The populace was outraged at the brazen flouting of the law and their outrage grew when only lower-class plebs or resident foreigners were targeted for prosecution. The aristocratic senators who had participated in the affair—for example, the authors of the Lex Agraria—were never called to account despite their central role in the crisis. For the next few weeks the common people of Rome lived under the ominous shadow of the tribunal. Men were hauled before the consuls for the most tenuous connection to the Gracchan movement. Some were executed, many more driven into exile.3
If it was obnoxious to many that no senators were called to account for themselves, it was downright sacrilegious that Scipio Nasica still walked free. Nasica had done nothing less than orchestrate the murder of a sacrosanct tribune. That he had yet faced no consequences was literally a crime against the gods. So Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, a young reformist senator and ally of the Gracchans, announced his intention to bring Nasica to justice. Whatever they thought of Nasica’s conduct, the Senate could not stand by while an angry mob prosecuted the pontifex maximus. Luckily a convenient solution presented itself. With Tiberius dead, the Senate had taken back control of the Kingdom of Pergamum, and they named Nasica to an embassy that would travel to Pergamum, assess the situation, and begin the process of annexation. The pontifex was incensed that he was being shuffled out the back door, but complied with the will of his colleagues. Nasica departed for the east, where he would live just long enough to witness a giant slave revolt before dying bitterly, “without any desire to return to his ungrateful country.”4
Having defused this crisis the Senate also refused to ignite a new one. They knew there were limits to how far they could go with their repressive antics, so they did not attempt to repeal the Lex Agraria or to shut down the land commission. Either because they finally admitted the efficacy of reform or because they believed that stopping the process now would spark a riot, the Senate allowed the commission to continue its work. They assigned Mucianus—one of the senatorial authors of the Lex Agraria—to take Tiberius’s place on the commission alongside Claudius and young Gaius Gracchus. The redistribution of ager publicus continued.5
WHILE ALL OF this was unfolding in Rome, Scipio Aemilianus was half a world away wrapping up the conquest of Numantia. He had arrived eighteen months earlier and found the Spanish legions demoralized, inert, and lacking discipline. Aemilianus cleaned them up and ran them around on daily exercise to get them back into fighting shape. After a full year of preparation, Aemilianus then called in the full weight of Rome’s available manpower. In the spring of 133 more than 60,000 Italian, African, and Spanish soldiers surrounded the pitiful city of Numantia, which was now manned by just 8,000 holdouts. In the face of this overwhelming force the Numantines admitted defeat: “Despairing, therefore, of escape and in a revulsion of rage and fury they made an end of themselves, their families and their native city with the sword, with poison and with general conflagration.” When the few remaining traumatized survivors exited the gates, Aemilianus ordered them thrown in chains and Numantia razed to the ground.6
Aemilianus expected this victory to be the talk of Rome, but shortly after the fall of Numantia word came of a major political crisis in Rome. After passing a controversial land bill, Tiberius Gracchus and three hundred of his followers had been killed and dumped in the Tiber. Aemilianus did not respond diplomatically to the news. With the official story being that Tiberius had conspired to make himself a king, Aemilianus responded with another dose of Homeric wisdom: “So perish all those who attempt such crimes.” But when Aemilianus’s Homeric quip landed back home, the streets murmured with displeasure. Had Aemilianus just sanctioned the murder of a tribune—his own brother-in-law, no less? The same people who had carried Aemilianus to two extraordinary consulships now saw him as just another out-of-touch noble.7
Aemilianus was oblivious to the shift in mood back in Rome, however, and continued to believe that thanks to his latest conquest his star burned brighter than ever. When he returned home in the summer of 132, he was shocked by the reception he received. Rather than adoring throngs he found people in Rome glowering and standoffish. A distressed Aemilianus hardly recognized the people that had unanimously elected him consul just two years earlier.8
Things might have gone differently for Aemilianus had he been able to lavishly spread the wealth from his conquest in Numantia, but unfortunately there was no wealth to spread. Compared to his triumph after the sack of Carthage, Aemilianus’s Numantine triumph was a pathetic affair. Few riches. Few slaves. Nothing exotic or beautiful or wondrous to behold. For all the lives that had been ruined in the Spanish wars, it must have been infuriating to discover that all Rome had to show for it was a few trinkets and some gaunt Spaniards.9
Shortly after Aemilianus’s meager triumph, a rising Gracchan partisan named Gaius Papirius Carbo was elected tribune for 131. A passionate young reformer, Carbo introduced a bill that would extend the secret ballot to all legislative assemblies. If passed, it would complete the transformation of Roman voting from public voice to secret ballot—as all electoral, judicial, and legislative Assemblies would now be secret. Carbo also introduced a bill to retroactively confirm the legitimacy of Tiberius’s reelection bid to undercut the conservative argument that Tiberius’s murder was justified because he broke the law.10
Believing that things were moving too far in a popular direction, Aemilianus spoke in the Forum against Carbo’s bill. He said the traditional prohibition on recurring office holding was in keeping with republican virtue—which must have struck the crowd as hypocritical since Aemilianus had secured an exemption from those very same prohibitions. During one of Aemilianus’s public appearances, Carbo himself stepped forward to demand what Aemilianus really thought about the murder of Tiberius. Aemilianus said, “If he intended to seize the state he was killed justly.” When the audience turned hostile Aemilianus returned the compliment. As he looked out at the angry mob Aemilianus did not see true Romans, but instead a gaggle of foreign interlopers: immigrants, freedmen, and slaves who did not know what Roman virtue and dignity meant. “How can I,” he bellowed, “who have so many times heard the battle shout of the enemy without feeling fear, be disturbed by the shouts of men like you, to whom Italy is only a stepmother?” Not surprisingly, this only led to further heckling and Aemilianus’s bitter withdrawal from the Forum. The measure confirming the right of reelection did not pass, but the fight had done irreparable damage to Aemilianus’s reputation.11
IN SOME WAYS, Aemilianus was right about the crowd he faced in the Forum that day. In the early days of Rome, there was no difference between the plebs urbana—the residents of the city—and the populus Romanus—the citizens of Rome. The residents of the city were citizens of Rome, and the citizens of Rome were the residents of the city. But by the end of the second century, Rome was by far the largest city in the Mediterranean. Where other cities of the day boasted tens of thousands of citizens, Rome boasted hundreds of thousands. As the largest and most powerful city in the Mediterranean, Rome became a center of migratory gravity. Noncitizen Italians frequently moved to the growing metropolis, and were followed by Greek philosophers, and Spanish artisans, and North African merchants, and Syrian ambassadors, and Gallic mercenaries. By the 130s, Rome had transformed into a polyglot mix of every language and etÚicity in the known world.12