The Agrarian Revolution 145–78 BC

Introduction

The Roman Revolution had many causes and results, and the personalities who emerged in its heat—from the Gracchi to Augustus—rank among the strongest figures in history. Never before or since has such a struggle arisen over such ideals, nor has the drama of world history been so fiercely contested. The first cause was the massive importation of grain from Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and Africa, which, being grown by slaves and therefore cheap, drove the price of cereals below the cost of production and sale, ruining many Italian farmers. The second cause was the influx of slaves who replaced free peasants in the countryside and free workers in the cities. The third was the spread of the system of large estates. In 220 BC a law forbade senators from contracting or investing in commerce; but senators, intoxicated by war spoils, bought up vast estates. The newly conquered lands were sometimes sold in small plots to colonists, easing urban unrest; more were granted to capitalists in payment for loans made to the state during the wars; but the largest portion was bought or leased by senators or merchants on terms fixed by the government. Smallholders, to compete with the owners of these great estates, were forced to borrow money at rates beyond their means; thus they gradually fell into poverty, bankruptcy, tenancy, or slum life. Finally, the peasants, having seen and plundered the world in military service, no longer had the taste or patience for solitary labor or the tedious and menial troubles of the fields; so they preferred to join the turbulent urban proletariat, watch free gladiatorial spectacles in the amphitheaters, receive cheap grain from the state, sell their votes to whoever paid or promised more, and disappear into the anonymous mass of the poor and dispossessed.

The Background of Revolution

Roman society, once a community of free farmers, now depended more and more on the plunder of foreign lands and internal slavery. In the cities almost all domestic work, most handicrafts, commerce, banking, and nearly all labor in factories and public buildings was performed by slaves, so that the wages of free workers fell to a level where idleness was as profitable as labor. Owners of large estates preferred slaves to free men because slaves were not liable for military service and their offspring, thanks to the only recreation allowed them or the malice of their masters, could be kept generation after generation. To supply living machines for these industrialized farms, raids were made throughout the Mediterranean. After every battle, pirates and Roman officials added their captives to the prisoners of war. Pirates seized free men and slaves on the coasts of Asia or nearby, and officials, with their regular hunts, added those provincials whom local authorities did not protect. Every week slave dealers brought their human quarry from Africa, Spain, Gaul, Germany, the Danube, Russia, Asia, and Greece to the ports of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The auction of ten thousand slaves in a single working day at Delos was not unusual. In 177, forty thousand Sardinians and fifteen thousand Epirotes were captured by Roman armies and sold into slavery; the price of an Epirote slave was about one dollar. In the cities, friendly bonds with masters and the hope of manumission lessened the bitterness of slavery; but in the fields there was no human connection with exploitation. There the slave, unlike in Greece or early Rome, was not counted as a member of the family; he rarely saw his master; and the overseer’s reward depended on how much he could squeeze from the sweat of the slaves under his whip. The slave’s wage on large estates was food and clothing just enough to keep him working from dawn to dusk every day except holidays until old age. If a slave complained or disobeyed, he was chained at the ankles during work and locked at night in the dungeon that was part of every large farm. This system was wasteful and brutal, for the number of households working a single unit of land was now less than one-twentieth of the families who had once lived there as free men.

If we remember that at least half the slaves had once been free (since slaves were less often sent to war), we can guess at the bitterness of their broken lives and then marvel at how rarely they revolted. In 196 the slaves and free workers of Etruria rose in revolt. Roman legions crushed the rebellion and, according to Livy, “many were killed or captured; the rest were scourged and crucified.” In 185 a similar uprising in Apulia saw seven thousand slaves arrested and condemned to the mines. In the mines of New Carthage alone four thousand Spanish slaves labored. In 139 the “First Slave War” began in Sicily. Four hundred slaves answered the call of Eunus and massacred the free population of the city. More slaves poured in from the fields and dungeons of Sicily, and the number of rebels rose to seventy thousand. They captured Agrigentum, defeated the Roman praetor’s forces, and held almost the entire island until 131, when a consul’s army trapped them at Enna and forced surrender by starvation. Eunus was brought to Rome and thrown into a dungeon, where he died of hunger and lice. In 133 smaller revolts ended with the killing of one hundred and fifty slaves in Rome, four hundred and fifty in Minturnae, and four thousand in Sinuessa. In that year Tiberius Gracchus passed the agrarian law that began the Roman Revolution.

Tiberius Gracchus

He was the son of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, who by his generous policy won the gratitude of the Spanish people. He was twice consul and once censor, saved the life of Scipio Africanus’s brother, and married his daughter Cornelia. Cornelia bore him twelve children, all but three of whom died before reaching maturity; after her husband’s death she had to rear Tiberius, Gaius, and her daughter alone. Both father and mother were attached to Hellenistic culture and the Scipionic circle. Cornelia gathered a literary salon around her and wrote letters of such pure and elegant style that they hold a distinguished place in Roman literature. Plutarch says that one of the kings of Egypt sought her hand in marriage and offered her the throne of Egypt when she became a widow; but Cornelia refused and preferred to remain the daughter of one Scipio, the mother-in-law of another, and the mother of the Gracchi brothers.

Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, having been educated in an environment of philosophy and statesmanship, were familiar with both the problems of the Roman state and Greek thought. Both were especially influenced by Blossius, the Roman philosopher from Cumae, and drew from him a passion and vigor for liberty that made them scorn the power of Roman traditionalists. Both brothers were almost equally and excessively ambitious, proud, sincere, and eloquent, and knew no measure in courage. Gaius relates that when Tiberius once passed through Etruria he “saw how few the inhabitants were and that those who tilled the soil and tended the flocks were foreign slaves.” Thus he became aware of the wretched condition of the Italian peasants. Realizing that only property owners could now serve in the legions, he asked himself how Rome could maintain its leadership or independence if the legions were filled with wretched and alien slaves instead of the sturdy and spirited peasants who had once formed them. How could Roman democracy and life remain healthy when the urban proletariat, instead of being proud landowners and farmers, lived in poverty? The division of land among poor citizens seemed the obvious and necessary solution to the problems of rural slavery, urban corruption and overcrowding, and military decline.

At the beginning of 133 Tiberius Gracchus was elected tribune of the plebs and announced that he intended to submit three proposals to the tribal assembly: (1) no citizen should hold more than 333 acres, or, if he had two sons, more than 667 acres of the public lands that had been bought or leased from the state; (2) all public lands previously sold or leased to individuals should be returned to the government at the original purchase or lease price plus an additional sum for improvements; and (3) the returned lands should be distributed in twenty-acre plots among the poor on condition that the recipients never sell their share and pay an annual tax to the treasury. This was not a utopian scheme but an attempt to enforce the “Licinian Laws” passed in 367 BC, which had never been enforced nor repealed. In one of the most famous speeches in Roman history, Gracchus told the poor plebeians:

The wild beasts of the field and the birds of the air have their dens and nests, but the men who fight and die for Italy have only the sun and the wind. Our generals exhort their soldiers to fight for the tombs and altars of their ancestors. This is a vain and lying appeal. Where is the altar built for your fathers? Where is the tomb of your ancestors? You fight and die to provide wealth and luxury for others. You are called the lords of the world, but you cannot find a single clod of earth that is your own.

The Senate denounced Gracchus’s proposals as usurpation and accused him of aiming at tyranny; they induced another tribune, Octavius, to block the bills with his veto. Gracchus therefore proposed that any tribune who acted against the wishes of his electors should be immediately deposed. The assembly passed this proposal, and Gracchus’s lictors removed Octavius from the tribunician bench. The main bills were then approved and became law; the assembly members, fearing for Gracchus’s life, escorted him home.

Gracchus’s unconstitutional abolition of a tribune’s veto—previously declared absolute by the assembly itself—gave his opponents a pretext to thwart his efforts. They announced that they would prosecute him at the end of his first year of office for violating the constitution and using force against a tribune. Gracchus again broke a constitutional rule by demanding re-election as tribune for 132. Since Scipio Aemilianus and Laelius, senators who had previously defended Gracchus’s bills, had now withdrawn their support, Gracchus threw himself completely into the arms of the people and promised that if re-elected he would shorten military service, abolish the senators’ exclusive right to choose jurors, and grant citizenship to Rome’s Italian allies. Meanwhile the Senate refused to provide funds for the commission charged with carrying out Tiberius’s laws. When Attalus III of Pergamon bequeathed his kingdom to Rome (133), Gracchus proposed to the assembly that Attalus’s personal and movable property be sold and the proceeds distributed among the recipients of public land to provide them with farming equipment. The Senate was furious, seeing that in this way its control over the provinces and public funds would pass to an assembly that was neither tame nor truly representative of the people, whose members were low-born and foreign. When election day arrived, Gracchus, hinting that defeat would mean prosecution and death, appeared in the great square with armed guards and in mourning dress. When voting began, both sides came to blows. Scipio Nasica, shouting that Gracchus aimed at kingship, led the senators, armed with clubs, into the Forum. Gracchus’s supporters, terrified by the long flowing robes of the patricians, all fled; Gracchus was struck on the head and killed, and several hundred of his followers died with him. When his brother asked permission to bury him, he was refused, and while Cornelia mourned, the bodies of the slain rebels were thrown into the Tiber.

Gaius Gracchus

Cruel rumor-mongers accused Cornelia of plotting with her daughter, the ill-fated and ill-favored wife of Scipio, to murder him. Cornelia, facing this slander, consoled herself by devoting herself to the upbringing of her surviving son and her last “jewel.” The murder of Gracchus stirred in Gaius not a desire for revenge but a determination to complete his brother’s work. Having served with distinction and courage under Aemilianus at Numantia and won universal admiration by his upright conduct and simple life, Gaius was elected tribune at the end of 124.

Being more realistic than Tiberius, he realized that reforms conflicting with the balance of economic or political power in the Roman state could not be carried out. He therefore tried to win over four classes: the rural population, the soldiers, the urban proletariat, and the merchants. He won the support of the rural population by renewing his brother’s agrarian laws, extending them to public lands in the provinces, and restoring the agrarian commission with personal supervision of its operations. He pleased the middle class by founding new colonies at Capua, Tarentum, Narbo, and Carthage and turning them into commercial centers. He satisfied the soldiers by passing a law providing for their clothing and maintenance at public expense. He won the gratitude of the urban masses by the “grain law,” which obliged the state to distribute a bushel of wheat at six and one-third asses (half the market price) to all who asked for it. This measure harmed the old Roman ideal of self-reliance and later caused vital changes in Roman history. Gaius argued that grain merchants were selling their goods at twice the cost of production and that his action, which unified agricultural operations and produced savings, would not harm the state. In any case, the grain law turned the poor free citizens of Rome from dependent supporters of the aristocracy into defenders of the Gracchi brothers and, later, of Marius and Caesar, laying the foundation for the democratic movement that reached its peak under Claudius and died at Actium.

The purpose of Gaius’s fifth measure was to secure the power of his supporters by abolishing the traditional order of voting in the Centuriate Assembly, so that voting order would henceforth be determined by lot. He pleased the merchants by giving them the exclusive right to serve as jurors in trials concerning provincial affairs—in other words, the right to judge most of their own cases. He stimulated their greed by proposing that they collect a tithe on all produce from Asia Minor. He enriched the contractors and reduced unemployment by carrying out a program of road-building throughout Italy. Taken together, these laws—apart from the politically deceptive aspects of some—were the most constructive measures passed in Rome before Caesar.

Enjoying the support of these diverse elements, Gaius was able to violate tradition and be re-elected tribune twice in succession. It was perhaps at this time that he decided to add three hundred new members—chosen by the assembly from among the merchants—to the existing three hundred senators. He also proposed that all free men of Latium receive full citizenship rights and the rest of the free men of Italy receive partial citizenship rights. This measure, the boldest step he took toward expanding democracy, was his first mistake. The voters showed no enthusiasm for sharing their privileges even with those few of whom were able to attend the assemblies in Rome. The Senate seized the opportunity. The senators, whom Gaius had ignored and who appeared powerless, saw this brilliant tribune only as a demagogue who wished to expand his personal power by the reckless division of public lands and funds. While Gaius was away founding his colony at Carthage, they used the absence to induce another tribune, Marcus Livius Drusus, to give two pieces of advice: first, to win the support of the rural population by passing a law abolishing the tax that the Gracchan laws had imposed on them; second, to please the urban proletariat and at the same time render them powerless by proposing the foundation of twelve new colonies in Italy, each consisting of three thousand men from the people of Rome. The assembly promptly approved these bills, and when Gaius returned he found that Drusus, now the people’s favorite, had step by step challenged his leadership. Gaius tried to be elected tribune for a third time but failed; his friends claimed that he had been elected but that the votes had been falsified. Gaius warned his supporters against the use of force and withdrew.

The following year the Senate proposed to abandon the foundation of the colony at Carthage; all factions, openly and secretly, saw this as the first step toward repealing the Gracchan laws. Some of Gaius’s supporters appeared armed in the assembly, and one of them killed a conservative who was about to attack Gaius. The next day the senators appeared fully armed, each with two armed slaves, and attacked the popular faction, who had barricaded themselves on the Aventine Hill. Gaius tried to calm the tumult and prevent further violence. Failing, he fled across the Tiber and, when overtaken, ordered his slave to kill him; the slave did so and then killed himself. Two hundred and fifty of Gaius’s supporters fell in the fighting, and three thousand more were executed by senatorial decree. As the bodies of Gaius and his supporters were thrown into the river, the city crowd, whose welfare Gaius had sought, remained silent. The Senate forbade Cornelia to wear mourning for her son.

Marius

The victorious aristocracy used all its cunning to neutralize the constructive elements of the Gracchan laws while leaving their demagogic aspects intact. But it lacked the courage to deprive the merchants of jury service or to drive the contractors and traders from their profitable hunting grounds in Asia, and it allowed the distribution of grain, as a guarantee against revolution, to continue. To the much-discussed law it added a clause permitting the recipients of land to sell their holdings; thousands of them sold their plots to slave-owners, and the system of large estates revived. In 118 the agrarian commission was abolished and dismantled. The urban masses in the capital raised no protest, for they had concluded that eating state grain in the city was better than sweating in the fields or working in frontier colonies. Prosperity was increasing, but it was not being distributed; in 104 BC a moderate democrat calculated that only two thousand Roman citizens owned property.

Appian says: “The condition of the people became even worse. The plebeians lost everything. … The number of citizens and soldiers continued to decline.” It became increasingly necessary to recruit legionaries from the Italian provinces, but these men had neither the enthusiasm for war nor love for Rome. Every day more men deserted military service; military discipline weakened and the Republic’s defensive power sank to its lowest level.

Italy was therefore attacked almost simultaneously from the north and the south. In 113 two Germanic tribes, the Cimbri and the Teutones, as if to give the Romans a foretaste of their final fate, poured down like a terrifying flood—three hundred thousand warriors with their women, children, and animals in covered wagons—from their homeland (Germany) toward Italy. Perhaps they had heard from beyond the Alps that Rome was given over to luxury and weary of war. The newcomers were tall, strong, fearless, and so fair that the Italians said their children looked like white-haired old men. At Noreia (modern Neumarkt in Carinthia) they met a Roman army and defeated it. They then crossed the Rhine and defeated a second Roman army. They then turned south through western Gaul and overcame a third, fourth, and fifth Roman army. At Arausio (modern Orange) eighty thousand legionaries and forty thousand camp followers were killed in battle. All Italy lay open to the invaders, and Rome was seized by a terror not felt since the days of Hannibal.

Almost at the same time war broke out in Numidia. When Jugurtha, grandson of Masinissa, tortured his brother to death and tried to deprive his cousins of their share of the kingdom, the Senate, wishing to turn Numidia into a province and open its doors to Roman goods and capital, declared war on him. Jugurtha bought the patricians to defend his cause and crimes before the Senate and bribed the generals sent against him into half-hearted efforts or a favorable peace. When summoned to Rome he spent more than ever from the treasury and was able to return to his capital unhindered.

From these struggles only one honorable official emerged: Gaius Marius, the son of a day-laborer, born like Cicero at Arpinum. In early youth he joined the army, was wounded at Numantia, married one of Caesar’s aunts, and although he lacked education and refinement—perhaps precisely for that reason—was elected tribune of the plebs. At the end of 108 he resigned his post as lieutenant to the incompetent Quintus Metellus in Africa and offered himself as a candidate for the tribunate on the grounds that if he replaced Metellus he would bring the war with Jugurtha to a successful conclusion. When elected he took command and forced Jugurtha to surrender (106). At the time the people did not know that the main factor in this victory had been a young noble of great courage named Lucius Sulla—this story came out later. Marius returned to Rome in triumph and became so popular that the assembly, disregarding the decaying constitution, elected him tribune several years in succession (104–100). The merchants supported him because his victories opened the way for their investments and because he was undoubtedly the only man who could crush the Celtic invasion. From that time Rome began to recognize, in the person of Caesar’s uncle, many of the features of the later Caesarian system; to many weary Romans the dictatorship of a popular leader supported by a loyal army seemed the only remedy against the abuses of aristocratic liberty.

After their victory at Arausio the Cimbri crossed the Pyrenees and ravaged Spain, sparing Rome for a time. But in 102 they returned to Rome with even greater numbers and joined forces with the Teutones, who were to attack the fertile plains of northern Italy simultaneously by separate routes. Marius met this danger with a new method of recruitment that revolutionized both the military organization and the government. He called for volunteers of all classes, rich or poor, offered them generous pay, and promised to free them after each campaign and give them land. The army thus formed was drawn largely from the urban proletariat and felt hostile toward the patricians. This army fought not for the fatherland but for its general and for plunder. In this way Marius, perhaps without realizing it, laid the foundation for the Caesarian revolution. He was a soldier, not a politician, and had no opportunity to weigh the distant political consequences. Marius led his troops over the Alps and, by marching and drilling, hardened their bodies and, by attacking easily defeated targets, made them brave; until his soldiers were seasoned he did not risk battle with the enemy. The Teutones, unopposed, passed the Roman camp and mockingly asked the soldiers if they had any messages for their women in Rome, since they intended soon to enjoy the company of Roman women. The number of the Teutones can be guessed from the fact that their passage past the Roman camp took six days. When all the invaders had passed, Marius ordered his army to attack them from behind. In the battle that thus took place at Aquae Sextiae (modern Aix-en-Provence) the new legions killed or captured one hundred thousand men. Plutarch reports that the people of Massilia built fences of bones around their vineyards and that after the carcasses rotted and winter rains fell the soil became so fertile from the putrid matter that seeped into it that the next year it produced an unprecedented harvest. Marius then gave his army a few months’ rest and led it back to Italy, where at Vercellae near the Po he met the Cimbri—the same place where Hannibal had first defeated the Romans (101 BC). The barbarians, to show their strength and courage, went naked into the snow, dragged themselves over the ice and through deep crevices to the mountain peaks, and then used their shields as sleds and slid joyfully down. In the battle that followed almost all of them were killed.

Marius, like Camillus who had once driven back the invading Celts, and Romulus who had refounded Rome, was received with joy in the capital. Part of the spoils he brought with him was given to him as a reward, and Marius thus became a rich man and acquired estates “as large as a kingdom.” In 100 BC he was elected tribune for the sixth time. His colleague, Lucius Saturninus, was a fiery reformer who was determined to carry out the Gracchi’s aims by law if possible, or by force if not. Saturninus’s bill, which distributed land in the colonies to the veterans of the recent war, pleased Marius, and when he reduced the price of a bushel of state grain from six and one-third asses (about thirty-nine cents) to five-sixths of an as, Marius raised no objection. The Senate tried to block the tribunes from referring such measures to a vote by forbidding them, but Saturninus nevertheless had his measures approved by the assembly. Disorder then broke out on both sides. When Saturninus’s gangs killed Gaius Memmius, one of the most respected aristocrats, the Senate resorted to its last weapon and, using its right as the “senatus consultum ultimum” for the defense of the public safety, called on Marius as consul to suppress the revolution.

Marius faced the bitterest decision of his life. After long service to the people, it was a tragic end that he should now be forced to crush the leaders of the people and his old friends. Yet he too hated the violence of the revolution and considered its evils greater than its benefits. He therefore attacked the rebels with his forces and allowed Saturninus to be stoned and killed; then, while both the people whose rights he had defended and the aristocracy he had saved despised him, he retired into a gloomy seclusion.

The Italian Revolt

Now the revolution gradually turned into civil war. When the Senate asked its eastern allied kings for help against the Cimbrian invasion, Nicomedes, king of Bithynia, replied that all the fighting men of his kingdom worthy of the name had been sold into slavery to satisfy the heavy demands of Roman tax collectors. The Senate, now placing the existence of an army above everything else, ordered that all those enslaved for non-payment of taxes should be freed. On hearing this order, hundreds of slaves in Sicily, many of whom came from the Greek-speaking east, left their masters and gathered before the Roman praetor’s palace demanding freedom. The masters protested and the praetor suspended the order’s execution. The slaves, led by a religious charlatan named Salvius, mobilized for battle and attacked the city of Morgantia. The inhabitants of the city kept their own slaves loyal by promising them freedom if they repelled the attackers; the slaves drove off the attack but received no freedom; many of them then joined the rebels. At the same time (103), near the western end of the island, another six thousand slaves, led by Athenion, a cultivated and determined man, rose in revolt. This force defeated the troops the praetor sent against it one after another and, taking the eastern road, joined the rebels under Salvius’s leadership. The combined forces defeated the army sent from Italy, but Salvius died at the moment of victory. More legions under the consul Manius Aquilius crossed the straits; Athenion was killed in single combat with Aquilius and the leaderless slaves were defeated; thousands of them fell in battle, and thousands more returned to their masters while hundreds were shipped to Rome to fight the lions in the spectacles held to celebrate Aquilius’s victory. Instead of fighting, the slaves turned their daggers on one another until all were dead.

A few years after this “Second Slave War,” all Italy was thrown into turmoil. For nearly two centuries Rome—a small state between Cumae and Caere, between the Apennines and the sea—had ruled the rest of Italy as if it were its subject territory. Even some cities near Rome, such as Tibur and Praeneste, had no voice in the government that ruled them. The Senate and consuls imposed their decrees and laws on the Italian communities with the same domineering authority as on foreign and conquered provinces. The resources and manpower of the “allies” were spent on wars whose aim was to increase the wealth of a few families in Rome. Those states that had remained loyal to Rome during the crisis with Hannibal received scant reward; those that had helped him in any way were, as punishment, reduced to such slavish obedience that many of their free men joined the slave revolts. A few rich men in the cities received Roman citizenship, and Roman power everywhere supported the rich against the poor. In 126 an assembly forbade the inhabitants of Italian cities to migrate to Rome, and by a decree in 95 all those who held Italian but not Roman citizenship were expelled from the self-centered capital.

One of the aristocrats tried to reform this situation but lost his life in the attempt. Marcus Livius Drusus was the son of a tribune who had rivaled Tiberius Gracchus. Since his adopted son became the father-in-law of Augustus, his family linked the beginning of the revolution to its end. After being elected tribune in 91 he proposed three measures: (1) the distribution of more public land among the poor; (2) the restoration of the senators’ exclusive right to jury service while adding three hundred “equestrians” or capitalists to the Senate; and (3) the granting of Roman citizenship to all free men of Italy. The assembly approved the first bill with pleasure and the second with coolness; the Senate rejected both and declared them void. The third bill was never put to a vote, for an unknown man murdered Drusus in his own house.

The Italian provinces, whose hopes Drusus’s bills had raised and whose outcome convinced them that the Senate and assembly would never easily agree to share their privileges, prepared for revolution. They formed a