The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire (15 page)

Scholars are unsure of the historicity of this tale. Perhaps it originated in a trial for perjury, for a hand placed in a fire was the established penalty for breaking an oath or a pledge. Entry into an enemy camp in disguise recalls a Greek legend about
an Athenian king who dressed as a peasant in order to reach the camp of an invading army. Part or all of the incident may well be a fabrication. However, its melodramatic quality does not disqualify its moral from being taken seriously.

That said, the idea that Mucius’s valor was enough to persuade Porsenna to give up the war is inherently improbable. In fact, a few clues suggest a completely different sequence of events. In a passing reference, a great Roman historian, probably using old Etruscan sources, reveals that the king did not abandon his siege but actually captured Rome. Reporting the destruction by fire of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol during a civil war six hundred years later, he notes that even “
Porsenna, when the city gave itself up to him,” did not harm the building. Also, Pliny the Elder, who has something to say about everything, informs us: “
In a treaty granted by Porsenna to the Roman People after the expulsion of the Kings, we find it specifically stated that iron shall be used only for agriculture.” This was a humiliating condition, for it meant that the Romans had to disarm. Another report claims that the Romans gave Porsenna a throne of ivory, a scepter, a crown of gold, and a triumphal robe—in sum, the insignia of kingship. An act of homage, if ever there was one. This is all we are told, but it is a reasonable deduction that, far from seeking to restore Superbus, Porsenna was the agent of his expulsion.

It was Rome’s great good fortune that soon afterward the king of Clusium, continuing his aggression against neighbors, suffered a decisive (and historical) defeat near the Latin town of Aricia at the hands of the Latin League, a federation of Latin city-states, with help from the powerful Greek foundation of Cumae, then under the eccentric but highly effective rule of an effeminate despot who first
made his name as a male prostitute, Aristodemus the Queen. Porsenna was killed in the battle, and any threat he posed vanished with him.

Two echoes of these events can be detected in the city. Once the fighting was over, the Romans tended the Etruscan wounded and, in a rare gesture of altruism, brought them back to Rome, where they settled. They were given permission to build houses along a street that led from the Forum around the Palatine to the Circus Maximus; according to the common belief, it was
named after them,
vicus Tuscus
, or Etruscan Street. Second,
an old custom at public sales of captured booty survived into the first century
B.C.
; the auctioneer always included in a sale, as a formality, “the goods of king Porsenna.” This must refer to property the captor of Rome left behind in his new base, before he marched out to meet his unexpected doom.

One way or another, though, the Roman Republic now no longer faced any challenge to its constitutional authority.

7

General Strike

I
T WAS THE STRANGEST SPECTACLE SEEN SINCE THE
foundation of Rome. A long stream of families could be observed leaving the city in what looked like a general evacuation. They walked southward and
climbed a sparsely populated hill, the Aventine, which stands across a valley from the Palatine, the site of Romulus’s first settlement. They were, broadly speaking, the poor and the disadvantaged—artisans and farmers, peasants and urban workers. They carried with them a few days’ worth of food. On arrival they set up camp, building a stockade and a trench. There they stayed quietly, like a weaponless army, offering no provocation or violence. They waited, doing nothing.

This was a mass protest, one of the most remarkable and imaginative in world history. It was like a modern general strike, but with an added dimension. The workers were not simply withdrawing their labor; they were withdrawing themselves.

Of course, some people remained—the rich and those members of the lower classes who for one reason or another could not or would not join their fellows, but Rome was half deserted. The Senate was at its wits’ end. What should, or could, be done if one of Rome’s numerous enemies among its neighbors in central Italy seized the moment and launched an attack? Were the rabble planning
violence after a pretense of passivity, and if so how should the Senate respond? Were those who had stayed put secretly mutinous or not, a fifth column? How could civil war be avoided?

As has been noted, all citizens had to buy their own military equipment. Only the wealthy could afford the heavy armor of the legionary soldier and everyone else served as light-armed troops and skirmishers. So, in a set-piece battle with the lower classes, affluent supporters of the status quo were likely to carry the day. But such a victory would be counterproductive. Rome could not survive on the strength of the rich alone. Every state needs its workers.

The ruling élite felt very alone. The decision was taken to send an embassy of older and more tolerant senators to parley with the protesters and persuade them to end their secession, as it was called, and come home. Their spokesman was a former consul, Gaius Menenius Agrippa, a man of moderate views.

He entered the temporary camp on the hill and addressed the crowd. According to ancient sources (as ever, prone to an amusing fiction), he issued no threats and made no concessions. In fact, he appeared to speak off the point, for he launched into a fable:

Once upon a time, the members of the human body did not agree together, as they do now, but each had its own thoughts and words to express itself. All the various parts resented the fact that they should have the worry and trouble and sheer hard work of providing everything for the belly, which remained idly among them, with nothing to do except enjoy the pleasant things they gave it.

The discontented members plotted together that the hand should carry no food to the mouth, that the mouth should accept nothing that was offered it and that the teeth should refuse to chew anything. Because of their anger they tried to subdue the belly by starvation only to find that they all and the entire
body wasted away. From this it was that clear that the belly did indeed have a useful service to perform. Yes, it receives food, but, by the same token, it nourishes the other members and gives back to every part of the body, through its veins, the blood it has made by the process of digestion. On this blood we live and thrive.

Menenius Agrippa compared this intestine revolt of the body to the current political crisis and the People’s rage against the state of things, and persuaded his hearers to change their minds. Negotiations opened to find a settlement that the secessionists would accept.

WHAT, THEN, WAS
their complaint? These were no revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the constitution. In its first years of freedom, the Republic went through an economic crisis. What caused the slump is uncertain, but a series of military reverses may have had something to do with it. (See the following chapter.) There seem also to have been food shortages. Another long-standing problem was land hunger. Freehold properties for peasants were very small, although they had access to publicly owned land,
ager publicus
, for grazing or cultivation; however, the rich and powerful tended to control public land, ruthlessly crowding out the smallholder. Archaeologists tell us that fewer public buildings were put up at this time:
a Temple of Mercury, the god of business, was a telling exception, but he was to be placated at a time of commercial failure.

But perhaps the itchiest cause of discontent was identified by Cicero. “
The People, freed from the domination of kings, claimed a somewhat greater measure of rights,” he noted, adding sourly, “Such a claim may have been unreasonable, but the essential nature of the Republic often defeats reason.”

The poor were burdened with debt and arbitrary treatment by
those in authority; they sought redress. Many had reached a point where the only thing they owned with which to repay their debts was themselves—their labor, their bodies. In that case, they were able to enter into a system of debt bondage, known as
nexum
, literally an interlacing or binding together. In the presence of five witnesses, a lender weighed out the money or copper to be lent. The debtor could now settle what he owed. In return he handed himself over—his person and his services (although he retained his civic rights). The lender recited a formula: “For such and such a sum of money you are now
nexus
, my bondsman.” He then chained the debtor, to dramatize his side of the bargain.

This brutal arrangement did not in itself attract disapproval, for it did provide a solution, however rough-and-ready, to extreme indebtedness. What really aroused anger was the oppressive or unfair treatment of a bonded slave. The creditor-owner even had the right to put him to death, at least in theory. Livy tells
the story of a victim, an old man, who suddenly appeared one day in the Forum. Pale and emaciated, he wore soiled and threadbare clothes. His hair and beard were unkempt. Altogether, he was a pitiable sight. A crowd gathered, and learned that he had once been a soldier who commanded a company and served his country with distinction. How had he come to this pass? He replied:

While I was on service during the Sabine war, my crops were ruined by enemy raids, and my cottage was burnt. Everything I had was taken, including my cattle. Then, when I was least able to do so, I was expected to pay taxes, and the result was I fell into debt. Interest on the borrowed money increased my burden; I lost the land which my father and grandfather had owned before me, and then my other possessions. Ruin spread like an infection through all I had. Even my body wasn’t exempt, for I was finally seized by my creditor and reduced to slavery—no, worse, I was hauled away to prison and the torture chamber.

Uproar followed, and any senator who happened to be in the Forum quickly made himself scarce. Other bonded men identified themselves. When the mob surrounded the Senate House and demanded that the consuls convene the Senate, it began to look as if a popular insurrection was under way. The consuls complied, but it proved difficult to persuade enough nervous senators to turn up and make a quorum.

When the meeting eventually started, news arrived that a Volscian army was marching on the city. There was no alternative but to meet the mob’s demands. One of the consuls issued an edict to the effect that it would be illegal to fetter or imprison a Roman citizen and so prevent him from enlisting for service and, second, to seize or sell the property of any soldier on active duty. This calmed opinion and the protesters willingly joined a military force that marched out of Rome to confront and defeat the invaders.

This did not end the matter, thanks to a contemptuous and choleric consul,
Appius Claudius, founder of an immigrant Sabine family that won a name over the centuries for high-handedness. He insisted on pursuing debtors with the utmost rigor of the law, and gave no consideration to the riots that resulted. Leaders of the People began meeting secretly at night to plan their response.

This was the background of the general strike and the withdrawal to the Aventine, which took place in 494, a little more than ten years after the expulsion of Superbus. Those involved saw themselves as
members of a gathering called the
plebs
. In later centuries, the word came to include everyone who was not a patrician or a nobleman—the common people as a whole. But, at this early stage, the evidence suggests that it signified a political or campaigning movement, recruited from the masses but not identical with them. It was not unlike a trade union, but representing all crafts and workplaces.

And, like a trade union, the plebs wasn’t interested in the armed overthrow of the state or in a constitutional upheaval. It did not set
itself in opposition to the dominant patrician class. It existed simply to protect and advance the interests of its members, the plebeians. This it did with extraordinary success. The consuls and the Senate had lost their nerve, at least for the time being.

The leadership understood the need to organize. A special assembly was created, the
concilium plebis
, or Plebeian Council, which voted on tribal lines. At this time, the Roman population was (probably) divided into twenty-one local tribes, to which citizens belonged by virtue of residence. The plebeians decided on resolutions by tribe, with each tribe exercising one vote (a fairer system than voting by centuries in the
comitia centuriata
). The council’s enactments
—plebiscita
, whence our
plebiscite
—were not binding on the Republic itself but were difficult for the consuls and the Senate to ignore. As time passed, the plebs became
a state within a state.

The negotiations with Menenius Agrippa and the other senatorial envoys saw a further strengthening of the influence of the plebs. It was agreed that the
concilium plebis
could elect extra-constitutional officials (probably two in the first instance),
tribuni plebis
, or tribunes of the plebeians. (By the middle of the fifth century, their number had risen to, and remained at, ten.) The
first tribunes to take office were Lucius Sicinius Vellutus, the leader of the encampment on the Aventine, and Lucius Junius Brutus, a vain and pretentious man who so admired the Republic’s first consul that he added the cognomen Brutus so that he could share the same name.