Some of these dislocated citizens migrated to the cities in search of wage labor, only to find that slaves monopolized the work in the cities, too. So most remained in their rural homelands, forming a new class of landless peasants who would continue to work their land as mere tenants and sharecroppers rather than owners. Their new landlords loved the arrangement—tenant farmers could be used to produce low-margin cereals, which would allow landlords to save their slaves for more lucrative crops like olives and grapes. Politically minded landlords had an added incentive to promote tenancy: these peasants remained political clients whose votes could be counted on in the Assembly. This new breed of poor tenant-farmers would be tied to their landlords forever unless someone came along and offered them a way out.14
EXACERBATING THIS ECONOMIC and social dislocation was the Spanish quagmire the Romans had gotten themselves stuck in. When Carthage and Corinth fell in 146, Roman power seemed invincible, but Roman commanders in Spain had indulged in greedy atrocities that continued to provoke stiff resistance from the Spanish natives. So each year the Senate was obliged to raise new recruits and ship them off to the Iberian Peninsula, to serve on campaigns of undefined length against an enemy who specialized in demoralizing skirmishes. As a reward for their service these conscripts would come home to find their farms ruined.15
While the unpopularity of the Spanish wars grew, potential conscripts began to defy the consuls. With no other recourse, they once again turned to the tribunes for protection. The tribunes were the ancient guardians of the plebs, but over the past century they had been co-opted by the Senate. With citizens once again suffering under the arbitrary whims of the nobility, the tribunes returned to their sacred mandate of protecting the people from abuse. In both 151 and 138, aggressive conscription by the consuls climaxed with tribunes placing the consuls under arrest until they backed off. The tribunes had every right to throw the consuls in jail, but it was still a shocking challenge to noble authority.16
The Senate attempted to mollify potential conscripts by making life in the army a little less harsh. They capped service at six years and gave soldiers the right to appeal punishments handed down by their officers. But ultimately, this did little to improve the morale of the legionaries in Spain. In 140, veterans who had served six years were mustered out and replaced by raw recruits. These new soldiers were “exposed to severe cold without shelter, and unaccustomed to the water and climate of the country, fell sick with dysentery and many died.” Not exactly something you can put on a recruitment poster.17
As the tribunes watched their constituents driven off the land or hauled off to fight in the quagmire in Spain, they took their first steps toward curbing the power of the nobles. For the entire history of the Republic, citizens had declared their vote out loud, making it easy for powerful patrons to ensure clients voted the way they had been ordered to. In 139, a tribune defiantly passed a law requiring secret ballots for elections. Two years later the secret ballot was extended to judicial assemblies. It would take time for the effects of these reforms to be felt, but the introduction of the secret ballot would prove a hammer blow to the foundations of the senatorial oligarchy.18
Surveying the state of Italy in the 130s, some among the nobility could see that there was a greater problem. Conscripts still had to meet a minimum property requirement to be enrolled, but with the rich pushing the poor off the land fewer citizens could meet the minimum requirement to be drafted. The Romans had faced crises like this in the past and responded by lowering the property requirements to bring more men under arms. But by the mid-second century, many citizens could not even meet minimal standards of service. The consuls were forced to rely on an ever-shrinking pool of men to fight wars and garrison the provinces.19
WITH ALL THESE social and economic problems swirling, Tiberius Gracchus was elected quaestor for 137. This was supposed to be the routine first step on his ascent up the cursus honorum, but instead it nearly ended Tiberius’s public career before that career even began. Attached to the command of consul Gaius Hostilius Mancinus, Tiberius landed in Spain in the spring of 137 to continue the war against the Numantines, a Celtiberian tribe who had managed to resist all Roman attempts at pacification. Upon arrival Tiberius found himself caught up in one of the most embarrassing defeats the legions ever suffered. The consul Mancinus was far more a scholar than a soldier and the experienced Numantine guerrillas ran circles around his clumsy maneuvers. After a series of poorly executed skirmishes, Mancinus attempted a strategic retreat under cover of darkness, but discovered as the sun rose that his army was surrounded.20
Having fallen prey to Roman treachery in the past, the Numantine leaders demanded young Tiberius Gracchus be sent forward to negotiate. While serving in Spain a generation earlier, Tiberius’s father had brokered an equitable peace treaty with the Numantines, and they remembered the name Gracchi and trusted the son to play as fair as his father. On his first campaign and with as many as thirty thousand lives on the line, Tiberius negotiated a treaty that allowed the legions safe passage out of the region in exchange for a pledge of future peace.21
Though there was little else Tiberius could have done under the circumstances, when Rome heard about the surrender, senators tripped over themselves bewailing the humiliating terms. The Senate recalled Mancinus and his senior staff to Rome to explain the cowardly capitulation. Though the embarrassed Mancinus attempted to justify his conduct, the Senate brutally smacked him down. They stripped Mancinus of his consulship and ordered him deposited at the gates of Numantia in chains to signal Rome’s rejection of the treaty. The Numantines responded by sending Mancinus back to Rome with a message that “a national breach of faith should not be atoned for by the blood of one man.”22
Tiberius and his fellow junior officers escaped official censure for their role in the scandal, but that did not spare them a severe tongue lashing. Tiberius cannot have expected to return home to a hero’s welcome, but the intensity of the invective the Senate laid on him seemed disproportionate to his “crime.” All he had done was save tens of thousands of men from certain death—did the Senate really expect him to choose voluntary mass suicide? But in contrast to the self-righteous fury of the old men in the Senate, when Tiberius emerged from the Senate house, he was greeted by cheers from the families of the men he had saved.23
WHILE TIBERIUS LICKED his political wounds, the road to redemption was already being paved by a group of senators intent on rebuilding the population of small citizen-farmers. These reformist senators were crafting a novel piece of legislation called the Lex Agraria that would hopefully reverse the decades-long trend of growing economic inequality. They believed they had hit upon an ingenious method of redistributing land from rich to poor without running afoul of the iron-clad private property rights that defined Roman law. They would focus exclusively on ager publicus illegally occupied by wealthy squatters.
As you might have guessed from squinting at the Latin, ager publicus was publicly owned land. As the Romans conquered Italy, they typically confiscated a third of a defeated enemy’s territory and turned it into state-owned ager publicus. In the early days of the Republic, this public land was converted into a Roman colony, but by Tiberius’s day it was usually leased to individual renters who would work the land in exchange for a portion of the produce. To prevent rich families from monopolizing the state lands, the Assembly passed a law that no family was allowed to lease more than five hundred iugera (about three hundred acres) of public land. But this prohibition was mostly ignored. The magistrates tasked with enforcing the limits were themselves wealthy landowners occupying excessive public land, so everyone colluded to get away with it together.24