It could, of course, be dangerous for a tribune to overplay his hand. Like most magistracies in the Republic, his office presented him with pitfalls as well as opportunities. Even by the standards of Roman political life, however, the unwritten rules that helped to determine a tribune’s behaviour were strikingly paradoxical. An office that provided almost limitless opportunities for playing dirty was also hedged about by the sacred. As it had been since ancient times, the person of a tribune was inviolable, and anyone who ignored that sanction was considered to have laid his hands upon the gods themselves. In return for his sacrosanct status a tribune was obliged during his year of office never to leave Rome, and always to keep an open house. He had to pay close attention to the people’s hardships and complaints, to listen to them whenever they stopped him in the street, and to read the graffiti which they might scrawl on public monuments, encouraging him to pass or obstruct new measures. No matter how overweening his personal ambition, the aristocrat who chose to stand for election as a tribune could not afford to appear haughty. Sometimes he might even go so far as to affect the accent of a plebeian from the slums. ‘Populares’, the Romans called such men: politicians who relied on the common touch.
Yet at the same time as he upheld the interests of the people, a popularis also had to respect the sensibilities of his own class. It was a balancing act that required enormous skill. If the tribunate was always regarded with suspicion by the more conservative elements in the nobility, then that was in large part because of the unique temptations that it offered to its holders. There was always a risk that a tribune might end up going too far, succumbing to the lure of easy popularity with the mob, bribing them with radical, un-Roman reforms. And, of course, the more that the slums swelled to bursting point, and the more wretched the living conditions for the poor became, the greater that risk grew.
It was two brothers of impeccable breeding, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who finally made the fateful attempt. First Tiberius, in 133 BC, and then Gaius, ten years later, used their tribunates to push for reforms in favour of the poor. They proposed that publicly held land be divided into allotments and handed out to the masses; that corn be sold to them below the market rate; even, shockingly, that the Republic should provide its poorest soldiers with clothes. Radical measures indeed, and the aristocracy, unsurprisingly, was appalled. To most noblemen, there appeared something implacable and sinister about the devotion of the Gracchi to the people. True, Tiberius was not the first of his class to have concerned himself with land reform, but his paternalism, so far as his peers were concerned, went altogether too far and too fast. Gaius, even more alarmingly, had a consciously revolutionary vision, of a republic imbued with the values of Greek democracy, in which the balance of power between the classes would be utterly transformed, and the people, not the aristocracy, would serve as the arbiters of Rome. How, his peers wondered, could any nobleman argue for this, unless he aimed to establish himself as a tyrant? What struck them as particularly ominous was the fact that Tiberius, having finished his year of office, had immediately sought re-election, and that Gaius, in 122 BC, had actually succeeded in obtaining a second successive tribunate. Where might illegalities such as these not end? Sacred as the person of a tribune might be, it was not so sacred as the preservation of the Republic itself. Twice the cry went up to defend the constitution and twice it was answered. Twelve years after Tiberius was clubbed to death with a stool-leg in a violent brawl Gaius, in 121, was also killed by agents of the aristocracy. His corpse was decapitated, and lead poured into his skull. In the wake of his murder three thousand of his followers were executed without trial.
These eruptions of civil violence were the first to spill blood in the streets of Rome since the expulsion of the kings. Their grotesque quality vividly reflected the scale of aristocratic paranoia. Tyranny was not the only spectre that the Gracchi had raised from Rome’s ancient past. It was no coincidence, for instance, that Gaius died on the spot most sacred to the plebeian cause, the Aventine. By taking refuge there, he and his supporters had deliberately sought to identify their cause with that of the ancient strikers. Despite the fact that the poor failed to rise in his support, Gaius’ attempt to stir long-dormant class struggles struck most members of the nobility as a terrifying act of irresponsibility. Yet the reprisals too filled them with unease. Head-hunting was hardly the practice of a civilised people. In the lead-weighted skull of Gaius Gracchus an ominous glimpse could be caught of what might happen were the conventions of the Republic to be breached, and its foundations swept away. It was a warning that temperament more than fitted the Romans to heed. What was the Republic, after all, if not a community bound together by its shared assumptions, precedents and past? To jettison this inheritance was to stare into the abyss. Tyranny or barbarism – these would be the alternatives were the Republic to fall.
Here, then, was one final paradox. A system that encouraged a gnawing hunger for prestige in its citizens, that seethed with their vaunting rivalries, that generated a dynamism so aggressive that it had overwhelmed all who came against it, also bred paralysis. This was the true tragedy of the Gracchi. Yes, they had been concerned with their own glory – they were Roman, after all – but they had also been genuinely passionate in their desire to improve the lot of their fellow citizens. The careers of both brothers had been bold attempts to grapple with Rome’s manifold and glaring problems. To that extent, the Gracchi had died as martyrs to their ideals. Yet there were few of their fellow noblemen who would have found that a reassuring thought. In the Republic there was no distinguishing between political goals and personal ambitions. Influence came through power, power through influence. The fate of the Gracchi had conclusively proved that any attempt to impose root and branch reforms on the Republic would be interpreted as tyranny. Programmes of radical change, no matter how idealistic their inspiration, would inevitably disintegrate into internecine rivalries. By demonstrating this to the point of destruction, the Gracchi had ultimately stymied the very reforms for which they had died. The tribunes who followed them would be more careful in the causes they adopted. Social revolution would remain on permanent hold.
Like the city itself, the Republic always appeared on the point of bursting with the fissile tensions contained within it. Yet just as Rome not only endured but continued to swell, so the constitution appeared to emerge stronger from every crisis to which it was subjected. And why, after all, should the Romans not cling to an order that had brought them such success? Frustrating, multi-form and complex it may have been, yet these were precisely the qualities that enabled it to absorb shocks and digest upheavals, to renew itself after every disaster. The Romans, who had turned the world upside down, could be comforted by knowing that the form of their republic still endured unchanged. The same intimacies of community bonded its citizens, the same cycles of competition gave focus to its years, the same clutter of institutions structured its affairs.
And even blood spilled in the streets might easily be scrubbed clean.
THE SIBYL’S CURSE
Sacker of Cities
Long before the murder of the Gracchi and their followers the Sibyl had foreseen it all. Roman would turn against Roman. Nor, according to the Sibyl’s grim prognostications, would the violence be confined to mere scuffles in the capital. Her vision of the future was far bleaker, far more dystopian: ‘Not foreign invaders, Italy, but your own sons will rape you, a brutal, interminable gang-rape, punishing you, famous country, for all your many depravities, leaving you prostrated, stretched out among the burning ashes. Self-slaughterer! No longer the mother of upstanding men, but rather the nurse of savage, ravening beasts!’1