The boy would have stood alongside his mother and the leading aristocratic senators before the blazing pyre outside Rome; it was here that, after the public funeral orations, his father’s body would have been cremated. As he watched the ceremonies come to an end, the boy would have been instilled with the desire to endure hardship and even death to earn a eulogy similar to that accorded his father. He now carried the responsibility of upholding the paternal name and glory. It was a burden outstripped only by the obligation to uphold the prestige of another family: his mother Cornelia’s.
Through both his mother and father, the young Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus was related to three of the great aristocratic dynasties of the Roman republic. Together, in the space of less than a hundred and fifty years, these families had led the way in turning the republic from its position as master of Italy to master of the entire Mediterranean. By the time of Gracchus the elder’s funeral, the Romans referred to that expanse of sea as mare nostrum (our sea) because of their undisputed dominion over it and the lands surrounding it.
And yet this boy’s path in life would radically diverge from the pattern established in his family. The young Tiberius himself would have no grand funeral like his father’s: just twenty-two years later his mutilated corpse would be slung unceremoniously into the river Tiber. The men who would carry out his murder would not be foreign enemies of Rome on the battlefield, but the same aristocratic senators who had lined up behind him watching his father’s funeral pyre burn. For Tiberius’s short, controversial life intersected with a key turning point – a crisis – in the history of the Roman republic. This crisis centred on the question of who would benefit from the empire Rome had so quickly acquired – the rich or the poor? The aristocratic architects of Rome’s empire or the ordinary citizen-soldiers who had built it? It was a question that would lead to a soul-searching investigation into the nature of Rome’s empire and what the process of acquiring it had done to the moral character and values of Romans. Extraordinarily, this crisis would see the young Tiberius take not the side of his own family and the aristocratic élite, but the side of the poor.
After the funeral the wax masks of the elder Gracchus and his ancestors were laid in a shrine in the family home. They would serve as an ‘inspiring spectacle for a young man of noble ambitions and virtuous aspirations. For can we conceive anyone to be unmoved by the sight of all the likenesses collected together of the men who have earned glory, all, as it were, living and breathing? What could be a more glorious spectacle?’2 Yet in 154 BC no one would have imagined what a revolutionary path the young Tiberius, in seeking to match the example represented by those masks, would take, or how it would change Rome for ever.
The great convulsion in Roman history epitomized by Tiberius’s career is a morality tale. In becoming a superpower, Rome, so it was said, abandoned the very values with which it had won its supremacy. At the pinnacle of its achievement, the virtues that had made the Roman republic so successful failed it and were lost for ever. To understand the significance of this turning point, however, one must begin with an account of how Rome reached it.
CONQUEST OF THE MEDITERRANEAN
The Greek historian Polybius, detained as a prisoner in Rome between 163 and 150 BC, wrote a history aimed at helping Romans to answer one question: how did Rome achieve supremacy over the Mediterranean in the space of just fifty-two years (219–167 BC)?3 Although Polybius’s work fed Roman myths and legends about this period in their history, this should not diminish the extraordinary success of Rome. The Romans’ mastery of the Mediterranean was so complete that by 167 BC the Senate was able to abolish direct taxation in Italy, replacing it with the riches that the republic received in revenue from its provinces abroad.
The leading politicians in Rome who had achieved this feat were a small clique of aristocratic families. Although access to these families – through the practice of adoption, for example – was more open than the Romans liked to think, between 509 and 133 BC just twenty-six families were said to have provided three-quarters of those elected to the consulship, the highest annual office in the republic. A mere ten had provided half of them. The young Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus was related to the three interconnected families who had blazed a trail during the great period of Roman expansion: the Sempronii Gracchi through his father, and both the Cornelii Scipiones and the Aemilii Paulli through his mother (see family tree, page 48). By tracing a brief history of Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean, we can see how all the young Tiberius’s relatives spearheaded Rome’s empire-building abroad. This extraordinary story begins in North Africa and with the challenge posed by a rival.
In 265 BC the ancient city of Carthage was the most significant power in the Mediterranean. It was founded by Phoenicians (from what is now Lebanon) around 800 BC. Their skill lay in seafaring, and it was their single-minded pursuit to control the trading routes of the western Mediterranean that, by 265 BC, made Carthage the wealthiest, most culturally advanced city of the region. Its trading posts stretched from the coasts of Spain and France to Sicily and Sardinia, and from there south across the whole of North Africa. While Carthage had come into conflict with other maritime peoples, particularly the Greeks, in the process of establishing these trading routes, its relations with the city-state of Rome and the seafaring peoples of Italy had been friendly: treaties protecting Carthage’s trade routes were established with Rome in 509 BC and 348 BC. Now in 265 BC, however, all that was about to change, although no one knew it at the outset.
Rome’s first great war with Carthage, known as the First Punic War (Punic being the Latin word for ‘Phoenician’), began in 264 BC. The moment of incitement was when Rome was called upon to help resolve a small dispute on the island of Sicily, a Carthaginian province (see map, previous page). The city of Messina, controlled by mercenaries from Campania in Italy, was being attacked by soldiers from the city of Syracuse. Rome took the side of Messina; Carthage took the side of Syracuse. The war by proxy blew up into a direct confrontation between Rome and Carthage after the consul in charge of the Roman army not only succeeded in relieving Messina, but also forced Syracuse to accept his generous terms, defect from Carthage and become an ally of Rome. Anxious to protect its province, Carthage joined battle in earnest by sending a large army to the island in 262 BC. So began a war that would last more than twenty years. At stake was the control of Sicily.
As the conflict escalated, so too did Rome’s war aims. Rome realized that to win the war it needed to drive Carthage out of Sicily altogether; to do that it needed to weaken Carthage’s control of the seas around Sicily. This would be no mean feat, for it required developing a weapon Rome had not yet tried out, let alone built: a navy. According to Polybius, the Romans seized the opportunity to build a war fleet for the first time in their history when a Carthaginian ship harrying the crossing of Roman troops to Sicily ran aground on the coast of southern Italy.4 The Romans seized it, copied its design and within a year produced a navy of one hundred oared warships. They even took the opportunity of enhancing the ships with a secret weapon: a rotatable, spiked boarding bridge. Thus armed, the Romans, led by their admiral Gaius Dulius, won their first sea battle at Mylae in 260 BC.