However, there is no evidence that he wanted to emasculate or even abolish the Senate; rather, his idea was to purify the Senate and make it more responsive to the interests of the People. He shared something of Cato’s disgust with the activities of the ruling élite and of Scipio Aemilianus’s commitment to fair treatment for the provinces. He was a radical, not a revolutionary.
DURING HIS SECOND term, Gaius grasped the nettle of allied resentment. He could see from Aemilianus’s fate that it would be hard to win public opinion to the Italian cause. A colleague of his on the tribunician bench had tabled a proposal, while serving as consul a few years earlier, to grant citizenship to any allied community that wanted it and, for those who didn’t, the right of appeal against Roman officials. The Senate was nervous and dispatched the consul to Gaul in response to a conveniently timed call from the port of Massilia for military assistance. The matter had had to be dropped.
The tribune would have been wise to let leave well alone, but the danger of serious disaffection across Italy was too great to ignore. He proposed that communities with Latin status (that is, a second-class citizenship—see this page) should be awarded the full franchise, and that plain and simple allies should receive Latin status. The Roman mob was displeased, and there was heated opposition in the Senate.
One of the consuls led the assault, deploying the fear-inducing slogans of the anti-immigrant campaigner through the ages. He declaimed:
I suppose you imagine that, if you give Latins the citizenship, there will still be room for you in the Assembly where you are standing now, and seats at the games and festivals. Don’t you realize that they will swamp everything?
A fellow tribune, working for the Senate, trumped Gaius with a populist package designed to satisfy both the People’s Assembly and Italian opinion. This was approved but (as intended, no doubt) never implemented, and Gaius’s bill failed. The only practical result of the initiative was his rising unpopularity among the city’s masses.
He failed to win a third term as tribune, and his opponents at once began to unpick his legislation. He had recently returned from a visit to Carthage to make arrangements for the building of Junonia, and at a crowded Assembly on the Capitol one of the new tribunes for 121 attacked the law authorizing it. Now that the crisis had arrived, Cornelia set aside her opposition to her son and helped him recruit bodyguards. These hired men lurked on the outskirts of the meeting, with Gaius walking up and down a portico in a nervous frame of mind. He may have intended only to observe the debate, but it is possible that he planned to disrupt the meeting.
Fate then played a wild card. A servant of Lucius Opimius, one of the consuls, bared his arm and made an insulting gesture. An overexcited Gracchan stabbed him fatally with a writing stylus. This was just the pretext the consul was hoping for. He immediately went to the Senate and persuaded it to vote a state of emergency. This was the first time that what came to be called the Final Decree, or senatus consultum ultimum, was passed. The Senate resolved: “Let the consuls see to it the Republic comes to no harm,” (“Videant consules ne quid detrimenti res publica caperet”).
This vague formula was understood to give senior officeholders the power to use lethal force against malefactors who were endangering the state. But did the Senate actually have the power to suspend a Roman citizen’s constitutional rights? The answer depended on a man’s political point of view, on the emotion of the moment. If we look at the issue dispassionately, the Senate was, in the final resort, an advisory body and its resolutions had no legal force. A consul had imperium, but the law insisted that he could not execute citizens without trial (reinforced by Gaius Gracchus’s own recent legislation); this was because they had the right of appeal, of provocatio, to the People. In practice, few would disobey a serving consul’s command, but he was wise to remember that, once out of office, he was subject to the courts and the anger of the Assembly.
Such fine considerations were of little interest in the heat of the present moment. Opimius called on senators to arm themselves, and for all equites to turn up the following morning with two armed servants. Rome passed an uneasy night. In the morning, the Gracchans seized the Aventine Hill, the traditional refuge of plebeian agitators through the ages. Gaius refused to arm himself (except for a dagger) and left home wearing a toga as if it were a normal day and he were just going down to the Forum on routine business.
After unsuccessful negotiations, Opimius had some archers loose their arrows into the crowds on the Aventine, throwing them into confusion. Gaius, furious at what was happening, took no part in the fighting. He walked up the broad steps of the Temple of Diana, standing high on its plateau on the hilltop, and entered the precinct. Ironically, the shrine was devoted to community, sanctuary, and arbitration, attributes not on offer that day. Gaius was so depressed that he considered taking his own life, but his companions confiscated his dagger and urged him to escape.
With enemies close behind, Gaius, a slave, and two friends ran across the narrow wooden footbridge spanning the Tiber, the Pons Sublicius. The friends halted and turned round at the head of the bridge, where, like Horatius and his companions, they fought their pursuers in order to give Gaius time to make a getaway. But they were soon overwhelmed.
Bystanders watched Gaius run to the other side of the river. They told him to hurry up, but offered no help. When he called for a horse, nobody gave him one. On being caught, the slave with him threw his arms around his master and had to be killed as well. (Another version of Gaius’s end has him finally succeed in committing suicide.) Gaius’s head was cut off and taken to Opimius, who had promised to reward the bearer with its weight in gold. Some say Gaius’s killer gouged out his brains and replaced them with lead to make the head heavier.
FOR ALL THE brothers’ good intentions the Gracchan episode was a disaster. Their policies were rational, and ultimately much of their legislation passed into the body of Roman law. The economic consequences of their land reforms were beneficial. The Senate reacted to the brothers rather like a general faced with a mutiny, who concedes most of the grievances but executes the ringleaders.
However, the constitutional results of their efforts were overwhelmingly negative. The Italians were more embittered than ever, through the Assembly the People had stretched their muscles, and for the first time the equites had become aware of their own strength vis-à-vis the Senate. Before the Gracchi, nobody had realized that the Republic could be governed from the tribunes’ bench. Both the Senate and the People had been shown to act with breathtaking selfishness, always consulting their own rather than the public interest.
The Roman constitution was a complicated contraption of levers and balances, with obsolete pieces of machinery left in place alongside modern additions. Its management called for sensitivity, imagination, and, above all, an ability to accommodate, to concede, to compromise. For centuries, these qualities among Rome’s politicians had drawn the admiration, reluctant or full-hearted, of friend and foe.
Now, though, the tragic trajectory of the Gracchi exposed the Republic for what it had become, an unstable and uncreative monster. It is no accident that, in his Civil Wars, Appian chose this moment at which to begin his story. He observed: