But unfortunately for those who had the interests of the farmer at heart, the constitution of Rome rested on a public assembly of citizens massed in the Campus Martius. A permanent court of three commissioners “Triumviri agris dandis assignandis,” was to be created, not only to distribute land, but to sit as judges in all cases where there was a dispute as to what was and what was not state domain, or as to the fraction which the old tenant desired to retain, or as to any other point arising out of the law. Passing through Etruria on his way to Spain, as we are told, he saw no one working in the fields but slaves; tillage seemed to be dying out and the free farmer to have disappeared. They had come to Rome precisely in order to enjoy the cheap loaf, and they were already clamouring to have it larger and yet cheaper. “Why in such a hurry,” asked the lady, “unless indeed you chance to have got Tiberius Gracchus for her?” Clearly public opinion, among the matrons of Rome who were blessed with marriageable daughters, looked upon the young man as the most eligible, The evils from which Italy, or rather Roman Italy, was suffering in B.C. The opponents of Gracchus were already wrought up to such a pitch of wrath by the financial ruin that he had brought upon them, that they readily believed — or professed to believe — even the wildest of these rumours. Again there was a deadlock. This fact tended to make the working of the economic crisis slower. Sometimes it was used for purely personal ends by any vain, or eccentric, or ambitious person who had succeeded in obtaining the office. Of the public land held by possessio, some had been granted out as far back as the Samnite and Pyrrhic wars, and none had been distributed at a later date than Hannibal’s expulsion from Italy. Cattle and sheep, kept on a large scale, could pay, long after com had become a hopeless failure. The confusion and anarchy caused was out of all proportion to the gravity of the provocation which Tiberius had received. The news that Flaccus had carried to the assembly seems to have been somewhat highly coloured, for though the possessores had been denouncing Tiberius in the bitterest terms, they had not succeeded in moving the consul Scaevola to take any action against him, nor had the Senate shown any willingness to pass a decree of outlawry. Accordingly they had got their instrument ready. Indeed, looking over the assembly, all clamorous for the Agrarian Law and new farms, Octavius must have considered it a mockery as well as a solecism. Two friends of Gracchus, a Manlius and a Fulvius, both consulars, are then said to have suggested to him that, before going further, he might ask the Senate to plead with his colleague to allow the bill a fair hearing. Nevertheless, when the adjourned assembly met, Tiberius put before them the motion that Octavius should be deposed from office. It had not been invariably observed, but it was still on the Statute Book. We may suspect also that the discovery of his own power to sway the multitude by his fervid eloquence had somewhat intoxicated him, and that he was not unwilling to accept the post of “friend of the people.” To accuse him of mere ambition and love of authority would be unfair. Your email address will not be published. The powers of the office had never been pressed to their logical extreme, though it was always possible that an obstinate man might bring matters to a crisis. It was quite enough to give an excuse to men much less angry and unscrupulous than the. We only know that there were an immense number of complicated lawsuits, and that the bitterness of feeling among the expropriated, grow absolutely desperate as, man after man, they were actually expelled from their holdings. But by asking for a second term of office Tiberius made himself into a permanent party leader. It would be better that one should be removed.” Accordingly he invited Octavius to take the sense of the meeting on their differences, with the understanding that the tribune found to be in a minority should abdicate from his office and withdraw. The speech, as all our authorities agree, was moving and eloquent enough. If the state machine could be worked by an irresponsible tribune dealing. Its most important clauses we have already noticed ; but we must add that the confiscated land was to be cut up into farms of thirty jugera each, inalienable by the allottees, and charged with a small rent payable to the state. His indignant partisans closed around him, vowing that he should be preserved at all costs, and for the next few days he went about with a sort of bodyguard armed with staves and bearing torches after nightfall. 137). Here lay the one chance for preserving the old balance of classes in the Roman state. The main result of it was to estrange from the reformer’s cause the greater part of his more moderate partisans. Its Yes, I am going to link to some Crypto.Fashion shirts, caps, etc. Tiberius Gracchus (Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus) 163–132 BC. Accordingly, the statesman who wished to carry his law before the Comitia had normally to face only the, Tiberius Gracchus was a perfectly honest and genuine enthusiast, who believed that he had a mission — the rehabilitation of Italian agriculture — and that he was quite competent to carry it out. Tiberius told him to look out for the worst, and dismissed the Comitia for that day. If we were to find a tribune trying to pull down the temple on the Capitol, or to set fire to the arsenal, we should lay restraining hands on him in spite of his inviolability. For in these days how many are there of the rank and file who possess an altar that their forefathers reared, or a sepulchre in which their ashes rest? He was named M. Octavius: all agree that he was a perfectly honest and upright man. Otherwise the Roman farmer, like the British farmer in the golden days of the struggle with Napoleon, might have prayed for “a bloody war and a wet harvest,” as the things most likely to send up wheat to 120s. He harangued them, told them that violence would probably be used against them, and added that in that case they must meet force by force. It was really economic changes, in a time of comparative peace, that were doing the mischief. When he broached his request, he was met with insulting replies from prominent squatters, and finally the Senate refused to interfere with a tribune who was only exercising his undoubted constitutional privilege. When the expected negative was given to his impassioned appeal, Tiberius suddenly produced a new and startling proposal. This fact tended to make the working of the economic crisis slower. He served two consulships and was awarded two triumphs, with consulships in 177 and 163 BC. Many had bought soil held by possessio at its full market value, under the impression — confirmed by the practice of two hundred years — that it was to all intents and purposes held under a perpetual lease. directly with the sovereign people, the Senate became a useless wheel in the engine. Tribune (tribunus plebis) Tiberius Gracchus proposed reforms that were straightforward and, he argued, well within Roman law, custom and tradition. One ridiculous Optimate solemnly declared that he had got from Pergamus, among the royal treasures, a crown and a purple robe, which he intended to use when he should proclaim himself king of Rome! He made an elaborate apologia for all that he had done in a speech which shows strong traces of his studies in the field of Greek political philosophy. The planks of it included (i) the relaxation of the terms of military service ; (2) the granting of a right of appeal from all law-courts to the sovereign people assembled in the Comitia ; (j;) the abolition of the monopoly, which the senators had hitherto enjoyed, of supplying all the jurors in the courts ; (4) (if Velleius is to be trusted) the introduction of a bill for extending the franchise to Latin and Italian allies. All this was a deliberate provocation of civil war: to endeavour to pack a meeting and to come down prepared for violence means rioting and not politics. He determined to make all state business impossible, till his bill should have had a hearing. The Spanish and other wars of the next generation, waged far away, would not have sufficed to ruin rural Italy. Had there ever been before, they asked, a citizen of Rome who could not stir without a huge gang of bravos at his. The cluster of stories which Plutarch gives us to illustrate the youth of the Gracchi are almost enough by themselves to explain Tiberius’s after career. Forty years later the Social War reveals to us the existence of a numerous free agricultural population all over the mountain regions of the Apennines — Samnium, Picenum, the Marsian territory, and the rest. — Was the Senate or the Public Assembly to rule the world, and by what machinery? One ridiculous Optimate solemnly declared that he had got from Pergamus, among the royal treasures, a crown and a purple robe, which he intended to use when he should proclaim himself king of Rome! On the lands from which they were to be evicted lay, as they complained, their old family villas and the tombs of their ancestors. It assumes that the verdict of the Comitia on some chance day of meeting is the same thing as “the will of the Roman people.” It also presupposes that what the people desires is necessarily for its own best interests. The eviction of all the, Samnite and Pyrrhic wars, and none had been distributed at a later date than Hannibal’s expulsion from Italy. He made an elaborate, But by asking for a second term of office Tiberius made himself into a permanent party leader. The reformers of the past had been content to work slowly, to introduce changes by adding small rags and patches to the constitution, or by inventing transparent legal fictions, which gained the practical point, while leaving the theory of the law that they were attacking apparently untouched. He himself certainly believed it; and when one of his friends died of an obscure distemper, Such a guarantee was not of much effective use, and Tiberius went about with the uncomfortable persuasion that he was a marked man. When the expected negative was given to his impassioned appeal, Tiberius suddenly produced a new and startling proposal. He announced that, as a matter of grace, and not of right, he should propose that the present occupiers might be allowed the terms granted by the Licinian Rogations. Clearly Tiberius would not lack supporters, and the angry capitalists soon saw that they would have to fight to the death, if they wished to retain the broad lands which they had so long regarded as their own. These ways of escape were not so obvious to the Roman of the second century. “If Tiberius said that a thing was right,” observed this good man, “right of course it must be.” When he grew up, the world conspired to do him honour. 133, Rome was blessed not with one, but with two obstinate tribunes who held diametrically opposite views. Even those who sympathised with his ends were scared at his reckless proceedings, for in this last crisis of his life he showed a complete lack of coolness and self-restraint. He sold it to the capitalist at a ruinous sacrifice, since he was simply anxious to move on at any price. Kingdom for those interested in the study of Rome and the Roman Empire. Accordingly he resolved that these enemies of the people should be chastised. When he died suddenly of sunstroke, it was found that he had left his whole kingdom as a, legacy to the Roman Republic. The soldiers in the Roman military had to all be landowners. The main result of it was to estrange from the reformer’s cause the greater part of his more moderate partisans. No doubt all the tags of Aristotle’s school on. Accordingly they bent all their efforts to the end of frustrating his election. On any ordinary day of meeting the assembly was entirely composed of the urban populace ; it would require some very great matter to induce the farmers of the Campagna to trudge in many miles in order to exercise the franchise. The evils from which Italy, or rather Roman Italy, was suffering in B.C. The debate in the Senate was only brought to a head when the clamour of the multitude who were fleeing from the scene of riot was heard. “The wild beasts of Italy,” he cried, “have their holes and dens to retire to, but the brave men who spill their blood in her cause have nothing left, when they come back from the wars, but light and air. In the reforms which he announced that he intended to carry out in B.C. And of the imports that were poured in from abroad, corn was one of the most prominent. “Was it not most just to distribute the public property among the public? Er war der älteste Sohn des Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus und der Cornelia, Tochter von Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus. Accordingly they had got their instrument ready. Ever since the Republic became a conquering power, it had been wont to confiscate part of the soil of vanquished enemies. They fully believed that their ruin had come not from economic causes, but from the greed of the rich; they thought that, if started again with the state’s aid and protection, they might yet live off the land. He argues that the only known child of Gaius Gracchus was a daughter. Very reasonably, from their own point of view, they resolved to fight till the last gasp, and to fight in the old constitutional Roman fashion, by finding one of the tribunes who sympathised with them, and inducing him to put his veto on his colleague’s proposed Agrarian Law. In the fourth century, and even in the third, the tendency of the Roman state had been to divide up the larger part of conquered land viritim, or to put colonies upon it. The type of exalted doctrinaire who exclaims that any constitutional check that hinders his plans must be swept away without further inquiry, that every political opponent is a bad man who must be crushed, has been known in many lands and many ages, from ancient Greece down to the France of the Revolution. But when the reformer devoted himself for many days to a desperate personal canvass, it soon became evident that his popularity was too great, and that his triumph was more than probable. An amateur writer of verse, he makes himself useful as an editor for Men of the West. Hence came the rise of the great ranches of Southern Italy which figure in so many descriptions. The news that Tiberius was canvassing for a second tenure of office brought the more or less suppressed wrath of his enemies to boiling-point. A permanent court of three commissioners “. On the night before the adjourned election meeting he collected a great crowd of his adherents, many of whom encamped before his house, and slept in the street. On the whole, too much is made of these causes. But fortune intervened. There is a point at which the freeholder, even if he be as frugal as the old Roman farmer, and even if he lives mainly by the consumption of his own produce, will refuse to stop any longer on the soil, more especially when the alternative is not emigration to the Far West, but removal to the capital, with all its urban pleasures, its cheap food, and its opportunities of living without the back-breaking toil of plough and mattock. His faithful tool Mummius had obtained the presidency for the day, and began to call over the roll of the tribes. The eviction of all the possessores from the public land was not such a simple matter as it looked. The hopeless side of the agrarian problem, then, in ancient Rome, was that all legislation to support the farming class must be useless without Protection, and Protection could not be got. Bitter hatred followed him wherever he appeared. They had also to face the state as a rival seller; the tithe-corn of Sicily from the civitates decumanae, who paid their tribute in kind instead of in money, was annually shot upon the Roman market, and the state had to get rid of it at what price it could. The most respected member of the Senate, chancing to lie next him at a dinner-party, offered him his daughter’s hand in marriage without waiting to be asked. But if he manifestly opposes their interests and tyrannises over them, by refusing to allow them the liberty to vote on any project which they have at heart, he surely deprives himself by his own act of his sacrosanct character. No story, was too silly or malignant to be told against him. The Senate and the urban populace did not care; there was a vague notion abroad that if the corn did go cheap, it was Roman citizens who bought it, and Roman citizens ought to get as much as possible of the profits of Empire out of the “praedia populi Romani.” Indeed, the city mob were already clamouring for distributions of corn when any excuse, adequate or inadequate, could be found. But the capital, the coast cities, and, most important of all, the treasure, were safely made over to the Senate and People. He gave notice to the praetors that they must close the law-courts, and that if they allowed a case to be tried they should be punished by a heavy fine. Beef and mutton, hides and wool, might still be grown at a profit, long after barley and wheat had been given up. Though he was busily engaged in breaking up the old constitution of Rome, he does not seem to have been aware of the fact. A single man was fated to bring forward both these questions, to formulate them in the most contentious shapes possible, to confuse their issues in the most inextricable fashion, and to leave a heritage of strife behind him for the next three generations of Romans. It is scarcely necessary to point out the effect on the agricultural classes of Central Italy of the appearance of such huge masses of cheap corn in the great central market of the capital. And Northern Etruria seems also to have suffered; it was a district which even in early days had been in the hands of great landholders who worked their farms with serfs, and now the serfs were being replaced by foreign slaves. Without any attempt at parley, Nasica charged at the Democrats, with his followers streaming in a wedge behind him, the senators at their head. It would probably be doing Tiberius an injustice to suspect that the whole of this programme was drawn up in order to provide him with an excuse for asking for a renewal of his tribunate. Copyright 2020 Men Of The West. 342), which discouraged re-election. Then, when told to depart, because he had been deposed and was no longer a tribune, he clung to the rostra, vociferating that the whole proceedings were null and void — a statement which was undoubtedly true, if there remained any force in the Roman constitution. If Hannibal did not succeed in permanently bringing down the number of Roman freeholders, we shall not be persuaded that Viriathus and the Numantines succeeded in doing so. Any theory based on the hypothesis that rich men are gratuitously and perversely wicked has found eager acceptance in certain quarters ever since history began. On the other hand, there was an old law, dating from the generation after Licinius (B.C. It is necessary to remember, however, that it was not all Italy which was affected. It was much more common to throw many small holdings into a vast ranch or sheep-farm, worked by a few slave-herdsmen.

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