Thieves of private property pass their lives in chains; thieves of public property in riches and luxury.
CATO THE ELDER1
TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS WAS WATCHING AS CARTHAGE burned. In 146 BC the teenager was on his first campaign and serving under the famous commander Scipio Aemilianus—a typical posting for the scion of an illustrious family. And the Gracchi were an illustrious family. First ennobled by Tiberius’s great-grandfather, the family had risen in stature with each generation, culminating with Tiberius’s father, whom Livy called “by far the ablest and most energetic young man of his time.” Over the course of his storied career, Gracchus the Elder served two consulships and was awarded two triumphs. Though his father died when Tiberius was just ten years old, the boy knew his father’s exploits well. He knew he had much to live up to.2
Tiberius’s mother, Cornelia, was herself one of the most respected matrons in Roman history. She was the daughter of Scipio Africanus and wielded enormous influence inside the extended Scipione family. After her husband, Gracchus the Elder, died in 154, Cornelia elected not to remarry—even turning down a marriage proposal from the king of Egypt—and instead dedicated herself to Tiberius and her other son, Gaius. She cultivated their education and hired renowned Greek tutors to expose the boys to the most advanced theories of the age. In an apocryphal but telling story, a wealthy noblewoman once showed off a set of beautiful jewels to Cornelia, who herself pointed to Tiberius and his younger brother Gaius and said, “Those are my jewels.”3
As he grew to maturity, young Tiberius was admired for his intelligence and dignity. He was possessed of “brilliant intellect, of upright intentions, and… the highest virtues of which a man is capable when favored by nature and by training.” A generous spirit and eloquent speaker, Tiberius was on track to meet the high standards set by his father and become the leading man of his time.4
To keep the family fortunes under one house, Cornelia arranged for her daughter Sempronia to marry her adopted nephew Aemilianus—even though she did not like Aemilianus personally. Cornelia found him pretentious and did not think him worthy of the honor of being head of the family. In fact, much of Cornelia’s focus on her children was an effort to keep Aemilianus from outshining her jewels. She pushed her sons’ ambitions by reminding them that the Romans still called her the mother-in-law of Aemilianus, but not yet mother of the Gracchi.5
Despite all this family drama Aemilianus was obligated to bring his teenage brother-in-law Tiberius to the siege of Carthage. In Africa, Tiberius was exposed to the basics of military life. By all accounts he performed well as a soldier, earned the respect of the men, and even won a coveted award for being the first man over an enemy wall. When Carthage fell in 146, Tiberius Gracchus was there to watch the city burn.6
After Tiberius returned from North Africa, Cornelia maneuvered him into a marriage with the daughter of Appius Claudius Pulcher. Tiberius’s new father-in-law came from one of the oldest patrician families in the Republic and had recently been named princeps senatus—a prestigious position that meant he was listed at the top of the senatorial roll and was allowed to speak first in any debate. But the marriage was not without complications: Claudius was a bitter opponent of Scipio Aemilianus, and Tiberius was now caught in the middle of their rivalry. But that said, by his early twenties Tiberius was positioned to achieve a preeminence that might even surpass his father. He was well educated, well connected, and already recognized as a man with “great force of character, eloquence, and dignity.” But unlike most Romans, Tiberius would not win fame on the battlefield fighting a foreign enemy. Instead he would win fame in the Forum combating the domestic threat of skyrocketing economic inequality.7
AFTER THE SECOND Punic War ended in 202 BC, the economy of Italy endured a massive upheaval. The legions that conquered Spain, Greece, and North Africa returned home with riches on an unprecedented scale. A proconsul returned from a campaign in the east bearing 137,420 pounds of raw silver, 600,000 silver pieces, and 140,000 gold pieces. Tiberius’s own father returned from a campaign in Spain with 40,000 pounds of raw silver. This was an insane load of treasure that would have been unimaginable to the frugal and austere Romans of the early Republic. But by the middle of the second century BC, Rome was rolling in the Mediterranean’s dough.8
The newly enriched Romans spent their money on a variety of luxuries: fine carpets, ornate silverware, embellished furniture, and jewelry made of gold, silver, and ivory. The effect of this influx of wealth began to concern some alert senators. As early as 195, Cato the Elder warned his colleagues, “We have crossed into Greece and Asia, places filled with all the allurements of vice, and we are handling the treasures of kings… I fear that these things will capture us rather than we them.” Every few years, the Senate would attempt to rein in ostentatious displays of wealth, but the resulting limitations inevitably went unheeded and unenforced: “by a fatal coincidence, the Roman people, at the same moment, both acquired a taste for vice and obtained a license for gratifying it.”9
But this story of fabulous riches leading to moral decay only affected the small group of noble families who controlled the spoils of war. For the majority of Roman citizens, the conquest of the Mediterranean meant privation, not prosperity. In the early days of the Republic, service in the legions did not interfere with a citizen’s ability to maintain his property—wars were always fought close to home and in rhythm with the agricultural seasons. But when the Punic Wars spread the legions across the Mediterranean, citizens were conscripted to fight in campaigns that dragged on for years a thousand miles from home. Thanks to these endless wars, lower-class families were “burdened with military service and poverty,” and their property would fall into a state of terminal neglect. Upon returning home, a discharged soldier was likely to find the time, effort, and resources required to restore his land to its former productivity beyond his means.10
Wealthy noble families exacerbated the sharpening divide between rich and poor. As they looked to invest their newly acquired riches, they found thousands of dilapidated plots just waiting to be scooped up. Sometimes destitute families sold willingly, happy to get something for property they could no longer afford to work for themselves. But holdouts were often bullied into quitting their land. As these newly acquired small plots combined into larger estates, the Roman agricultural landscape began to transform from small independent farms to large commercial operations dominated by a few families.11
The plight of the dispossessed citizens might not have been so dire had they been allowed to transition into the labor force of the commercial estates. But the continuous run of successful foreign wars brought slaves flooding into Italy by the hundreds of thousands. The same wealthy nobles who bought up all the land also bought slaves to work their growing estates. The demand for free labor plummeted just as poor Roman families were being pushed off their land. As the historian Diodorus observed: “Thus a few men became extremely rich while the rest of the population of Italy grew weak under the oppressive weight of poverty, taxes and military service.”12
Tiberius first confronted the new economic realities early in life. According to a pamphlet written later by his brother, “Tiberius was passing through Tuscany, and observed the dearth of inhabitants in the country, and that those who tilled its soil or tended its flocks there were barbarian slaves.” According to Gaius this was the moment Tiberius first seriously confronted the need for economic and social reform. This apocryphal story is no doubt a fine piece of exaggerated propaganda, but it captures the essential dislocation of the poor families from their traditional way of life.13