030 - Gaius Gracchus

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome. Last week, we discussed the career of Tiberius Gracchus, whose extreme populism helped kick start the century of civil strife that would be the Republic's undoing. This is not to say that Tiberius was to blame for the downward spiral, but he certainly staked out a position that forced the Senate to stake out a reactionary counter position, and it was this polarization, not one side or the other necessarily, that eventually led the Roman people to the safe and comforting arms of Caesar Augustus.

Hot on the heels of that number one summer blockbuster, Tiberius Gracchus, Man of the People, came its sequel, Gaius, Revenge of the Gracchi. And like all good sequels, they took what made the original work, doubled the special effects budget, and quadrupled the size of the crises. If protagonist Tiberius had to save the city, Gaius would be tasked with saving the whole world. What I mean to say by all that is that Tiberius entered office, focused on the single issue of agrarian reform, and met his downfall running for an illegal second term. His brother would pick up the baton on agrarian reform, but also add a whole slate of other populist reform measures. And where Tiberius failed to win his second term as tribune, Gaius succeeded and met his own downfall seeking an unprecedented third term. The sequel always has to be bigger, better, and go further than the original. It's just good marketing.

Gaius was born in 154 BC, the same year his father died. So where Tiberius at least had some contact with their father, Gaius was raised entirely by their mother. He was destined to live his life in the footsteps of his brother, who was fourteen years his elder. The entire career of Gaius Gracchus was defined by the path his brother had cut through the wilderness. It was a combination of family obligation and personal revenge that drove Gaius to press his ambitious reform platform, and for the most part, the younger Gracchi did not have much choice. The supporters of Tiberius and the legions of clients that had built up around the family expected him to carry on the legacy, and Gaius simply could not turn away from those expectations.

Gaius even began his career in similar fashion to his brother, attached to the staff of their much older brother-in-law, Scipio Aemilianus. Like Tiberius, he served in Numantia, though was not there at the time of the campaign that so changed Tiberius' life. And where Tiberius was driven to his extreme populism because of a very public rebuking by the Senate, Gaius was driven by the very public murder of his brother by those same senators. His brother's death left Gaius, at twenty-one, the patriarch of the wealthy and influential Gracchi family.

For a few years, Gaius did attempt to pull back from a public career, declining to run for office when he came of age, though, like I say, he couldn't avoid the pressure to follow in the footsteps of his brother, father, grandfather, and ancestors in every direction. Gaius was marked for a public career, and there was nothing he could do about it. In 126 B.C., he was elected Quaestor and was assigned by lot to a post in Sardinia and by all accounts served as an able administrator. But it was on the island that Gaius found himself becoming personally embittered towards the Senate in his own right, not just for real and perceived slights against his family, but slights directed at him personally.

As Quaestor, Gaius served under the consul Lucius Orestes, and in Roman tradition, if a consul was kept on in a certain territory, becoming a proconsul, then his officers stayed with him. In Rome, political class tensions continued to simmer after the death of Tiberius, and the Senate was keen to keep Tiberius's younger brother out of the city while they undid all his work. So they voted to keep Orestes stationed in Sardinia, and Gaius was forced to stay on. Another year passed, and the Senate voted to keep Orestes on again. Gaius began to feel like the Senate was doing this on purpose, so when the Senate again voted Orestes proconsul for Sardinia, Gaius denounced he was leaving the island. There was nothing illegal about leaving, but it was completely unheard of, and so Agraeci managed again to turn a binding cultural norm into so much hot air. He returned to Rome, and in 123 BC was elected tribune of the plebs like his father and brother before him.

The sources differ as to whether Gaius entered office with a revolutionary slate of proposals in hand, or whether his platform grew organically as a response to circumstance. What is not disputed is that by the time he left office, almost every aspect of Roman society had been touched by one or another of his proposed reforms. He began innocuously enough, addressing an issue that is actually in the headlines today, skyrocketing grain prices. Though the slave revolt in Sicily had been put down, a plague of locusts—yes, a plague of locusts—had swept through North Africa, and there was a general shortage of grain coming into Rome. The city, swollen with poor and landless families, faced outrageous markups on basic food staples. The conditions that caused the shortages were real enough, but merchants were having a field day, taking full advantage of the panic in the streets.

Gaius simply pushed through a cap on the price of grain. Essentially the Roman state began to bring in grain and settled it far below the inflated market rate. This transferred the burden of the price spike off the backs of the poor city dwellers and on to the collective back of the state treasury. The Senate was by no means pleased at Gaius's ingenious plan to invert basic economic common sense—buying high while selling low—but it did solve a pressing social concern and the people loved it, so there was only so much the elites felt they could do. In Gaius's grain plan we find the seeds of the later full-on food welfare program that became so important during the Imperium, but for now at least the Roman state merely provided food at a normal price and was not yet handing it out for free.

With the people now fully behind him, Gaius turned to settling old family scores. He passed a measure making it a crime to re-stand for the tribunate if the assembly voted to remove an officer from power. Gaius wanted to be clear that standing in the way of popular will was the shortest route to complete irrelevance, while at the same time he wanted to legitimize Tiberius's recall vote of Octavius ten years before, which had a very shaky legal foundation at the time. Gaius also passed a measure making it a crime to hand down capital punishment without the approval of the assembly. This measure was aimed directly at an ex-consul named Laianus, who had overseen the trials and executions of many of Tiberius's associates in 132 B.C. after the elder Gracchi was killed. Gaius's new law contained the provision that it applied retroactively and Laianus was forced into exile for an act that was only later determined to be a crime. In most countries today, these kinds of ex post facto or literally after the fact laws are explicitly prohibited as being an obvious source of mischief.

Old scores settled, Gaius returned to what had made his brother so popular to begin with, agrarian reform. The agrarian commission, which had been rendered impotent in 129 B.C., was rebooted and the process of identifying illegally held land and redistributing it was taken up again in earnest. Gaius followed this with laws on military service. Henceforth, no one under 17 was to be drafted and limits were put on the total number of years of service required. Also, an important step in the evolution of the army, Gracchus demanded that the state provide soldiers with adequate clothing. During his time in Sardinia, he had witnessed firsthand drafted legionaries freezing and miserable from a lack of proper supplies. It was a necessary provision to deal with real suffering, but it was another step on the road to the full-blown state-funded armies that would tear the country apart in the years to come. Rounding out his first year in office, Gaius worked to reform the law courts, opening up the jury pool beyond the senatorial class, which had long held the strings of justice, and creating a commission to investigate charges of bribery, a rampant problem that had been ignored for years.

It had been a remarkable year and Gaius' popularity was at an all-time high. Because of this popularity, Gaius was able to, through no fault of his own, to succeed where his brother had failed and win another term in office. He had not even actively campaigned, but the assembly had failed to grant a majority to ten tribunes, so the final slots were appointed by those tribunes who had won a majority, and they named Gaius, who, though he had not sought the office, eagerly accepted their appointment.

In his second term, Gaius brought to the table one of the thorniest issues of the day and dropped it right in the middle of an already chaotic political environment. The question was on the rights of non-Roman Italians, and specifically, whether they should be made full citizens. One of Gaius' fellow tribunes was a former consul named Marcus Fulvius, who had championed Italian citizenship in 125 BC. It was, in fact, Fulvius' proposal that had inspired the Senate to keep Gracchus in Sardinia. Italian citizenship was an idea whose time had come, but the Senate still balked at the idea of extending full rights to non-Romans. One of their greatest fears was that if they allowed populist reformers like Gracchus and Fulvius to bring the vote to the Italian allies, they would be rewarded with thousands and thousands of new clients, ready to vote any way the tribunes directed them. It was an irrational fear, as many of the Italians were feeling the brunt of the Agrarian Commission's redistribution efforts, and had no great love for Gracchus, but the conservatives in the Senate began to see boogeymen around every corner.

Gaius worked on other issues in addition to the citizenship proposal, shoring up the treasury by increasing the efficiency of provisional tax collection, and attempting to release some of the population pressures on Rome by establishing colonies overseas. In total, Gaius' year and a half or so in office had seen him touch almost every aspect of the social order, and universally acting in opposition to whatever the conservatives in the Senate wanted.

Near the end of his second term, Gaius sailed for Carthage, where one of his proposed colonies was being built. While he was gone, his voice and charisma left with him, and his enemies began to openly plot the downfall of the troublesome tribune. When Gaius returned, he found his allies had one by one been turned against him, and that all his reforms were threatened by outright repeal. The only option Gaius felt he had available to him was to tempt fate and do the only thing more unthinkable than serving his tribune for two terms, serving for three terms. This time, though, his support amongst the non-senatorial elites was at an all-time low, as a mixture of bribes and threats had done their work.

Gracchus was forced to fully embrace the persona of man of the people, and hoped that he would be able to drum up enough votes to win. He moved from his estate on the Palatine Hill down into a local slum, and began, with the help of his Greek speechwriters, to launch into full-throated populist campaign mode. He even went so far as to tear down a set of risers the wealthy would view an upcoming gladiatorial match from, because they blocked the view of the commoners. But despite his desperate campaign, Gracchus was defeated in the polls. There were of course accusations of fraud, and we will never know whether Gracchus actually won or not, but officially he was out, and the new tribunes, to a man enemies of Gracchus, set about dismantling all his reforms.

Gracchus and his colleague, Fulvius, made the fateful decision to muster a series of public demonstrations against repeal, that took on an increasingly violent and seditious overtone. At one of these gatherings, a herald of Gracchus' chief opponent was killed by overzealous Gracchai supporters. As soon as the body hit the ground, Gaius knew he was undone. The tribunate did not waste time leaping from a murder charge against the men actually responsible for the crime, to a full-blown charge of treason against Gaius and Fulvius. The two were immediately named enemies of the state, and were forced to run. Fulvius was caught and murdered along with his two sons, while Gaius fled with one of his slaves. Cornered and knowing that capture meant only disgrace, followed by execution, he decided to skip the former, and ordered his loyal slave to perform the latter. A murder-suicide later, they were both dead, and just like that, the Gracchai, who had so dominated Roman politics for the last decade, were gone.

Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus left an indelible mark on Rome, and changed the character of its society forever. Whatever the hopes of their political opponents, the Gracchian reforms could not simply be undone. It would take too much violence to remove citizens from their newly created farms, and besides, the negative press would be far too much to overcome. Of all his proposals, the only one to truly die was the matter of Italian citizenship. That would be tabled for another thirty years, and require a full-blown revolt before the Italian allies were treated as equals within the state. I believe I mentioned after the end of the Samnite Wars that the Samnites would return with a vengeance in a few hundred years. Well, that time is fast approaching, as they would be leaders in the violence that led to citizenship. The Senate could have saved itself a lot of blood and treasure by simply recognizing the inevitability of extending citizenship, but sometimes things have to get out of hand before the hand finally loosens its grip.

Beyond their legal reforms, the Gracchi introduced the idea of mob violence and mob pressure to Roman politics. Until now, the elites have been careful not to empower the masses or hint to them in any way that they far outnumbered their leaders, and could, if they wanted to, get their way by sheer physical intimidation. Sure, the early history of the Republic saw a few secession of the plebs, but that was passive civil disobedience, not rioting in the streets. The lesson of mob violence was a lesson well learned by the next generations, and the streets of Rome will soon run red with the blood of mobs and counter-mobs crashing into one another, egged on by leaders who crave power at any cost.

Next week, we will introduce one of those leaders who learned the lessons of the Gracchi all too well. It will take at least two, and possibly three episodes to cover the entire career of Gaius Marius, but his career is one of the most important in the late Republic, and it bears going into in some detail. Because the mark he would leave on the Republic would soon come to resemble the kiss of death, as Julius Caesar would follow his father-in-law's career to its logical conclusion and have himself declared dictator for life.