of the nobles had a considerable number of ‘clients’ whose interests, personal, economic, social, legal or political, they protected and advanced. Political relationships were fundamentally of a personal character, and it was largely on this basis that the nobles built up their own
political careers. Through patronage they were generally able to control the elections; this in turn gave them control of the Senate, where the influence of the higher magistrates was out of all proportion to their numbers. They also controlled the State religion through the priesthoods which were held by themselves and not by a special class of professional clergy: since most official acts had to be accompanied by some religious observances (e.g. the taking of auspices), the nobles gained much political control through their membership of the priestly colleges of Augurs and Pontiffs.
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Not all the nobles would think alike on every matter, and each family would naturally wish to advance its own members. Thus the nobility tended to split up into groups, based on families or
gentes
. These often formed political alliances (
amicitiae
), sometimes strengthened by inter-marriage, while some of the more powerful
gentes
would tend to act as patrons of less influential families. These groups did not develop into political parties in any modern sense of the term, but the first half of the second century had witnessed some fierce electoral tussles between rival coteries.
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Such struggles may have become slightly less tense by 133, when another division within the nobility soon becomes observable: that into Optimates and Populares.
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These words have often been misunderstood and difficulties have arisen from thinking of the Optimates as a Senatorial Party, and of the Populares as a Popular, Democratic or Reform Party. But in fact both groups, designated by these political catchwords, were members of the same class: one group, the Optimates, gained control of the Senate and by blocking the wishes of the others forced the latter to seek tribunician support for their measures in the Tribal Assembly: these were called the Populares, the demagogues, by their opponents. The real difference lay, not in class nor even in the programmes that they proclaimed, but in the methods that they followed. Many of the Populares sought a personal predominance, while in contrast the Optimates tried to uphold the oligarchy that they controlled. But if the Populares as a group frequently shared a common background and used similar tactics, they often varied in motive. Many wooed the Populus as a means rather than as an end, their objective being to break the dominant oligarchy, and by using various slogans they urged the People to assert its freedom against the
potentia, dominatio, superbia
or
libido
of the Few. Others, as the Gracchi, were genuine reformers who sought popular support because they had at heart the well-being of the people rather than their own personal position. But whether selfish adventures or altruistic reformers, the Populares in their struggles against the Optimate faction dominated the political scene in Rome for many decades to come.