5. The Revolt of the Gracchi

The early Republic was an agricultural economy based upon subsistence farming. Its backbone was the class of free peasants who produced mainly for their own consumption, only exchanging the small surplus left over. In the early days of Rome money therefore played an unimportant role in the economic life of society.

But a long period of wars and foreign conquests radically transformed the Roman economy. With the emergence of Rome as a world power and the consequent expansion of trade on an international scale, money began to play a more important role, first as bronze, later as silver and gold. For the first time, exchange and money-relations began to dominate economic life.

This led to the disintegration of the old social forms. The rise of a money economy put an end to the relative equality of the early days of the Republic, and in its place we see an increasing polarisation between rich and poor that no longer corresponded to the old tribal divisions – between plebeians and patricians, noblemen and commoners.

Together with trade and money, a new ‘aristocracy’ of speculators, tax farmers, merchants and the like arose on the basis of money, production for exchange and the slave economy: the equites. The name, equites (‘knights’, derived from equus, a horse), was originally given to those citizens who could afford a horse and provided the cavalry in the army, but now began to refer to all those with an estate worth more than 4 million sesterces.

With the emergence of these new relations of production, the day of the free peasant was over, and so was the old Republic with its stern morality and simple soldierly virtues. Gone was the famous frugality of the Romans. Very often the new men of money were commoners, and even freedmen (former slaves). These ‘new men’ had no aristocratic pedigree, but they had wealth and showed it off ostentatiously.

These nouveaux riches dressed in silk, drank fine foreign wines and employed educated Greek slaves to recite Homer at their lavish banquets, even if neither they nor their guests understood a single word. Conservatives like Cato the Elder complained bitterly about this ostentation, but, as we have already seen, by this time old Cato was regarded as a crank when he dressed himself up in a rough peasant’s tunic and went to work in the fields alongside his slaves. Such things were now seen as anachronisms.

Although in economic terms the equites and the old landed nobility had similar interests as defenders of private property, in political terms there were still important differences between them. The power of the old aristocracy was based on its control of the Senate, but increasingly the equites began to exercise a decisive influence on Roman politics.

As these ‘new men’ gradually accumulated vast sums of wealth, so they increasingly felt themselves to be a power in the land. They constantly jostled with the old patrician nobility for political power, creating new tensions and antagonisms within the Roman Republic.

Despite the concessions that the old nobility had been forced to give to the ‘new men’ in the previous period, the latter were still poorly represented in the offices of state. The government was still in the hands of a closed circle of privileged families. About 2,000 men from fewer than twenty gentes controlled the state and took the lion’s share of the huge amounts of loot from the wars.

A good example of this is the Scipio family, which in less than a hundred years had gained no fewer than twenty-three consulships. This was a permanent source of friction between the equites and the senatorial class. These great aristocratic families kept in their cupboards the wax masks of their ancestors who had held consular office. These masks were paraded in the streets at their funerals, when there were pompous speeches in praise of the dead man and all his ancestors.

Rome was now effectively divided into three rival centres of power, reflecting the interests of different classes: the official state power, the Senate, controlled by the predominantly patrician aristocracy; the voting-assemblies or comitia, dominated by the wealthy citizens; and the informal popular assemblies (contiones), where the poorest sections of the populace gathered: the proletariat, including street-boys, Jews, Egyptians and the city rabble in general. The political life of the Republic now becomes much more complicated.

A struggle opened up between defenders of the aristocracy and its opponents, whose most radical wing, the populares, tried to lean on the masses, as the French middle-class Jacobins did at the time of the French Revolution. We could describe the populares as the Roman ‘popular party’, although no formal parties existed in Roman society as such. Nevertheless, a distinct section of leaders, leaning on the plebeian masses, opposed themselves to the conservative faction, which would later be described as the optimates, or ‘the best’.

The contiones, although they had no legal powers to decide anything, in practice controlled the streets. And the power of the street in Rome was growing. The urban poor formed a lumpenproletariat of dispossessed peasants, embittered by their expropriation and always ready to riot.

Plutarch describes the popular agitation in Rome at this time. In his Life of Tiberius Gracchus, he writes of the common people expressing their discontent by “setting up writings upon the porches, walls, and monuments”,^[1] demanding that the poor citizens be reinstated in their former possessions. This was the explosive background to the emergence of the Gracchi.

The agrarian question

The period that led to the fall of the Republic was characterised by a ferocious struggle between the classes, along with fierce power struggles between ambitious generals and politicians. There is an official history of this period, but there is also a secret history. In Capital, Marx wrote:

For the rest, it requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of the Roman republic, for example, to be aware that its secret history is the history of its landed property.^[2]

It was standard practice for the Romans to confiscate part of the land of conquered cities and states. This was made public land, which was occupied by tenants who paid rent, usually in produce, to the state. From the earliest times the patricians held the lion’s share of the public lands, known as the ager publicus. In Rome’s Italian territories the holding of public lands tended to become a monopoly of the wealthy.

No matter by what dubious means this land had been acquired, once it had been occupied for a certain length of time it was considered as the real property of the occupier, confirming the old saying that possession is nine-tenths of the law. In this way, gradually, the people were robbed of the public lands, and this was the focal point of all the great class battles in the later Roman Republic.

There were repeated attempts to pass laws regulating the distribution of public lands – the result of the struggle of the poorer classes to gain some share in the ager publicus. Since these lands were occupied without lease, from a strictly legal point of view, this should not have been difficult. But the law, especially as regards property, has always favoured the rich and powerful. And since most agrarian legislation challenged the wealth and privileges of the powerful, it remained a dead letter. The wealthy classes were determined to keep the lands they held, and they controlled the state and drew up the laws. Even the agrarian laws that were passed were often flagrantly disobeyed or simply ignored.

The most famous of early agrarian laws were the Licinio-Sextian laws (367 BC), which limited the amount of public land any citizen could hold and the number of sheep and cattle he could pasture on it. Some public lands were distributed to poor citizens, but by about 233 BC these laws had already fallen into disuse, and the situation of the poor peasants had become increasingly difficult.

The next serious attempt to solve the agrarian problem was the Lex Sempronia Agraria of 133 BC. This will be forever associated with the name of one of the most remarkable figures in Roman history: Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus.

Gracchus was not a plebeian but an outstanding member of the Roman aristocracy, whose father had held high office. Tiberius and his brother Gaius, known to history as ‘the Gracchi’, came from a prestigious patrician family. They were the sons of Sempronius Gracchus and Cornelia, the daughter of Scipio Africanus, the famous general who had defeated Hannibal.

With such a pedigree, Gracchus would normally be destined to take his place with the ruling aristocracy and hold high office in the state. But instead, he broke with his class and became the most celebrated leader of the Roman poor – the proletariat. Despite his impeccable aristocratic credentials, Tiberius Gracchus was destined to launch himself on a course that would destroy the social and political equilibrium of the Republic.

This is not the only case in history where outstanding members of the ruling class come over to the side of the revolution. In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels point out:

… in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.^[3]

We see the same process in other periods also. Marx points out that in the period of the decay of feudalism, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie. So in a period of intense class struggle in the Roman Republic, certain individuals broke away from their class and attempted to represent the interests of the oppressed classes.

It may be argued that the Gracchi did not have a consistently revolutionary policy, that they vacillated and attempted to compromise, and that this eventually led to defeat. But when we consider that these men had no selfish reason to do what they did, and that they gave their lives fighting for the cause, surely they deserve to be remembered for their courage and not for their weaknesses.

Tiberius Gracchus was clearly a man of high principles and extraordinary talent, a fact that was grudgingly accepted even by his critics. Seventy-five years after Gracchus’ death, Cicero considered him to be among the best orators Rome had ever produced, but he also saw him as a dangerous demagogue. He wrote: “I only wish that Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus […] had possessed political intentions as good as [his] oratorical talents”, and he added: “If so, [his] renown would have been the most splendid in the world.”^[4]

To us today his proposals for reform do not seem excessively radical, but they had revolutionary implications. It was almost unheard of for Roman politicians to deal with social or economic problems and such problems seldom played any part in senatorial debates. The idea that a senator or politician might represent a particular social class was completely alien to the Romans. Tiberius was the first one to address the growing problems in the city of Rome itself, and tried to solve the economic crisis in the countryside by rallying the oppressed masses.

Gracchus clashes with the Senate

How did this man become a revolutionary? Probably there are several different reasons. Cicero wrote: “He took the office because he was so infuriated with the nobility”.^[5] His clash with the Senate seems to have its origins in an incident during the Numantian war in Spain (143-133 BC), when the name of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus first comes to our attention.

He apparently became interested in the land question when he travelled to Spain, and observed the decline of smallholdings in Etruria. Plutarch writes:

… while Tiberius was travelling through Etruria on his way to Numantia, he saw for himself how the country had been deserted by its native inhabitants, and how those who tilled the soil or tended the flocks were barbarian slaves introduced from abroad; and that it was this experience which inspired the policy that later brought so many misfortunes upon the two brothers.^[6]

He saw with his own eyes how the Italian smallholders, whom Rome depended on to provide men for her army, were declining in numbers, undermined by competition from the huge farms worked by armies of slaves. The smallholdings were everywhere in decline, although they had by no means disappeared by this time. Tiberius Gracchus drew the conclusion that the destruction of the class of free peasants would undermine Rome itself.

As a member of an aristocratic family, Tiberius Gracchus could have expected a distinguished senatorial career, following in his father’s footsteps to both the consulship and the censorship. But his reputation was undermined by a reckless decision he took in Spain. In the Numantian campaign, Tiberius served with distinction as quaestor, and earned the respect of the Spaniards for his bravery and honesty. Such was his reputation for honesty and fairness that the Numantines insisted on negotiating with a man who had treated the Iberians better than other Romans, who frequently reneged on their promises.

But his conduct gave rise to an incident that changed his life and the course of Roman history. In order to save the army of the consul Gaius Hostilius Mancinus, which was trapped and facing certain destruction, Tiberius staked his reputation by concluding a treaty with the Spaniards – without first consulting the Senate. Plutarch credited Tiberius Gracchus with saving the lives of 20,000 Roman citizens through this agreement. But there was a problem. The Senate had not been consulted about this deal and promptly rejected it and sent the commander Mancinus in chains back to Numantia in 136 BC.

The actions of the Senate mortified Tiberius. A Roman aristocrat was brought up to prize above all else his dignitas, a more complicated idea than dignity in English. It means not just dignity, but status and honour. Tiberius had given his word to the Spaniards, and the Senate broke it. He considered this a dishonourable action, which not merely betrayed the Numantines, but also disgraced him.

Tiberius’ brother-in-law Scipio Aemilianus did his best to shelter him from the dishonour of the Numantian affair, but to no effect. This betrayal had a profound effect on Gracchus, who took deep and lasting offence at the Senate. This set in motion a chain reaction which exercised a fatal influence on Roman history for more than a century.

Tiberius Gracchus became the mortal enemy of the Senate and the Roman aristocracy. He entered the political arena, and in 133 BC he shocked the Roman system by standing not for the office of magistrate, but for the office of Tribune of the Plebs. This was a bold and fateful step to take.

The tribunate carried with it important powers: the power to veto and to propose law. But the ruling class had always assumed that it could buy off the tribunes and use them to police the masses. They never thought that such an office would be held by a significant political figure such as Tiberius Gracchus, or that it would be used in a serious attempt to change society. They were wrong.

The moment Gracchus stood for the office it was clear that he was seeking to use his power to rival that of the consuls. In so doing, he was acting according to the letter of the law, but he was doing things that were not in the original script. This was extremely dangerous. It was as if the modern Labour leaders were to make use of the machinery of formal parliamentary democracy to pass laws to expropriate the capitalists. That also is not in the script!

This action set Tiberius Gracchus on a collision course with the Senate. The hatred felt by the aristocracy towards him was so intense because they saw him as a traitor to his class. He was the first member of the Roman senatorial class to break ranks. His actions offended the strong spirit of solidarity that always exists within the ruling class. They wanted to destroy him utterly. For his part, he was looking for a fight.

Tiberius Gracchus was no doubt a courageous and sincere man, convinced of the need for a change. He was a social reformer, an idealist who was influenced by the philosophical doctrines of the Stoics of the brotherhood of man. His critics said that he had spent too much time listening to Greeks. As we have noted, according to his contemporaries, he was an excellent orator. The following speech recorded by Plutarch is probably not authentic but invented by Plutarch (this was standard procedure with the ancient writers). But it undoubtedly conveys the spirit, if not the letter, of his agitation:

“The savage beasts”, said he, “in Italy, have their particular dens, they have their places of repose and refuge; but the men who bear arms, and expose their lives for the safety of their country, enjoy in the meantime nothing more in it but the air and light; and, having no houses or settlements of their own, are constrained to wander from place to place with their wives and children.”

He told them that the commanders were guilty of a ridiculous error, when, at the head of their armies, they exhorted the common soldiers to fight for their sepulchres and altars; when not any amongst so many Romans is possessed of either altar or monument, neither have they any houses of their own, or hearths of their ancestors to defend. They fought indeed and were slain, but it was to maintain the luxury and the wealth of other men. They were styled the masters of the world, but in the meantime had not one foot of ground which they could call their own.^[7]

Despite the implacable opposition of the aristocracy, Tiberius Gracchus obtained some important backers for his candidature to the tribunate, including a number of key senators and ex-consuls. This may reflect the power of old family ties and personal friendships, or maybe they simply did not take his populist propaganda very seriously.

In the same way, members of the British establishment did not take seriously the communist convictions of Burgess, Maclean and Philby because they were members of the upper class and had been educated at Eton and Cambridge – until they turned out to be Soviet spies. And if the senators had looked more closely at his programme for taking office, they might have seen that he was very serious indeed.

Tiberius Gracchus was elected tribune in 133 BC on a platform of distributing land to the urban poor and limiting the land that each individual could hold. This was hugely popular with the poor but – in spite of significant concessions to the wealthy landowners – it provoked the anger of the patrician reactionaries who blocked his proposed reforms. This sharpened the class conflict, giving it a revolutionary character.

The Sempronian Law

The support that Gracchus got at first from the most powerful of Rome’s politicians may indicate that at least a section of the ruling class understood that land reform was both necessary and overdue. His original proposals were not very radical. Many of the latifundia were actually situated on public land, which they rented for ridiculously small sums from the state, if they paid anything at all. In his Life of Tiberius Gracchus, Plutarch writes:

Of the land which the Romans gained by conquest from their neighbours, part they sold publicly, and turned the remainder into common; this common land they assigned to such of the citizens as were poor and indigent, for which they were to pay only a small acknowledgement into the public treasury. But when the wealthy men began to offer larger rents, and drive the poorer people out, it was enacted by law, that no person whatever should enjoy more than 500 acres^[8] of ground. This act for some time checked the avarice of the richer, and was of great assistance to the poorer people, who retained under it their respective proportions of ground, as they had been formerly rented by them. Afterwards the rich men of the neighbourhood contrived to get these lands again into their possession, under other people’s names, and at last would not stick to claim most of them publicly in their own. The poor, who were thus deprived of their farms, were no longer either ready, as they had formerly been, to serve in war or careful in the education of their children; insomuch that in a short time there were comparatively few freemen remaining in all Italy, which swarmed with workhouses full of foreign-born slaves. These the rich men employed in cultivating their ground of which they dispossessed the citizens.^[9]

Tiberius devised a plan to distribute land to the urban poor and landless peasants. The Licinian laws were easily circumvented and they had been turned into a dead letter, but they had never been revoked. Tiberius Gracchus therefore could argue that his proposed reforms were based upon law.

The Lex Agraria proposed by Gracchus in 133 BC reaffirmed the provisions of the Licinio-Sextian laws and added to the maximum allowance an extra amount for each son. He proposed to limit the amount of land a man could own to no more than 500 iugera (300 acres). To conciliate the big landowners, he offered to allow the current holders of public land to keep 500 iugera as their undisputed property, plus another 250 iugera for each of two sons.

Any wealthy man with at least two sons would therefore be allowed to keep 1000 iugera, twice the limit set down by the Licinio-Sextian laws. The remaining public land was to be redistributed in plots of thirty acres to families of smallholders. The intention was to create thousands of new landowners, from whom Rome would recruit soldiers for her armies. The plots, once granted, were supposed to be inalienable. They could not be sold or transferred to new owners, other than by inheritance from father to son.

In compensation for their losses, the occupants of public land were to receive full title to the land they retained. This was a huge concession to the rich, who would be allowed to keep a large amount of public land, in addition to any other lands they already outright owned, which would have remained untouched. In effect, the old Licinio-Sextian law on the land would have been superseded, and the big landowners would have their vast estates legitimised.

This was intended to make the reforms palatable to the rich landowners. By this measure Tiberius Gracchus hoped to reduce the opposition of the wealthy landowners to his reform. But this was a vain hope. Despite the moderate nature of his proposals, the wealthy classes were bitterly opposed to everything Tiberius Gracchus stood for. Plutarch describes their rabid hostility:

But though this reformation was managed with so much tenderness, that, all the former transactions being passed over, the people were only thankful to prevent abuses of the like nature for the future, yet, on the other hand, the moneyed men, and those of great estates, were exasperated, through their covetous feelings against the law itself, and against the lawgiver, through anger and party-spirit. They therefore endeavoured to seduce the people, declaring that Tiberius was designing a general redivision of lands, to overthrow the government, and throw all things into confusion.^[10]

How familiar these lines sound today! Nowadays, the ruling class would use the mass media to launch a campaign against the ‘threat to democracy’ posed by socialism. We saw this in the hysterical campaign in the media in the USA, which recently tried to present a very timid attempt to reform the health system more or less as an attempt to push through a socialist revolution and “sovietise American medicine”. This fact shows how little has changed in over 2,000 years of class struggle. The names and circumstances have changed, but the psychology of the ruling class has not.

Aristocratic reaction

For the conservative aristocrats who sat in the Senate, even minor political differences seemed to be matters of fundamental principle. They saw any attempt to restrict their powers as an attack on the Republic. It was particularly intolerable that those who were agitating for reform were men from their own class. Tiberius Gracchus knew he would have to face a stiff fight. Similar land reform had been proposed roughly ten years earlier by Gaius Laelius, but these proposals were shipwrecked on the rock of senatorial opposition.

Naturally, the most strenuous opposition came from those who held large quantities of public land. They faced losing the lion’s share of their public lands, and some of them had no great private estates to fall back on. Many senators were themselves large landowners holding vast tracts of public land.

They furiously opposed the reform as a radical attack on the principle of private property. They also understood that a land redistribution that would involve settling 70,000 families on public land would create a mass base of clients loyal to Tiberius. For such men, Gracchus’ law could represent a serious threat. Among these opponents, the most implacable was Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, a former consul, who was one of the principal holders of public land.

The new land reform bill was carefully drafted. But Gracchus took a revolutionary step when he presented the bill directly to the Plebeian Council (concilium plebis). He did not submit the law for review to the Senate. This was not strictly required by law but it was the usual practice.

Why did Tiberius Gracchus proceed in this way? The reason is unclear. Did he want to take his revenge on the Senate, treating them with contempt for having betrayed him over the Numantia affair? It seems more likely that he sought to by-pass the Senate where he would meet stiff opposition, and appeal directly to the people.

Whatever his reasons were, the senators were outraged. They did everything in their power to block the bill’s progress. When voting day arrived, the party of the rich prevented a vote by the simple expedient of seizing the voting urns. The masses confronted them and were preparing for a fight.

Rome now seemed on the brink of revolution. But once again the situation was saved by the cunning of the ruling class and the vacillations of the leaders of the popular party. Two distinguished men of consular rank, Manilius and Flavius, threw themselves to their knees before Tiberius and implored him to stop the proceedings and instead take the matter to the Senate.

Tiberius agreed out of respect for their rank. This shows the limitations of his outlook. Despite his undoubted sincerity, he had not yet given up all hope of convincing the Senate of the correctness of his proposals. Tiberius appealed to the Senate. What was the result? There was no result because the aristocracy dominated the proceedings. The masses were demobilised and the initiative, at least for now, was lost.

Intervention of the masses

We can only explain the conduct of Tiberius Gracchus by the fact that he was not proposing a revolution against the Senate, but a reform that was calculated to prevent revolution and save the Republic through an agrarian reform that would save the small peasantry. But for the wealthy and powerful such proposals sounded like a call to subvert all property, undermine the state and provoke a general revolution. Feeling themselves threatened, the aristocrats armed a large number of their followers and slaves. They were preparing for a showdown.

Stirred up by the prospect of land, large numbers of country people flocked to Rome to vote for the bill, which was easily passed in the plebeian assembly. The Senate struck back. They bribed another tribune, Marcus Octavius, to veto the bill.

This was a scandalous move, because this man was using his position to frustrate the will of the people he was supposed to represent. The tribunate had never been intended for this purpose. But the office of tribune was being corrupted and turned into the tool of the senatorial order. The tribune’s veto seemed to spell the end of the reform.

One might have expected Tiberius Gracchus either to retreat or seek to do some kind of deal with the Senate. But this time he did no such thing. Instead, he passed onto the offensive. First he offered Octavius (who, it seems, was himself the owner of public land) to compensate him out of his own pocket for any losses he incurred, on condition that he would drop his veto on the bill. Octavius refused.

Then Gracchus proposed that unless he withdrew his veto, Octavius should be removed from office. What he was demanding was the right of recall. In a desperate attempt to avoid a head-on confrontation, Tiberius tried to appeal to Octavius before the popular assembly. Plutarch describes the scene very vividly:

When the people were met together again, Tiberius placed himself in the rostra, and endeavoured a second time to persuade Octavius. But all being to no purpose, he referred the whole matter to the people, calling on them to vote at once, whether Octavius should be deposed or not; and when seventeen of the thirty-five tribes had already voted against him, and there wanted only the votes of one tribe more for his final deprivation, Tiberius put a short stop to the proceedings, and once more renewed his importunities; he embraced and kissed him before all the assembly, begging with all the earnestness imaginable, that he would neither suffer himself to incur the dishonour, nor him to be reputed the author and promoter of so odious a measure. Octavius, we are told, did seem a little softened and moved with these entreaties; his eyes filled with tears, and he continued silent for a considerable time. But presently looking towards the rich men and proprietors of estates, who stood gathered in a body together, partly for shame, and partly for fear of disgracing himself with them, he boldly bade Tiberius use any severity he pleased. The law for his deprivation being thus voted, Tiberius ordered one of his servants, whom he had made a freeman, to remove Octavius from the rostra, employing his own domestic freed servants in the stead of the public officers. And it made the action seem all the sadder, that Octavius was dragged out in such an ignominious manner. The people immediately assaulted him, whilst the rich men ran in to his assistance. Octavius, with some difficulty, was snatched away, and safely conveyed out of the crowd; though a trusty servant of his, who had placed himself in front of his master that he might assist his escape, in keeping off the multitude, had his eyes struck out, much to the displeasure of Tiberius, who ran with all haste, when he perceived the disturbance, to appease the rioters.^[11]

In these lines we can clearly see the class forces at work. The two opposing forces, the aristocracy and the masses, are pulling in opposite directions. It is a clash of mutually incompatible interests. In the middle we have the social reformer, Tiberius Gracchus, who has set in motion forces beyond his control.

He begins to fear that the situation is slipping out of his hands and pleads with the other side to see reason. But the other side is obdurate and will not budge an inch. The masses, enraged, intervene and force the issue. For the time being, the Senate is forced to retreat.

After Octavius refused to withdraw his veto for the second time, and was promptly voted out of office and dragged from the speaker’s podium, he was replaced with another candidate. Another Roman historian, Appian, describes the euphoria of the people in this moment:

Gracchus became immensely popular by reason of the law and was escorted home by the multitude as though he were the founder, not of a single city or race, but of all the nations of Italy. After this the victorious party returned to the fields from which they had come to attend to this business. The defeated ones remained in the city and talked the matter over, feeling aggrieved, and saying that as soon as Gracchus should become a private citizen he would be sorry that he had done despite to the sacred and inviolable office of tribune, and had sown in Italy so many seeds of future strife.^[12]

Sabotage by the Senate

When Tiberius Gracchus persuaded the Plebeian Council to impeach the tribune, he committed an unconstitutional act that was absolutely without precedent. Cicero later used this disagreement between two tribunes as an example of the wonderful flexibility of the Roman constitution:

“The tribunes have too much power”, you say. Yes, that is undeniable. But the power of the popular Assembly has a much more cruel and violent potential. Yet, in practice, that potential sometimes makes for greater mildness when there is a leader to keep the Assembly under control. […]

For no board of tribunes, surely, would ever be so outrageously constituted that not a single one of its members remained sane! Indeed, what caused the overthrow of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus was the fact the he had an opponent on his own board, whose veto he brushed aside and whose powers he took away. For that, indeed, is what brought about his downfall: his removal of one of his own colleagues from office, because he had exercised his right of veto against Tiberius Gracchus.^[13]

The Senate had suffered a setback, but was by no means prepared to concede defeat. Tiberius’ agrarian law was finally passed without opposition and a new tribune was elected to replace the deposed Octavius. But the Senate still held a strong card in its hand: its control over finances.

A commission was set up to supervise the distribution of land to the people. However, the Senate sabotaged the measure by withholding the funds that were necessary to help stock the new smallholdings. Without money to provide the basic necessities, the plots distributed under the reform would not be viable farms.

Tiberius Gracchus now took a drastic step, which brought the struggle between the two factions to a head. Attalus, king of Pergamon, who had died childless, bequeathed his treasury to the Roman state. Tiberius Gracchus proposed that this wealth be divided up between the citizens of Rome in order to fund the land commission and help set up farms for new settlers. In effect, he confiscated a large amount of money in order to finance the work of the agrarian commission.

Thanks to this measure, the commission could begin distributing land. But such an action was in complete disregard for tradition, which gave the Senate control of all overseas affairs. Although nowhere was this explicitly stated by Roman law, Tiberius’ action was a direct challenge to the Senate.

And that was not all. He also proposed to reduce the length of military service, and to introduce the right of appeal against the verdicts of juries (up to then composed exclusively of senators). In short, he was trying to reduce the powers of the Senate by every means possible.

The reactionaries in the Senate were alarmed by the passage of the bill, the deposition of the tribune and the confiscation of Attilus’ legacy. They were even more alarmed by the mass following Tiberius was acquiring among the poor. The Senate was forced to accept the situation, but was only playing for time. The reactionaries had no intention of limiting themselves to peaceful and legal means.

The murder of Tiberius Gracchus

The seizure of the Pergamene treasury in defiance of the Senate was a turning point. Tiberius Gracchus had made powerful enemies. Many of his former allies now broke away, once they saw he was serious about his intentions. He was now in a dangerous position.

There were plenty of people out to destroy him. The fundamental issue at this point was no longer the land reform. The question was: Who rules Rome? There was now an open clash between the Senate and the Plebeian Council. The situation was completely polarised: on one side were Tiberius Gracchus and his supporters, the poor peasants and proletarians, on the other, the senators, the patricians, and the big landowners.

There were two rival centres of power in society, a situation resembling what Lenin called dual power: On the one hand, the Senate, which was in the hands of the slave-holding aristocracy; on the other, the Plebeian Council, representing the free masses. This contradiction could not be settled by laws and constitutions, by speeches and votes. It could only be settled by violent struggle.

The reactionaries now saw their opportunity. Tiberius’ term as tribune was nearing its end. Once he no longer had immunity from prosecution as a tribune, he would be a dead man. The only way to prevent this was to stand for a new term of tribune. But for him to run for a second term as tribune was yet another unconstitutional action. He decided upon this desperate recourse.

As a matter of fact, his chances of winning the re-election for the tribunate were very poor. A large part of his base was in the rural areas, where the peasants were busy with the harvest. His powerful political allies had abandoned him and he had lost the support of his fellow tribunes. But the senators did not want to take any chances.

These tactics used by counter-revolutionaries of every period are well known. The reactionaries accuse their enemies of wishing to install a ‘tyranny’. They agitate around this false accusation in order to incite violence, while at the same time publicly adopting a defensive stance: “We will not be the ones who cast the first stone. We are only trying to defend the existing order and institutions of society, and protect the rights of the citizens.”

While posing as the injured party that was trying to ‘defend’ themselves, the aristocracy was in fact preparing a violent aggression against Gracchus and the popular party. The Roman ruling elite decided that their only hope was to behead the mass movement: to kill Tiberius Gracchus. But since Tiberius was too powerful to attack directly, his opponents decided to play a waiting game.

The reactionary forces began to prepare the ground carefully. They gathered around Publius Nasica, the Pontifex Maximus, who was in charge of religious observances and, by chance, Tiberius’ cousin. They began by provoking a riot in the Senate:

They created uproar in the Senate, and Nasica demanded that the consul must act now to protect the state and put down the tyrant. The consul answered in conciliatory fashion that he would not be the first to use violence, and would put no citizen to death without a regular trial.^[14]

There was violence also in the Plebeian Council, where the reactionaries were attempting to gain support by bribery or other means. The masses on the other hand attempted to make use of their existing rights to express their grievances, and this led to open fights in the assembly, with the supporters of Gracchus attempting to physically expel the aristocrats and their supporters.

The Gracchan faction held the Capitol where the voting assemblies met. According to Appian, Nasica led a mob of nobles and senators armed with clubs to the Capitol where Tiberius Gracchus was addressing his supporters.

As a supreme irony, the unsuspecting supporters of Gracchus gave way as a sign of respect for the senatorial rank. This polite gesture was answered by a show of naked force. The frenzied reactionaries attacked the meeting and battered Tiberius Gracchus’ brains out on the steps of the Temple of Fidelity. The scene is described by Plutarch:

The senators’ followers were armed with clubs and staves, which they had brought from their houses. The senators themselves snatched up the legs and fragments of the benches which the crowd had broken in their hurry to escape, and made straight for Tiberius, lashing out at those who were drawn up in front of him. His protectors were quickly scattered or clubbed down, and as Tiberius turned to run, someone caught hold of his clothing. He threw off his toga and fled in his tunic, but then stumbled over some of the prostrate bodies in front of him. As he struggled to his feet, one of his fellow tribunes, Publius Satyreius, as everybody agrees, dealt the first blow, striking him on the head with the leg of a bench. Lucius Rufus claimed to have given him the second, and prided himself upon this as if it were some noble exploit. More than 300 men were killed by blows from sticks and stones, but none by the sword.^[15]

For the first time in almost four centuries, there was open violence and bloodshed in Rome among members of the ruling elite. “All other disputes”, wrote Plutarch, “although they were neither trivial in themselves nor concerned with trivial objects, were resolved by some form of compromise, with the Senate making concessions through fear of the people and the people out of respect for the Senate.”^[16]

White terror

The terror that followed was similar to all other such episodes in history. The ruling class took its revenge on the defeated party with the utmost cruelty and ruthlessness. In the proscriptions that followed, the supporters of Gracchus were hunted down and killed like animals. The vengeful spite of the aristocratic party was vented even on the dead bodies of its enemies. Plutarch comments:

They refused his brother’s request for permission to take up the body and bury it at night: instead they threw it into the Tiber together with the rest of the dead. And this was not all. Some of Tiberius’ supporters were banished without a trial, while others were arrested and executed, Diophanes the rhetorician among them. A certain Gaius Villius was shut up in a vessel with vipers and other poisonous snakes and put to death in this way.^[17]

The bitterness at all levels of society is indicated by the rumour that the war hero Scipio Aemilianus had been murdered by his wife, Sempronia, who was the sister of Tiberius Gracchus, because of Scipio’s refusal to condemn the murder of Tiberius Gracchus.

The rich senators, having killed Gracchus, found that it was not the end of the matter. Powerful class forces had been unleashed from below. Such was the strength of the movement that the Senate was forced to accept at least a partial implementation of Tiberius’ reforms.

But this was only a means of controlling the masses and eventually overturning those very same reforms. The destruction of the small free peasants and the concentration of land in the hands of the wealthy was an unstoppable process.

The murder of Tiberius Gracchus changed everything. It introduced violence onto the streets of Rome as a political weapon. All hopes of a political consensus died with Tiberius. There was now no question of compromise. Neither side paid any attention to the laws or the ‘rules of the game’. It was a fight to the finish between the contending classes. Appian writes:

So perished on the Capitol, and while still tribune, Gracchus, the son of that Gracchus who was twice consul, and of Cornelia, daughter of that Scipio who robbed Carthage of her supremacy. He lost his life in consequence of a most excellent design too violently pursued; and this abominable crime, the first that was perpetrated in the public assembly, was seldom without parallels thereafter from time to time. On the subject of the murder of Gracchus the city was divided between sorrow and joy. Some mourned for themselves and for him, and deplored the present condition of things, believing that the commonwealth no longer existed, but had been supplanted by force and violence.^[18]

Although reaction was once more in the saddle in Rome, the murder had solved nothing for the aristocracy. Objectively, the problems of the poor and the dispossessed peasantry continued to worsen, providing a fertile soil for revolutionary agitation. Marx explains that the revolution sometimes needs the whip of the counter-revolution. The masses were enraged by the murder of Tiberius. They insulted the counter-revolutionary senators in the streets.

Tiberius’ younger brother Gaius was put on trial, but defended himself energetically and was cleared. By contrast, Nasica, the murderer of Tiberius, was disgraced and forced into exile, posted to the new province of Asia (in modern-day Turkey), where he died under suspicious circumstances.

The aristocratic party concentrated its attacks on the agrarian reform, determined to remove the last remaining barrier to its seizing all the remaining land. But the Senate did not feel strong enough to reverse Gracchus’ land law. The popular party was equally determined to keep the laws that defended what was left of the free peasantry.

Faced with the sullen anger of the people, the Senate retreated and named a land commission to carry out some of the reforms that Tiberius had demanded. For a time, it even seemed to be succeeding. By 125 BC, 7,000 citizens were added to the list of those liable for military service, when compared to the census figures of 131 BC.

The Senate was forced to buy peace for a while by squeezing the provinces with high taxes. While keeping the merchants and the urban poor quiet by a combination of concession and repression, the slave-owning aristocracy continued to concentrate more land into its hands. They plundered Italy shamelessly, ruining the small peasants and driving them out, creating an economic and social disaster. Small farms in Italy, says Mommsen, “disappeared like raindrops in the sea.”^[19]

Many dispossessed Italians began to drift into Rome, agitating for greater rights. This added to the political ferment in the city. In 126 BC the tribune Iunius Pennus passed a law expelling non-citizens from Rome. This measure was really targeted at evicting the Italian agitators. To what extent it was ever enforced against the rich foreign merchants and traders is unclear. It is obvious that many of them circumvented this law, which was directed against the poor non-Roman citizens.

Italian discontent became so dangerous that in 125 BC consul Marcus Fulvius Flaccus proposed to grant full citizenship to the Latins and Latin privileges to all Italians in preparation of eventual full citizenship.

But this met with opposition on two fronts. The senators saw the mass of Italians as a threat to their political authority, as they had no hold of political patronage over them. And the Roman poor saw any increase of the number of citizens as a threat to their privileges as Roman citizens. The measure stood little chance of success, but just to make sure, the Senate sent Flaccus off to Massilia to fight the Saluvii.

Unable to win by force, the Senate temporarily resorted to intrigue and bribery. They offered to increase the ration of corn and to give land to the landless Roman citizens (at the expense of the Italian peasants). But this was only meant to buy time while they prepared behind the scenes to deal with their enemies in the traditional way.

Later the class struggle assumed a violent form again, with new conflicts on the streets and murders. The ruling class, not yet sure of the situation, had to tread with care. They allowed the distribution of public land to proceed and proposed that the people should elect a new commissioner to succeed Gracchus.

The struggle therefore continued, but there was a situation of deadlock between the classes. A class of no more than 2,000 wealthy families decided everything. But the whole state was now in a palpable state of decline. The upper class showed itself as utterly degenerate and unfit to hold power, while the masses sought a way out of the crisis.

Gaius Gracchus

The people had learned to challenge the authority of the Senate. Tiberius had turned the popular party into a viable political movement. After his murder it was impossible to make the constitution of the Republic work effectively. How could the laws work when the people understood that the legal code was only the formal expression of the class interests of their masters? Tiberius Gracchus had tried to base himself on the people. He failed, but there would be others willing to try it again.

Gaius Gracchus, the brother of the murdered Tiberius, assumed leadership of the popular party. Like his brother he advocated a programme that was aimed at breaking the power of the aristocracy. He was a political agitator who started a hundred years of civil war that brought the Roman Republic to the point of exhaustion. He enjoyed immense popularity with the masses, and equally was hated by the rich and powerful:

All the most distinguished men in Rome without exception joined forces to oppose him, but such an immense multitude poured into the city from various parts of Italy to support his candidature that many of them could find no lodging; and since the Campus Martius was too small to hold them, they climbed up to the attics and housetops to declare their support for Gaius.^[20]

Despite Gaius’ popularity, the aristocrats succeeded in gerrymandering the elections to the post of tribune, so that he came fourth, instead of first, as expected. But no trickery could prevent his meteoric rise.

The agrarian law of Tiberius Gracchus was being applied in a reactionary manner, at the expense of the Italian peasants. This created a profound sense of grievance amongst Rome’s Italian allies. As we have seen, a prominent member of the Gracchan camp, Fulvius Flaccus, argued strenuously that the Italians should be granted Roman citizenship as compensation for any disadvantages they should suffer from agrarian reform, and Gaius agreed. The Italian question finally proved to be his undoing.

The Senate tried to get rid of Flaccus by sending him off as consul to Gaul to protect the Roman allies of Massilia (now Marseilles) who had appealed for help against the Celtic tribes. The manoeuvre backfired. He later returned in triumph, having won victories over the Gauls. In the meantime, Gaius Gracchus had finished his term of office as quaestor in Sardinia, and returned to Rome to take the place of his brother. Nine years after his brother’s murder, at the age of about thirty, Gaius was elected as people’s tribune in 123 BC.

Gaius’ main base was the city poor, the proletariat, which looked to him to provide them with their rations and land. He planned to expand his base, forming a broad opposition based on the city masses, the wealthy equites and the Italians.

The programme initiated by the younger Gracchus was even more far-reaching than that of his brother. He demanded that the soldiers should be supplied with clothing at the public expense, with no deduction from their pay, and that nobody under the age of seventeen should be conscripted. He also demanded a reduction in the price of grain sold to the public.

He had a law passed adding to the 300 members of the Senate another 300 drawn from the class of equites, although this law does not seem to have been put into effect. He launched an ambitious programme of public works, such as roads and harbours, which mainly benefited the equestrian class. By such means he succeeded in splitting the equites away from the Senate.

With this broad coalition, Gaius was able to remain in office for two years, during which he pushed through a lot of legislation. He reaffirmed Tiberius’ land laws and established smallholdings in Roman territory abroad, creating new colonies, including one on the old site of the destroyed city of Carthage.

He proposed to divide up the public lands among the poor citizens. But once again he was met with sabotage. The Senate allowed the new tenants to sell their new land, which the wealthy bought up. This was a regular feature, by which the Senate turned every attempt at reform into a dead letter.

Every time newly acquired lands were assigned to the poor, they simply passed into the hands of the wealthy landholders. In the meantime, large-scale slave labour drove all before it, tearing up the laws and mercilessly displacing free peasant labour throughout Italy.

The aristocracy was able to control the assembly of all Roman citizens (comitia tributa) because, with each tribe controlling a single block vote determined by the majority, the voting power of the urban proletariat was concentrated within four tribes. On the other hand, the rural tribes numbered thirty-one.

The landowners could therefore register themselves, together with their freedmen and clients, and this body of interests could usually dominate the assembly, since the small farmers seldom travelled to Rome in great numbers and never stayed there for long. Originally this system had been devised to prevent the interests of the farmers being swamped by those of the urban masses. But now it was a weapon in the hands of the slave-owning aristocracy.

In order to please the equites, Gaius awarded them the right to contract for the collecting of the enormous taxes due from the newly created province of Asia. It was further agreed that members of the equestrian class should hold judgement in court cases over provincial governors accused of wrong-doings. This was clearly an attempt to cut down the power of the Senate, as it restricted its power over the governors, many of whom were equites, filling their pockets at the expense of the provinces.

Gaius wished to expand the franchise to give the vote to the Italians, in order to increase his basis of support. But these measures were controversial and exposed the contradictions within the popular camp. The reactionaries then skilfully utilised anti-Italian feeling to divide the masses and thus the city poor united with the Senate to defeat this proposal.

The lumpen rabble did not want to share their privileges as Roman citizens with anybody. Since this, “seemed to these people, so to speak, like a partnership which gave them a claim to share in sundry very tangible profits, direct and indirect, they were not at all disposed to enlarge the number of the partners.”^[21]

The struggle between the classes had reached the point of deadlock, as Mommsen points out:

It was clear that the Senate was not powerful enough to wrest either from the merchants or from the proletariate their new privileges; any attempt to assail the corn-laws or the new jury-arrangement would have led, under a somewhat grosser or somewhat more civilised form, to a street-riot in presence of which the Senate was utterly defenceless.^[22]

In 121 BC Gaius Gracchus stood for yet another term as tribune, just as his brother had done. Once again, the Senate conspired against him. They put forward their own candidate, Marcus Livius Drusus, with a demagogic programme intended to undermine Gracchus’ standing as a champion of the people.

They put into circulation malicious rumours about Gaius to undermine his credibility. But the most serious weakness was the loss of popularity resulting from the failed proposal to extend Roman citizenship to the Italians. As a result, Gaius lost the vote for his third term in office.

Gaius Gracchus’ angry supporters, some of them apparently carrying weapons, held a mass protest demonstration on the Aventine Hill, with Flaccus at their head. This was used as an excuse for sending the consul Lucius Opimius to the Aventine Hill, backed by militia, legionary infantry and archers, ‘to restore order’. He carried an order from the Senate to take action against anyone “endangering the stability of the Roman state”.

That was all he needed. What followed was a massacre in which the Gracchan movement was drowned in blood. It appears that realising the hopelessness of the situation Gaius ordered his personal slave to stab him to death. His headless corpse was thrown into the Tiber. In the bloody proscriptions that followed as many as 3,000 of his followers were arrested and strangled in prison.

Why the Gracchi failed

The fatal weakness of the Gracchan Revolution was the fact that what we call the Roman proletariat was not a proletariat in the Marxist sense, but to a very great extent a declassed lumpenproletariat.

The unemployed mob in Rome hated the rich nobles, but in the last analysis, they were dependent on the exploiting classes, living off the wealth created by the slaves in the form of state handouts of free grain. The Roman proletariat benefited from the exploitation and oppression of the Italians, and therefore were implacably opposed to recognising them as Roman citizens.

They were able to stage riots, and sometimes played a revolutionary role, but in the end they also turned out to be fodder for the camp of reaction, which skilfully played on their prejudices. A large number of plebeians, jealous of their privileges as Roman citizens, turned against Gaius. This fatal split in the popular camp was what emboldened the reactionaries, who again went onto the offensive.

As we have seen, the aim of the Gracchi was to distribute land to the free citizens, revive the peasantry, and populate Italy with free peasants instead of slaves. They demanded that this public land should be redistributed to the poor. Nevertheless, their proposals did not remove the central contradictions.

The new class of smallholders could not compete with the big estates of the rich run on the basis of slave labour, especially if they were to be regularly taken away from their farms to perform military service. In essence, this was an attempt to put back the clock. It flew in the face of economic necessity.

Just as under modern capitalism all the attempts to bolster small businesses and prevent the spread of monopolies by anti-trust laws have proved futile, so in the Roman Republic, the efforts to re-create a class of small farmers proved to be ineffective. The tendency towards the concentration of the ownership of land in the hands of a small number of slave-owners was unstoppable.

The different classes in society – the urban ‘proletariat’, the small peasants, and the propertied classes, divided between equestrian money men and the old nobility – were not capable of providing any way out of the impasse Roman society faced. The result was a long and inglorious agony of the Republic that led inexorably to Caesarism and the Empire.

The Republic was dying on its feet because its social basis had ceased to exist. This fact expressed itself in continuous political crises and convulsions in the capital, party strife, revolutions and counter-revolutions. Paradoxically, the peasants were not the only ones affected by debt. Behind their outward splendour and overbearing pride, many Roman senators were in debt. The rise of a money economy served to disintegrate the old social relations and the political power that rested upon them.

The old system was dead but there was nothing viable to put in its place. The class struggle in Rome during this period assumes a particularly feverish and convulsive character. One party succeeds another without offering a definitive solution.

The freedmen were given votes in order to make their patrons masters of the streets. Politicians appeared in the streets and the forum at the head of private armies of freedmen numbering hundreds or even thousands to intimidate the Senate into passing certain laws. The political struggle had reached the point where only armed force could restore some kind of order and equilibrium. The stage was set for the irruption of the army into politics.

Endnotes

[1] Plutarch, Lives, Vol. 4, ‘Tiberius Gracchus’, p. 324.

[2] Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, MECW, Vol. 35, p. 93, note.

[3] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, The Classics of Marxism: Volume One, p. 12.

[4] Cicero, On Government, p. 254.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Plutarch, The Makers of Rome, ‘Tiberius Gracchus’, p. 161.

[7] Plutarch, The Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, ‘Tiberius Gracchus’, p. 675.

[8] The Licinian law limited holdings to 500 iugera, roughly 300 modern acres.

[9] Plutarch, Lives, Vol. 4, ‘Tiberius Gracchus’, pp. 323-4.

[10] Ibid., p. 325.

[11] Ibid., pp. 328-9.

[12] Appian, Roman History, Vol. 3, The Civil Wars, Book 1, pp. 28-9.

[13] Cicero, On Government, p. 205.

[14] Plutarch, The Makers of Rome, ‘Tiberius Gracchus’, p. 171.

[15] Ibid., pp. 171-2.

[16] Ibid., p. 172.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Appian, Roman History, Vol. 3, The Civil Wars, Book 1, p. 35.

[19] Mommsen, History of Rome, Vol. 3, p. 170.

[20] Plutarch, The Makers of Rome, ‘Gaius Gracchus’, p. 177.

[21] Mommsen, History of Rome, Vol. 3, p. 153.

[22] Ibid., p. 154.