The Gracchi and Their Reforms

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Introduction
Cornelia, whose father was Scipio Africanus, preferred to be called “Mother of the Gracchi” rather than daughter of the conqueror of Numantia. Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, her sons, were born at a time when the social condition of Rome was rank with corruption. The small farmer class were deprived of holdings, the soil was being worked by slaves and its products wasted on pleasure and debauchery by the rich; the law courts were controlled by the wealthy and powerful, while oppression, bribery and fraud were generally rampant in the city.

On December 10, B.C. 133, Tiberius Gracchus entered upon the office of tribune, to which he had been elected and pledged himself to the abolition of crying abuses. His first movement was in the direction of agrarian legislation. He proposed to vest all public lands in the hands of three commissioners [triumviri], who were to distribute the public lands, at that time largely monopolized by the wealthy, to all citizens in needy circumstances. The bill met with bitter opposition from the rich landholders but was eventually passed and Gracchus rose to the summit of popular power. He also brought forward a measure limiting the necessary period of military service; a second bill was drawn up by him for the reformation of the law courts and a third established a right of appeal from the law courts to the popular assembly. These measures were afterward carried by his brother Caius. Tiberius Gracchus was killed in a tumult which was raised in the Forum by the nobles and their partisans and three hundred of his followers lost their lives in the fray.

Caius Gracchus, his brother, returned to Rome B.C. 124 from Sardinia, where he had been engaged in subduing the mountaineers. For ten years he had kept aloof from public life but was at once elected tribune, in the discharge of which office he showed distinguished powers as an orator. He brought forth the important measures known as the Sempronian Laws, the provisions of which were quite revolutionary in character. The first of these laws renewed and extended the agrarian laws of his brother and instituted new colonies in Italy and the provinces. By the second Sempronian law the State undertook to furnish corn at a low price to all Roman citizens.

Other measures aimed at diminishing the great administrative power of the senate, which had so far monopolized all judicial offices. By the law of Gracchus the administration of justice was entirely transferred to a body of three hundred persons who possessed the equestrian rate of property. The Sempronian law for the assignment of consular provinces, which hitherto had been left to the senate, made the allotment of two designated provinces to be decided by the newly elected consuls themselves. The power of the senate was also crippled by the law of Gracchus in which he transferred to the tribunes the burden of improving the roads of Italy, contracts for which had hitherto been awarded by the censor under the approval of the senate. These movements were all in the direction of increasing popular and democratic power and the work of the Gracchi tended to the extension of political freedom. In the history of politics these social struggles are among the most important events illustrative of the gradual dawn of civil liberty among a people which had been dominated and oppressed by a selfish aristocracy.

This selection is by Theodor Mommsen.

Time: 133 BC
Place: Rome

The power of Gracchus rested on the mercantile class and the proletariat; primarily on the latter, which in this conflict — wherein neither side had any military reserve — acted, as it were, the part of an army. It was clear that the senate was not powerful enough to wrest either from the merchants or from the proletariat 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 civilized form to a street riot, in presence of which the senate was utterly defenceless. But it was no less clear that Gracchus himself and these merchants and proletarians were only kept together by mutual advantage and that the men of material interests were ready to accept their posts and the populace, strictly so called, its bread, quite as well from any other as from Caius Gracchus.

The institutions of Gracchus stood, for the moment at least, immovably firm, with the exception of a single one — his own supremacy. The weakness of the latter lay in the fact that in the constitution of Gracchus there was no relation of allegiance subsisting at all between the chief and the army; and, while the new constitution possessed all other elements of vitality, it lacked one — the moral tie between ruler and ruled, without which every state rests on a pedestal of clay. In the rejection of the proposal to admit the Latins to the franchise it had been demonstrated with decisive clearness that the multitude in fact never voted for Gracchus but always simply for itself. The aristocracy conceived the plan of offering battle to the author of the corn largesses and land assignations on his own ground.

As a matter of course the senate offered to the proletariat not merely the same advantages as Gracchus had already assured to it in corn and otherwise but advantages still greater. Commissioned by the senate, the tribune of the people, Marcus Livius Drusus, proposed to relieve those who received land under the laws of Gracchus from the rent imposed on them and to declare their allotments to be free and alienable property; and, further, to provide for the proletariat not in transmarine but in twelve Italian, colonies, each of three thousand colonists, for the planting of which the people might nominate suitable men; only Drusus himself declined — in contrast with the family complexion of the Gracchan commission — to take part in this honorable duty. Presumably the Latins were named as those who would have to bear the costs of the plan, for there does not appear to have existed then in Italy other occupied domain land of any extent save that which was enjoyed by them.

We find isolated enactments of Drusus — such as the regulation that the punishment of scourging might only be inflicted on the Latin soldier by the Latin officer set over him and not by the Roman officer — which were to all appearance intended to indemnify the Latins for other losses. The plan was not the most refined. The attempt at rivalry was too clear; the endeavor to draw the fair bond between the nobles and the proletariat still closer by their exercising jointly a tyranny over the Latins was too transparent; the inquiry suggested itself too readily.

In what part of the peninsula, now that the Italian domains had been mainly given away already — even granting that the whole domains assigned to the Latins were confiscated — was the occupied domain land requisite for the formation of twelve new, numerous and compact burgess communities to be discovered? Lastly, the declaration of Drusus that he would have nothing to do with the execution of his law was so dreadfully prudent as to border on sheer folly. But the clumsy snare was quite suited to the stupid game which they wished to catch. There was the additional and perhaps decisive consideration that Gracchus, on whose personal influence everything depended, was just then establishing the Carthaginian colony in Africa and that his lieutenant in the capital, Marcus Flaccus, played into the hands of his opponents by his vehement and maladroit acts. The “people” accordingly ratified the Livian laws as readily as it had before ratified the Sempronian. It then as usual repaid its latest by inflicting a gentle blow on its earlier benefactor, declining to reëlect him when he stood for the third time as a candidate for the tribunate for the year B.C. 120. On this occasion, however, there are alleged to have been unjust proceedings on the part of the tribune presiding at the election, who had been offended by Gracchus.

Thus the foundation of his despotism gave way beneath him. A second blow was inflicted on him by the consular elections, which not only proved, in a general sense, adverse to the democracy but which placed at the head of the State Lucius Opimius, one of the least scrupulous chiefs of the strict aristocratic party and a man firmly resolved to get rid of their dangerous antagonist at the earliest opportunity. Such an opportunity soon occurred. On the 10th of December, B.C. 121, Gracchus ceased to be tribune of the people. On the 1st of January, B.C. 120, Opimius entered upon his office.

The first attack, as was fair, was directed against the most useful and the most unpopular measure of Gracchus, the reëstablishment of Carthage, while the transmarine colonies had hitherto been only indirectly assailed through the greater allurements of the Italian. African hyenas, it was now alleged, dug up the newly placed boundary stones of Carthage and the Roman priests when requested certified that such signs and portents ought to form an express warning against rebuilding on a site accursed by the gods. The senate thereby found itself in its conscience compelled to have a law proposed which prohibited the planting of the colony of Sunonia. Gracchus, who with the other men nominated to establish it was just then selecting the colonists, appeared on the day of voting at the Capitol, whither the burgesses were convoked, with a view to procure by means of his adherents the rejection of the law.

Continued.

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