Last time, we started our retrospective on the Gracchi looking at the elder brother Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and his term as tribune of the plebs in 133 BCE; this week, we’ll wrap up this look by discussing Tiberius’ younger brother Gaius Sempronius Gracchus and his terms as tribune of the plebs in 123 and 122 and then – spoilers – his death in 121.
As noted last time, this series is intended to offset the substantially rosy treatment the Gracchi often get in introductory courses, which for the point of brevity are often forced to omit a lot of the political details of their careers and present them far too simply as proto-progressive reformers. As a result, it is quite intentionally framed as an indictment of both figures, intended to explain why, despite their often postive modern portrayal, they were viewed more negatively at the time, particularly but not exclusively by the Roman elite.
In fact, as we noted last time, the Romans had plenty of reason to believe that Tiberius Gracchus’ reforms were a substantial danger to the political order in Rome. By attempting to hold the tribunate multiple times (a thing that was against custom and at least some of Tiberius Gracchus’ colleagues thought was illegal) and to wield the powers of the office in ways contrary to the mos maiorum (if not the law), that Tiberius threatened to become a sort of tyrant, wielding disproportionate power within Rome’s political system and subverting its nature as a republic into something rather more like a monarchy. It’s not at all clear from our evidence if that belief was correct – our sources cannot read Tiberius’ mind any better than we can – but my point was that it was reasonable to imagine Tiberius Gracchus’ actions aimed to upset the Roman political system and potentially establish a tyranny and he did little to diminish the perception. Finally, we noted that for all of this, Tiberius Gracchus appears to have misdiagnosed the very problem he was trying to solve, with the result that although he could not have known it, all of this political dislocation was unlikely to accomplish very much.
Except, of course, getting Tiberius Gracchus killed, which it did.
Now because of the way these brothers tend to get covered in survey courses – treated together and often at extreme brevity because in a big survey, who has the time? – there’s a tendency for Gaius Gracchus to just end up summarized as ‘second verse, same as the first:’ a good-for-the-poor reform program stymied by the conservative, hidebound and greedy Roman elite, culminating in Gaius’ death in 121. Tiberius Gracchus, as we noted last time, gets a remarkably favorable treatment from our two main sources, Appian and Plutarch, but these significant diverge with Gaius Gracchus. Plutarch remains broadly favorable to the point of appearing to substantially fudge some of the details of Gaius’ career to try to paper over the uncomfortable suggestion that Gaius was, in fact, merely an ambitious man carried away by his ambitions. Appian, by contrast, is far more willing to allow for a negative portrayal of Gaius, even though he clearly thinks Gaius’ ultimate goal of citizenship reform was wise. By contrast, our other sources – often summarized or fragmentary – are almost uniformly negative (e.g. Diod. Sic. 34.25; Livy Per. 60.7, 61.4; Vell. Pat. 2.6.2; Dio 25.85) and harshly so, suggesting that Gaius Gracchus’ perception, at least among Rome’s literate elite, was substantially darker than that of his brother: the dangerous radical to his brother’s well-intentioned but ill-fated reformer.
But if Appian’s verdict on Tiberius Gracchus was that he was killed “on account of an excellent proposal he pursued with violence” then the fact that even our favorable sources note that compared to Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius was prone to vehemence and anger (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 2.2-5) should warn us against minimizing Gaius’ own agency in producing the confrontation that is going to claim his life as well. The irony is that while unlike Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius seems to have correctly identified a problem that needed fixing, Gaius’ more vehement, uncompromising and frankly reckless approach often reads much worse than his brother’s more conciliatory style and Gaius’ role in producing the violent confrontation at the end of his life is far clearer, more intention and more direct.
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By the late second century, Campania was a mix of fully Roman territory (much of it seized from Campanian communities which joined Hannibal during the Second Punic War) and allied territory.
The Aftermath of 133
But before we can get to Gaius Gracchus we need to understand how the events of Tiberius Gracchus’ tribunate and its aftermath are going to set up Gaius Gracchus’ own turn in the spotlight a decade later. Gaius was, after all, ten years his brother’s junior and so there was a significant lag time between their two careers.
First off, it is striking that the response of the Senate after Tiberius Gracchus’ death was mixed. On the one hand, Tiberius Gracchus’ body was flung into the Tiber River as would have been done with infamous criminals (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 20.2; App. BCiv. 1.16) a shocking statement of the Senate’s hatred of the man at this point, though not an unreasonable thing to do if you did, in fact, think that Tiberius had been slain as part of a failed coup to make him king. Some of Tiberius Gracchus’ associates were also prosecuted and others, Plutarch tells us, were banished without trial (which may mean they fled before a trial could take place, a thing you could do in the Roman legal system). Though while Plutarch notes two associates of Tiberius convicted and executed (a Gaius Villius and Diophanes the Rhetorician) but equally Gaius Blossius, despite appearing quite unrepentant was apparently acquitted (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 20.4), though Plutarch notes this fellow then went to back an anti-Roman army in the East (Aristonicus’ rising in Asia) so perhaps they should have convicted him.
But what clearly doesn’t happen is an effort to pull out Tiberius Gracchus’ network by the root. Gaius Gracchus isn’t prosecuted and indeed remains one of the three commissioners on Tiberius Gracchus’ land commission. Indeed, as we’ll see, Gaius’ political career appears in no way hindered by Tiberius’ fall. Even more notably Tiberius Gracchus’ land commission is permitted to move forward. Meanwhile, P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio, the architect of the mob that killed Tiberius Gracchus is unceremoniously packed off as part of an embassy to Pergamon in a move that would have probably marked the end of his political career even if he didn’t die in 132 (but he does).
But of course the biggest thing here is that the land commission moves forward and equally it seems to have made something of a mess of things (despite being run by Gaius Gracchus and having political allies like Fulvius Flaccus on it). Appian – who you will recall clearly favors the measure and even fudges his description of it to make it sound more reasonable and traditional than it really was – is clear that the implementation makes a mess of things (App. BCiv. 1.18). It was often unclear who owned a given plot of land which lead to repeated lawsuits and further problems and it appears that the commissioners themselves almost immediately lost the reputation of being impartial adjudicators of these problems, leading to Scipio Aemilianus to suggest shifting the cases to the jurisdiction of the consul, who promptly went on campaign in Illyria to avoid the political problems that would come from actually deciding any of these cases (App. BCiv. 1.19) leading to further gridlock. Further complicating matters, the land had never evidently been fully surveyed, leading to problems assigning and redistributing land, with farmers assigned to unproductive land (or as Appian has it, swamps and ponds!).
More broadly, of course, for reasons we’ve already discussed, there was never going to be a huge amount of land to distribute in any case: the problem wasn’t a vanishing small farmer class, but a growing small farmer class leading to a degree of real land scarcity. Consequently, a land commission of the sort set up by the Lex Sempronia Agraria could only accomplish gains on the margins, even if it was well run which by Appian’s account, it wasn’t.
However the land commission did accomplish one thing: it shortchanged the allies (the socii). As Appian notes (BCiv. 1.19) while the socii weren’t valid recipients of ager publicus under the Lex Sempronia Agraria, they could have their land taken under it if they held more than the allotted amount of ager publicus. Which means that the communities of the socii experienced all of the downsides of the law, but none of the upsides. And while you may be thinking this would only bother the very rich socii, remember that a lot of farmers in the countryside likely got by in part through sharecropping or tenancy arrangements, so even a socius small farmer might find his work disrupted when the Big Man lost a chunk of his land – and yet that socius was not eligible to get any land himself. This was a substantial change in the ‘bargain’ of the Roman alliance system: before the socii had been, so far as we can tell, fully eligible for settlement in new colonial foundations.
That fits into a larger pattern where the socii‘s ‘bargain’ gets progressively worse as compared to citizens over the late second century. When Rome was expanding in Italy, the socii had gotten an equal share of loot and at least some access to the land taken (including ager publicus!) but by the 130s and 120s, Rome’s wars aren’t bringing in loot, they’re bringing in taxes. Recall, for instance, that Tiberius Gracchus was able to fund his land commission by annexing Pergamum (into the province of Asia) because the tax windfall could fund his effort. But whereas the loot of fresh conquests was shared out equally, the tax revenue of the provinces flowed to Rome alone. That problem had likely been building since 168, where the proceeds of the destruction of Antigonid Macedon had been sufficient to end the standard Roman land tax, tributum, permanently – but that may not have suspended the socii‘s own obligations in order to pay their own soldiers (after all, the socii got part of that big single loot infusion, but no residual tax revenue). Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform, creating a benefit for only Roman citizens, paid out out ager publicus which used to be used in common by Rome and the socii and out of tax revenue made this problem worse.
As a result by the 120s, the socii are clearly beginning to push for citizenship. This is actually a fairly big change: Roman citizenship to this point was not always even something the socii wanted – after all, they retained a lot more autonomy internally as allies being subject to their own laws, whereas as Roman citizens, they’d be subject to Roman law. Marcus Fulvius Flaccus (cos. 125) makes the first effort to get a citizenship bill passed, but is stymied by the Senate; Roman citizenship, as we’ve discussed, was radically expansionary compared to other ancient models of citizenship, but the Romans (both elite and the common folk) were evidently pretty skeptical about effectively tripling the size of the citizen body (which would, after all, massively dilute their votes and also substantially raise the competition for office in Rome as socii elites could begin running for high Roman offices).
So this is the context for the career of Gaius Gracchus: the land commission has happened, but didn’t accomplish much to solve the potentially fictive issue it was supposed to solve. Meanwhile, what it has done is exacerbate a new and very real problem in the Roman relationship with the socii which the Senate is loath to address in the way it effectively has to eventually be addressed, by extending the citizenship.
Plutarch and the Early Career of Gaius Gracchus
Gaius Gracchus spend the late 130s and early 120s in the army; he was with Scipio Aemilianus during the Numantine War in 134 and 133, possibly as a military tribune but equally he could have been in the cohors amicorum (‘the cohort of friends’), the gaggle of friends, retainers and associates a Roman general would bring with him on campaign to help him manage the army. He finishes his ten years of military service (required to run for high office; Polyb. 6.19.3) and runs for the quaestorship in 127 (for the year 126) and wins it – little surprise there as there were many quaestors and election for a man of such a distinguished family much has been effectively assured. Still a strong indication that there’s no real effort by the senatorial elite to shut down his career in revenge for Tiberius Gracchus or anything of the sort.
Quaestors, as you may recall, were assigned by lot, with two quaestores in Rome to manage the central treasury and the remaining six each paired off with a praetor or a consul being sent abroad to manage their supplies and finances. Gaius Gracchus was assigned to one of the consuls – a good turn, that, as it offered better chances than being paired with a praetor (and thus more evidence, I’d argue, that no one was trying to sabotage Gaius at this point) – Lucius Aurelius Orestes, who was assigned a command to suppress a rebellion in Sardinia. For 125, Orestes is ‘prorogued’ (his command is extended) and so, as would have likely been typical, Gaius Gracchus’ role as quaestor is also prorogued making him a pro-quaestor (pro quaestore, [acting] ‘for the quaestor,’ since a promagistrate’s power technically derived from their acting in place of the sitting magistrates for the year), still assisting Orestes. For 124, Orestes still isn’t quite done on Sardinia and so is extended yet again; Orestes wants to finish the job and get his triumph (which he celebrates in 122). So Gaius Gracchus is extended again, as would be typical (and not necessarily bad, since Orestes is headed for a triumph, the glory of which would have at least reflected on of Gaius).
And here we get to the first ‘fudge,’ I think, in Plutarch. Plutarch opens his life of Gaius Gracchus with a report from Cicero (Cic. Div. 1.26.56; note also Val. Max. 1.7.6) that good ‘ol Gaius Gracchus was preparing to decline all public offices and live the quiet life at home when the shade of his brother appeared and commanded him to go into public life. For one, I feel the need to note that Plutarch simply egregiously and almost certainly intentionally misquotes Cicero; Cicero simply reports that Gaius said his brother came to him in a dream saying ‘you must perish the same death that I did.’ whereas Plutarch (C. Gracch. 1.6) embroiders by expanding this line to, “one life is fated for us both and one death in public office on behalf of the people.” It’s an amusing little snare, because anyone who knows anything about Cicero’s political views will guess that he does not regard the Gracchi as acting “on behalf of the people,” nor would he necessarily think that was a good thing as compared to acting on behalf of the res publica, the commonwealth. But in this case, we have the text of Cicero (and Plutarch is explicit that this is his reference) and indeed, he says no such thing, so we know that Plutarch here is embroidering a positive spin about championing the interests of the people.
But more broadly, the point of this is to deflect from the implication of what Gaius Gracchus is about to do. Because the actual Gaius Gracchus was clearly ambitious and eager to get his career moving fast: he wants to stand for election as a tribune for 123. But one must stand for election in person and Gaius is in Sardinia assisting Orestes as his pro-quaestor; so Gaius returns early – effectively abandoning Orestes and also his office – to stand for the election. It was a move that, as Plutarch admits, elicited not a little bit of censure in Rome (Plut. C. Gracch. 2.3) though Gaius Gracchus’ remarkable eloquence got him out of the political jam that resulted (including a reprimand from the censors, who were completing the census that year).
The problem Plutarch has, of course, is that Gaius Gracchus’ over-swift return to stand for election might imply a level of unseemly ambition and willingness to put his own career over the good of the state; that wouldn’t do for Plutarch’s literary aim, which demands that Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ careers parallel those of Agis IV and Cleomenes III of Sparta: well-meaning reformers who out of deep virtue and principle confronted the wealthy and complacent and were destroyed for it. Agis and Tiberius are paired because they’re the more conciliatory and caution ones, while Cleomenes and Gaius are paired as the more aggressive ones. But Plutarch’s comparison falls apart if Gaius Gracchus is, in fact, merely an ambitious politician looking to rise rapidly in Rome’s political order, because that can hardly be compared to Cleomenes III, a placed at the top of his society by birth (he’s a hereditary king, after all). So a suitable anecdote (the dream) is found and then carefully ‘reframed’ to soften the impression that Gaius Gracchus might be a different sort of man than the virtuous if reckless and ill-fated reformer that Plutarch needs to sit oppose to his portrait of Cleomenes III.
Plutarch: never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Likewise, Plutarch presents Gaius Gracchus’ claim to have effectively been ‘stuck’ doing military service for an overlong time uncritically (Plut. C. Gracch. 2.5), but a bit of math suggests that Gaius’ career was moving plenty quickly. Gaius was born probably in 154, so he holds the quaestorship in 126 at the age of 28, two years earlier than what seems to have been the customary (but at this point not legally binding) age of 30. Spending three years in Sardinia would thus have just left him on basically the same political schedule as anyone whose quaestorship was held in suo anno (‘in their own year,’ a phrase meaning to hold an office at the earliest customary age to do so) at age 30. Slower than his brother, who held the quaestorship as the ripe age of 25 (the youngest person we know to have done so), but hardly slow! The customary age for the next major office, the praetorship, is 39, so Gaius Gracchus also hardly needs to rush to the intermediate offices of the tribunate or the aediles on that account. As we’re going to see, it is not at all clear Gaius Gracchus ever intended to cycle out of public office, which is itself a real problem as the Roman political system is predicated on the assumption that elected magistrates complete their year in office and then go back to being private citizens (who are also in the Senate).
In any case, Gaius Gracchus stands for and wins the tribunate for 123 and he comes in storming.
The Tribunates of Gaius Gracchus
And this is the point where things get complicated and hard for many students to keep a handle on, because whereas Tiberius Gracchus had one, relatively easy to explain reform, Gaius Gracchus has a slew of laws he wants to pass. The challenge in keeping track is that Gaius Gracchus is reported to have proposed or passed (it’s not always clear what laws he actually got through) a whole mess of changes, the list of which differs in many cases from one source to the next. Trying to figure out what was attempted in what year of his office (he’s tribune in 123 and in 122 and runs but is not elected for 121) is equally difficult.
The traditional way to understand these many, many laws is to frame them as an effort to build a political coalition with the aim of getting enough people – we might honestly stay ‘interest groups,’ given how the laws are set up – behind Gaius Gracchus to enable him to surge over the logjam and pass a citizenship bill. That framing itself owes a lot to how Appian presents Gaius’ proposals (just as he leads into Tiberius’ life by detailing the supposed land and manpower crisis, he leads into Gaius detailing the citizenship crisis); the sources certainly agree that the purpose of Gaius Gracchus’ laws was to break the power of the Senate; in some cases they suggest this was to enable a democracy (of the Greek sort), in others a monarchy, in others just out of spite (Plut. C. Gracch. 5.1; Diodorus 34-5.25; Livy Per. 60.7; Vell. Pat. 2.6.2; Dio 25.85; App. BCiv. 1.21).
The one thing Appian clearly notes was done in Gracchus’ first term was a law providing for the distribution of grain in the city of Rome, the annona which we’ve discussed before. Appian (BCiv 1.21) presents this as a distribution of free grain, but this is clearly an anachronism and our other sources (e.g. Plut. C. Gracch 5.2) correctly note that his law instead provided for the sale of grain at a fixed, below-market price in the city and Livy evidently recorded the precise figure which, though the Livy for this period is lost, survives in its summary, the Periochae: six and one-third asses (presumably per modius). It’s an oddly not-very-round-at-all figure but it comes to just a touch more than 2.5HS per modius, which would be a cheap but not absurdly cheap price. This was, as we’ve noted, a substantial systematization of something – the stabilization of grain prices – which the curule aediles had done earlier in the Republic (Livy 2.9.6, 2.34.2-7, 4.13-16, 10.11.9), but systematized on terms that were quite generous, funded through Rome’s tax revenue. Gaius also seems have advanced in his first year a second land bill like the earlier Lex Sempronia Agraria, trying to restart the distribution of ager publicus, though he will swiftly move to a new strategy.
Beyond these proposals, however, things get sticky. He seems to have at least proposed to have the state provide soldiers’ clothing at state expense (Plut. C. Gracch. 5.1, note also Diod. Sic. 34-5.25), though it’s not clear if this passed. If it did, it didn’t stick, as in the imperial period we continue to see deductions in Roman soldiers’ pay for replacement clothing. He also reportedly tried to expand the Senate by introducing three hundred equites (rich men who had not embarked on careers in public office; Plut. C. Gracch. 5.2-3) into its number (or 600 according to Livy Per. 60) but this seems not to have passed or been implemented.
He did, however, succeed at changing the composition of the juries for the quaestio de repetundis, the Roman court which judges accusations of corruption against Roman provincial governors, shifting the juries to consist of members of the equites rather than senators. That may seem like a ‘good government’ proposal – there’s obviously a problem with having senators judge each other’s corruption – but the problem is that the equites represented a lot of the business interests in the provinces, particularly the companies of tax farmers who were the people who would be bribing governors to do corrupt things, namely allowing the tax farmers themselves (the publicani or public contractors) to overtax the locals to reap higher profits. Giving the publicani that position is a huge favor to them but might not have really improved Roman provincial governance – indeed, Appian claims it had the opposite effect (App. BCiv. 1.22). In the same direction, Gaius Gracchus passed a law for the taxes from the new province of Asia (formerly Pergamum) to be farmed through public contracts leased by the censors (rather than, presumably, collected through the preexisting bureaucracy of the old kingdom). Pergamum/Asia was a remarkably wealthy region, so this created a massive new set of business opportunities for the equites involved in the leasing of public contracts, but once again was hardly a strike for good government.
Gaius also passed laws for the construction of roads and granaries, in part perhaps to facilitate the grain needed for his new distributions, but the sources (e.g. App. BCiv. 23) equally suggest this was in part to put both wealthy public contractors and regular workers under obligation to him. And this is a point that you need to keep in mind in Gaius Gracchus’ flurry of legislation, that the structure of Roman patronage (patrocinium or clientela) meant that each of these proposals in theory established something like a patronage bond between Gaius and the recipients, such that he might, in theory, be able to call on them to support him out of that obligation.
The other major activity Gaius gets up to is proposing and passing laws to found two new colonies in Italy. Another tribune proposes a jumbo-sized colony on the ruins of Carthage (destroyed in 146, you will recall; this is the first Roman colony outside of Italy), which – at least according to Appian – Gaius will enlarge even further beyond what the law originally proposed (App. BCiv. 1.24)
So we can stop for a moment and take stock of these proposals and their targeting, though here it is hard not to be loaded in our language: we could say these proposals were designed to help certain groups or equally that they were designed to curry favor with those groups; both angles may be correct. For the very poor, there was a renewed land commission, the distribution of cheap grain and new colonies (the colonists of which would obviously be drawn from the landless, who would get land allotments in the new settlements). For the assidui, the broad ‘middle’ of Roman society who served in the army, they got a reduction in the cost of service (with free clothing) and likely also benefited from the grain distributions on the margin. For the wealthy urban equites, they got to control the courts which prosecuted governors who enabled their graft, as well as new opportunities for graft in the East.
And the senatorial elite, of course, got worse than nothing. Their role in the courts was diminished. The role of the curule aediles or the Senate in providing food stabilization at Rome was removed. The Senate’s ability to assign specific provinces to specific magistrates was also removed by requiring the Senate to select the provinces prior to the elections.
And this was all done in a way that undermined the power-sharing structure of the republic. One of the core functions of the republic was its rotation of power and authority between elite Roman politicians: in a society where one’s actions as a magistrate could create patronage bonds, it was important to make sure everyone was rotating in and out of those roles, so that credit and influence was diffused among a larger range of leaders, rather than congealing around just a handful of men or – worse yet – just one man.
But here note that it is Gaius that arranges the grain distributions and Gaius that builds the roads and the granaries and Gaius that founds the new colonies and Gaius that heads up the renewed land commission and Gaius that rearranges the juries. If the measured had passed, it would have been Gaius who minted new members for the Senate, Gaius who paid for soldier’s clothing. The only task in all of this new legislation that Gaius lets fall to anyone else is the leasing of the taxes for the province of Asia, presumably because the five-year structure of tax farming contracts was too inextricably linked to the censors to break. Indeed, Plutarch notes the almost frenetic action as Gaius Gracchus took basically all of these tasks in hand personally (Plut. C. Gracch. 6-7) which you can certainly present, as Plutarch does, as an example of Gaius’ virtue, industry and energy, but equally I think we can understand that approach as fundamentally destabilizing to the power-sharing system of the republic.
Things Fall Apart
Clearly there was going to be a reaction to all of this. But the nature of the reaction to Gaius Gracchus is one of those cases where the ‘second verse, same as the first’ simplification of these two men can be deeply deceptive, because Gaius’ behavior was much more provocative and the Senate’s reaction – at least initially – much more restrained.
Of the flurry of legislation above, probably only the renewed agrarian bill and the grain distribution happens in Gaius’ first tribunate in 123. Gaius opts to stand for the tribunate in 122, taking advantage of a bit of a loophole whereby if there weren’t enough candidates to fill every spot, citizens could ‘write in’ for the extra positions (thus avoiding the can-he-actually-run question that had tripped up Tiberius). This was, of course, an incendiary move, but the Senate does not leap to violence and instead lets it happen: Gaius wins another year as tribune and he is even popular enough to pull his preferred candidate for the consulship, Gaius Fannius, through alongside him along with another ally as one of the other tribunes (Marcus Fulvius Flaccus), giving him valuable allies as his flurry of legislation continued (Plut. C. Gracch. 8). Only ten years had passed since the death of Tiberius Gracchus, so many of the senators in 122 would have been senators (albeit far more junior ones) in 133. We’re not told they feared recreated the disaster of the murder of Tiberius Gracchus, but it does seem like not repeating the past is a factor.
It seems to be after this untraditional reelection that the flurry of smaller laws comes from Gaius Gracchus, with the aim being to curry favor with different key constituencies in the run-up to a big push for a law to expand citizenship to the allies.
Now we come to the problem of citizenship expansion. The yearning of the socii for citizenship in the face of the shifting bargain they had with Rome (discussed above) had been recognized as a problem for a few years at this point, but a few factors kept it logjammed and will keep it logjammed until the catastrophe of the Social War (91-87) unjams the issue. On the one hand, while you have at least some Roman politicians who see the danger, it’s clear that both in the Senate but also among the general citizenry, there was a strong constituency that opposed any dilution of their voting power or the privileges of Roman citizenship, which of course at this point including the increasingly large running river of tribute from Rome’s growing empire. At the same time, there was also a political concern: whoever actually did citizenship expansion would be more than doubling the size of the voting body, minting something like 400,000 new voters – new voters who, having received this remarkable favor (beneficium) would be bound by a tie of gratitude and even patronage to the man who made such a favor possible. Politically, even if you recognized that citizenship expansion was necessary, there was a danger to letting any particular influential politician take sole credit for doing it.
And it shouldn’t hard, in that context, to see the danger of letting Gaius Gracchus – who is already running much of the Roman state out of the tribunate – do this thing. We’ll talk about Gaius’ goals in a moment, but I think it has to be conceded that whatever he aimed to do, by the time the fellow was running Rome’s food policy, infrastructure policy, tax policy, jury selection, colonization efforts and finance policy all out of a single office he clearly intended to never give up (he’s going to run again for a third term) there is at least some reason to suspect there is a danger here that Gaius Gracchus aims at a kind of tyranny.
And here I want to stop and clarify how ancient tyranny worked: ancient tyrants did not demolish the apparatus of the state and declare themselves kings. Instead they subverted the state to run its affairs extra-constitutionally: the courts still functioned, the assemblies still met, councils still voted but one man controlled everything through a web of cronies, clients and the threat of force. The Greek world provided dozens of examples of this form of government, so the Romans were quite familiar with the way it functioned. Now Gaius Gracchus hadn’t assembled one of the key ingredients, a band of armed thugs to enforce his will – yet – but he has effectively begun the process of subverting state institutions by amassing extra-constitutional power to himself. He doesn’t need to declare himself a tyrant to be a tyrant; indeed, few tyrants do so declare themselves.
So it isn’t all that surprising that you have a significant body of Roman political elites who want to take the wind out of Gaius Gracchus’ sails before he’s amassed so much power that it becomes impossible.
Instead of violence, Gaius Gracchus’ political opponents decide to beat him at his own game. They pick their own tribune, Marcus Livius Drusus (cos. 112) and have him set out an even more generous version of Gaius Gracchus’ proposals. Where Gaius Gracchus wants to hand out ager publicus but have its holders pay a rent, Livius proposed to do so without even the rent. Gaius Gracchus proposed two new colonies; Livius proposed twelve. And whereas Gaius faced the resistance of the Senate, Livius of course had their support. Crucially, Livius’ proposals left the implementation of his proposals to other Romans, which as Plutarch notes, made him seem more honest and public-spirited than Gaius Gracchus, who insisted that he and he alone implement his proposals and reap all of the credit (Plut. C. Gracch. 10.1). Meanwhile, Livius starts blocking Gaius Gracchus’ less generous proposals.
However, when Gaius Gracchus proposed to extend citizenship to the allies, Livius parried with a much more limited proposal, an extension of the Roman citizen’s symbolic immunity to being beaten or whipped in military service to the allies – Roman citizen-soldiers were instead struck with a flexible vinecord stick for minor infractions or instruction which became the centurion’s badge of office; the symbolic significance here is that whips and rods were a thing with which to beat slaves; this proposal may have passed, but it doesn’t seem like any of Livius’ other generous proposals are actually implemented. I think it is entirely fair to regard Livius’ tribunate as essentially one big political ‘dirty trick,’ albeit one well within the rules of the political system (and one which Gaius might have diffused by simply backing Livius’ proposals, had he been willing to share the credit for basically anything).
Livius’ effort clearly worked, however, and the wind started to come out of Gaius’ sails. To make matters worse, he has quite a bit of bad luck: the new colony at Carthage already proposed needed to be set up and the tribunes drew lots to see who would go and see to it; Gaius drew the short straw and so at some point in 122 has to leave the city for seventy days to superintend the new colony (Appian represents this as an intentional decision of the Senate (App. BCiv 1.23, but Plutarch says it was by lot, C. Gracch. 10.2). Worse yet, the omens about this colony were bad: a storm scattered the new boundary markers and disrupted the sacrifices for the new foundation and there was a report that the markers themselves had been carried off by wolves (Plut. C. Gracch. 11; App. BCiv. 1.24). For the Romans, who believe their own religion, that sort of thing reflects badly on Gaius Gracchus and further dented his popularity.
Gaius Gracchus returns to Rome and our sources here are, to be frank, a bit confusing on the timeline of late 122 and early 121, which is annoying because the timeline really matters. Appian gives the impression that affairs moved very quickly, with Gaius returning to Rome straight into an assembly convened to decide if the colony at Carthage should go ahead (App. BCiv. 1.24-5), while Plutarch notes that the explosion is slower in coming: Gaius has time to return to Rome, stand for the tribunate of 121 and lose (Plut. C. Gracch. 12.4-5), for the consular elections to take place and for the new consuls, including Lucius Opimius to come into office; the Periochae seem to confirm Plutarch’s more expanded timeline (Livy Per. 61.4). That said, we might imagine this to have still proceeded pretty rapidly: the elections (in which Gaius Gracchus claimed fraud) in early winter and Opimius’ motions to repeal some of Gaius’ laws coming quick perhaps in January, which precipitates the explosion.
What is clear is that Gaius Gracchus’ popularity was waning. His citizenship expansion bill is defeated (either before he leaves for Carthage, while he was away or right when he came back) and when he ran for another term as tribune he lost (he claimed fraud, because of course he did, Plut. C. Gracch. 12.4, who avoids rendering a judgement). The new magistrates – notably Opimius – were evidently hostile to him, which I think ought to suggest Gaius may have actually lost and popular opinion really had turned against him.
Gaius responds by rallying his supporters and it is clear that some of them came surreptitiously armed; Plutarch uses συστασιάζω, “to band together seditiously” to describe participation (Plut. C. Gracch. 13.2) and it is worth remembering this is coming from sources that are generally favorable. At the gathering, Quintus Antyllius – for Plutarch, one of Opimius’ men making an insulting gesture, for Appian just a regular plebian who reaches out to give Gaius a comforting gesture that someone misread (Plut. C. Gracch. 13.3-4; App. BCiv 1.25) – is knifed to death by one of Gaius Gracchus’ supporters, reporting with a stylus converted into a concealed weapon, so as to sidestep Roman laws against bringing weapons into the sacred boundary of the city. Both sources agree that Gaius didn’t intend the killing and was distressed by it, though to be fair he did gather a surreptitiously armed mob in the city at a high state of fervor
Gaius Gracchus and Fulvius Flaccus initially try to win over the crowd in the forum, but this is unsuccessful – I mean, their partisans did just murder a man – and they instead head back to their homes with their supporters, the assembly itself having been broken up by rain. The following day, Opimius summons the Senate and the Senate calls both Gaius and Fulvius to attend and give an account of themselves. Instead, Fulvius arms his followers and seizes the Aventine; Appian represents this as Gaius and Fulvius together, Plutarch represents this as Fulvius the hothead leading and Gaius being pulled in his wake. I think here as elsewhere, we need to be wary of Plutarch’s embroidery, which is on fully display in this moment of high moral drama. The rest of our sources agree with Appian that Gaius Gracchus makes the decision here to attempt a coup: Diodorus (34.28a) speaks of deciding to overcome his opponents by force, the Periochae (61.4) gives no mention of Fulvius but says Gaius occupied the Aventine with an armed mob and while they don’t give us new details, the overall judgements of Dio (25.85) and Velleius Paterculus (2.6) are both harsh, treating Gaius as a seditious demagogue rather than a well-meaning but ill-fated reformer.
Plutarch thus portrays Gaius Gracchus in this moment as hesitating and conciliatory, but none of the other sources even remotely follow him on that point and frankly I think Plutarch is not to be trusted here. It is a better story of Gaius Gracchus is assailed by conscience and uncertainty in this moment – that’s surely how you’d write the HBO series – but that doesn’t mean it happened. According to Appian, Gaius and Fulvius Flaccus went up on the Aventine, fortified themselves in the Temple of Diana and only then – rather than coming themselves – sent Fulvius’ son Quintus as an ambassador to negotiate with the Senate, which insisted they lay down their arms and face an inquiry. They refuse.
And at this point, with an armed band having seized a large section of the city (the Aventine Hill), which it had fortified and from which it could menace the rest of the city, Opimius and the Senate now do exactly what you’d expect: they raise what military force they can and storm the hill.
It’s clear the bloodshed was considerable, both during what seems to have been a brief street battle – with real weapons this time. Afterwards, as Opimius offered a reward for both Gaius Gracchus and Fulvius Flaccus’ heads, but also captured and later executed many of their supporters. Gaius is able to flee and fight his way over the Tiber River, but unable to escape pursuit, he has one of his slaves, still with him, end his life. Plutarch claims some 3,000 Roman citizens were caught in the carnage (Plut. C. Gracch. 18.1), while Appian notes that after the killing a ritual purification – a lustration – had to be performed to cleanse the city (App. BCiv 26).
The Dust Settles
Needless to say, Opimius comes off of all of this, whatever one thinks of Gaius Gracchus, looking like a monster for all of the bloodshed and that seems to have been true at the time. He built a new temple to Concordia (Concord), ordered by the Senate, which was evidently not well recieved by the people (Plut. C. Gracch. 17.6). He was prosecuted the following year but successfully defended himself that he was merely following the Senate’s instructions. Opimius is packed off to Numidia in 116 to head a commission overseeing the inheritance of that kingdom and one cannot help but detect shades of Scipio Nasica being packed off out of Rome after Tiberius Gracchus death; in any case, Opimius’ managing of the commission was so corrupt (he was easily bribed by Jugurtha) that he was convicted and exiled (Plut. C. Gracch. 18.1) as a result.
The legacy of the Gracchi in Roman thought remained complex. As noted, our main sources are generally favorable, at least to their intent, though Appian disapproves of their methods. Plutarch is quite clearly and intentionally trying to spin a positive narrative of the two for the purpose of his biographies, which are about creating interesting comparisons of famous lives for the purpose of moral instruction. In at least certain quarters in Rome, the Gracchi received something approaching Greek-style hero cult (Plut. C. Gracch. 18.2), so they were clearly fondly remembered by someone, but it is striking that the verdicts of some of our other sources are so harsh on Gaius.
Even more than Tiberius Gracchus, the problem of Gaius Gracchus’ motives looms over how one thinks about his actions, but to be frank, I think the model of the honest reformer carried away by events fits Gaius even more poorly than it fits Tiberius. For one, breaking the power of the Senate and the traditional power-sharing structure of the Republic was clearly one of Gaius Gracchus’ goals and several of his proposals appear to have functionally no other purpose. Diodorus suggests that he may have intended to set up a democracy (Diod. Sic. 34.25), while Velleius explicitly raise the possibility that he aimed to set of a tyranny (Vel. Pat. 6.2). The fact that even Plutarch admits that the structure of Gaius Gracchus’ laws – wherein Gaius Gracchus got to spend all of the money, get all of the power and take all of the credit (Plut. C. Gracch. 10.1) – seemed dishonest at the time inclines me towards the latter.
And while the brothers are often treated together, it is striking that the sources are often much more forgiving of Tiberius than Gaius and it isn’t hard to see why: the violence of 133 can be understood as a moment of high political tensions gone wrong through misunderstanding and rushes to judgement. By contrast, Gaius Gracchus, when he had lost at the ballot box, gathered an armed mob and occupied part of the city. Perhaps he would have described this action as merely being one aimed at self-preservation (Julius Caesar would use the same excuse when he marched on Rome), but refusing to submit one’s self to a court of law or the broader political process is the act of a tyrant and while Opimius’ response went too far, it is striking that Opimius employs only votes – not violence – until Gaius and his supporters themselves take up arms and spill blood. The Senate, led by P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio initiated the violence of 133; the Gracchan supporters initiated the violence of 121.
Zooming out a little further, while the Gracchi emerge as folk heroes after their deaths (Plut. C. Gracch. 18.2) it’s not clear to me their reforms actually solved any problems in the long-term. As noted, the Gracchan land commissions were predicated on a fundamental, if honest, misunderstanding of the nature of the problem of land scarcity in Roman Italy and so despite vigorous application never seem to have accomplished very much. Instead, this problem will eventually be resolved, to the degree it is, in the first century and beyond, by the settlement of veterans outside of Italy. In that sense, the only guy who stumbles on a solid, long-term solution to anything in this entire mess is Gaius Rubrius (trib. 122) who proposes the colony at Carthage (which does, in the event, end up being permanent).
Gaius Gracchus had, of course, identified a real problem: the pressure building up behind the demand of the socii for citizenship. But Gaius Gracchus’ laws made this problem worse not better. For one, of course, the fact that the last guy who tried this ended up maybe doing an armed coup was hardly going to endear the Senate to the next attempt. But more critically, Gaius Gracchus’ laws further destabilized the bargain with the allies. Tiberius Gracchus’ land commission – which could seize land from socii but not give it to them – started this, but Gaius makes it worse. Now there was cheap grain, but only for citizens. Potentially new colonies, but now, it seems, only for citizens. Possibly free military clothing, but only for citizens. New opportunities for profit (and graft), but in contracts let out in the city of Rome, judged by juries of Romans. And all of this was paid for out of the expanding revenues of taxes from Rome’s provinces, a revenue stream that was as much the product of the valor of the socii as of the Romans, but in which the socii shared not at all. Moreover, in subsequent decades, Gaius’ programs will themselves make it harder to expand citizenship, because he’s created expensive new benefits for Roman citizens which the citizenry will be loath to share: if expanding the franchise means sharing the cheap grain or new lands with the socii, it might very well mean less for Roman citizens. Meanwhile, the Gracchan land reforms had deeply disadvantaged the allies and future efforts to buy in Rome’s lower classes with promises of land distribution will fuel the explosion of the Social War in 91.
In a sense, Gaius Gracchus has recognized the time bomb ticking in Roman Italy and in an effort to diffuse it, has instead accelerated its detonation.
Meanwhile, it is certainly the case that Gaius Gracchus’ example is a negative one for Rome. Weakening the Senate will not produce a democratic Rome, after all, but a monarchy under Julius Caesar and later Augustus. Tribunes acting in the same manner as Gaius Gracchus – Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Publius Sulpicius Rufus, in particular – continue to destabilize the republic in damaging ways. The Roman Republic functioned not based on a written constitution, but through the observance of the mos maiorum, a customary form of government which both Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus repeatedly ran roughshod over in the pursuit of their own ambition: even less scrupulous men would learn from their example. It is not an accident that when monarchy does finally return to Rome, the domestic powers of the emperor will be represented as tribunicia potestas – the powers of the tribune. Powers that the Gracchi effectively created in precedent by smashing the tribunate through all of its customary limits.
All of that said, we can dismiss the notion of the Gracchi as purely righteous reformers killed by a foolish, hidebound and greedy Roman Senate. Instead, while some of the Gracchi’s attempted reforms were well-meaning (if potentially misguided) and others clearly necessary, the impression of their contemporaries that they might be aiming for something like lawless tyranny was hardly unfounded. The extreme violent reaction of the Senate, I think, clearly made things worse in both cases and is well deserving of censure, but that shouldn’t entirely conceal the fact that the Gracchi really may have represented a threat to the stability of the Roman Republic. We cannot read the minds of the Gracchi and so we can never really know if they set out to try to use the tribunate to establish something like a back-door tyranny (or were just so spectacularly ambitious that they ended up on that path without fully knowing it was where their ambition was taking them), but we can know that the overweening ambition of the Gracchi provides the damaging template for what is to come and served to push the Roman Republic not further on the road to democracy, but down the road that will lead to a reborn Roman monarchy under the emperors.
Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus may not have known they were hammering the first nails into the Roman Republic’s coffin, but hammer them they did and the nails remain to caution us to swing our hammers more carefully at problems real or imagined.
