The families who constituted the nonpolitical rich of Rome were called the Equestrian class. Originally these were men with enough wealth to equip and maintain a warhorse so they filled the ranks of Rome’s early cavalry—hence the name “Equestrians.” But by the age of the Gracchi, the Equestrian name referred generally to the class of families worth more than four hundred thousand sesterce. To say these families formed the “middle class” of Rome is tecÚically accurate—their fortunes fell somewhere in between the senatorial oligarchs and the mass of subsistence peasants—but Equestrian fortunes were still considerable, and they were a part of the economic elite.33
At the intersection of private and state business was a special group of Equestrians called the publicani. The Republic had a variety of public obligations to fulfill, from equipping armies, to maintaining temples, to building roads and aqueducts. With senators prohibited from conducting business, someone had to handle the logistical details. The first recorded publicani contract was simple: procure feed for the Sacred Geese, a special flock of birds the superstitious Romans believed to be favored by the gods. But by the time of the Punic Wars the publicani handled a significant chunk of state business. With nearly fifty thousand men in the legions there was a constant demand for shoes, tunics, horses, blankets, and weapons. One order called for 6,000 togas, 30,000 tunics, and 200 Numidian horses to be delivered to Macedon—someone had to arrange it. Men would buy shares in joint-stock companies and then bid on the right to fulfill a contract. As the breadth and depth of the Republican Empire grew—the profits to be made from state contracts were enormous—some publicani fortunes came to surpass those of minor senators.34
The most lucrative contracts were for operating the state-owned mines. The first batch of state mines came under Roman control during the Punic Wars after Rome expelled Carthage from Spain. The Romans discovered the Carthaginians had opened rich silver mines and so claimed these mines as state-owned ager publicus. Every five years contracts would be auctioned off to operate the mines, and though it is difficult to calculate actual figures, the revenue involved dwarfed anything the Romans had ever handled. Conditions in these mines were awful. Diodorus describes that slaves “wear out their bodies both day and night in the diggings under the earth… dying in large numbers because of the exceptional hardships they endure… For no respite or pause is granted them in their labors, but compelled beneath blows of the overseers to endure the severity of their plight, they throw away their lives in this wretched manner.” The work was fatal, but the profits astronomical.35
The second-most lucrative contracts were for tax collection. The Roman provincial administrators did not directly collect provincial taxes. Instead publicani investors would form companies to buy five-year contracts, offering a lump sum of cash in exchange for the right to go collect what was owed Rome—the amount of money a company made over the amount paid was their profit. It was a system begging to be abused because the publicani had every incentive to extort as much as they could—even if it was more than what was legally owed. With limited oversight out in the provinces, the publicani tax farmers soon gained a notorious reputation that wherever they went there was neither law nor freedom. But despite this reputation for vigorous avarice, the publicani was still the one group that could actually handle the logistical load of empire. The Republic had no standing bureaucracy, so someone had to do it.36
The Senate was not thrilled at the rise of these publicani corporations. Senators were themselves prohibited from participating in commercial enterprises, so they naturally considered base commerce beneath the dignity of a reputable man and distrusted the publicani as greedy parasites. After the conquest of Macedonia in 168, the Senate intentionally withheld its extensive mines, forests, and infrastructure from the publicani. It was a deliberate attempt to block the further ascendency of the publicani, but it didn’t last long. Five years later the province was opened and the money started rolling in. From that point on, wherever Rome went, so too came the publicani. And publicani conduct in the rich province of Asia would become a special source of future conflict.37
WHILE ASIA WAS proving itself to be a major source of conflict abroad, the seeds of an even more disastrous conflict were being sewn back home as the work of the agrarian commission exposed major fault lines in the social and political landscape of Italy.
Italy in the second century was not a unified state, but rather a stratified confederation of cities, each with different social and political rights depending on when and how they fell under the Roman umbrella. At the top of the citizenship hierarchy were, of course, full Roman citizens. There was no wealth requirement to be a citizen—the wealthiest senator and the poorest beggar both shared equally in the rights of citizenship, rights that collectively established their libertas, or civil liberty. The most important of these liberties was the right to vote in the Assembly and protection from abuse by senior magistrates.38
Below the full Roman citizens in the hierarchy were the communities or individuals who held so-called Latin Rights. After unilaterally annexing Latium in 338, the Senate did not offer full citizenship for their new Latin citizens but instead granted them a set of rights that allowed them to operate on a semi-equal footing with true Romans. Latins could marry, enter into contracts, and engage in land claims with a full Roman citizen. They even had the right to vote in the Assembly, though the Senate was not going to give too much of a voice: the Latins were collectively lumped into just one of the thirty-five voting tribes.39
Eventually the concept of Latin Rights outgrew its original etÚic origin. When Rome planted new colonies around Italy, the Roman colonists were downgraded to holding mere Latin Rights in exchange for the free plot of land and place in the colony they were about to receive. Individual Italians could also win Latin Rights by special grant by the Senate or senior Roman magistrate—often as a reward for battlefield heroics or rendering some special service to Rome. Holding Latin Rights soon became a civil distinction rather than an etÚic one.40
Finally, at the bottom of the hierarchy were the foederati or socii—known collectively as the “Allies.” As Rome had spread across Italy they forced defeated cities and tribes to sign mutual defense pacts with Rome that required both sides to come to the other’s aid. But those defeated cities were never formally annexed, hence they remained merely “Allies” of Rome. The majority of inhabitants in Italy were Allies with only limited civil and political rights. But as a trade-off they also had few responsibilities. Rome demanded no regular taxes and left local administration to local magistrates. All Rome asked was that the Allies provide troops to fill the ranks of the legions. The hierarchical, confederal relationship that defined Roman Italy worked tolerably well for two centuries. It was now coming undone.41
BY 129, ONLY young Gaius Gracchus remained of the original land commissioners. Tiberius had died on the Capitoline Hill and his successor Mucianus had been killed in Asia. Mucianus’s seat was filled by Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, the friend of the Gracchi who had helped drive the hated Nasica out of Rome. Now in his mid-thirties, Flaccus was gearing up for a run at the consulship when he joined the commission. Then in 129, the old princeps senatus Claudius died and his seat went to Gaius Papirius Carbo, the tribune who had introduced the secret ballot law in 131 and clashed with Aemilianus over the legacy of Tiberius’s death. Where once the Gracchan faction had been run by eminent elder statesmen, it was now in the hands of young firebrands.42