The procession ended with a ceremony at the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, the place from where Aemilianus had set out the year before. The chief prisoners from Carthage were dragged to the prison at the foot of the hill and executed. Once their deaths were confirmed, Aemilianus supervised the sacrifice. He climbed the temple steps, poured wine over an ox’s brow, sprinkled its back with salted flour, then traced a knife slowly along its spine. Then, as a signal to the attending slaves to slit the animal’s throat, he pulled a loose fold of his toga over his head in the manner of a priest, and the beast was duly killed. The sacrifice was perhaps a way of giving thanks to Jupiter for Aemilianus’s success in Africa, something he had promised to do before he left Rome. That promise now fulfilled, the triumphal procession came to a close with celebratory banquets and feasting.
With her heroic son Tiberius now safely back in Rome, Cornelia would have encouraged him to accompany her to the dinner parties and social gatherings hosted by the élite. To help his career progress, the young man now needed to network voraciously, gain more military experience in the company of great generals like his cousin Aemilianus, and build on the prestige of the Mural Crown he had won at Carthage. A political ‘career’ for a young aristocrat in the Roman republic of the second century BC was not in any sense like a modern career. There was no salary for holding office. There was no nine-to-five routine or basic five-day week. All prospect of success in a Roman aristocrat’s political life depended on one narrow window of opportunity: winning an election for an annual public office.
Once successful in discharging the duties of that office, the holder found that rewards flowed freely – fame, glory, prestige and the possibility of great wealth. As a result, the competition was intense, and increased even further as the offices higher up the chain of magistracies became fewer and thus harder to obtain. Aemilianus had reached the top. Now it was the turn of Tiberius. Indeed, Cornelia was so famous for reproaching both her sons that she was still referred to as the mother-in-law of ‘Scipio Aemilianus’ rather than as the mother of ‘the Gracchi’.25 However, while his networking and nascent political career may have been on his mother’s mind, there was one debate in Roman high society that would perhaps have interested the young Tiberius a great deal more. It centred around the wealth that everyone had just witnessed flowing into Rome.
The booty from the cities of Carthage and Corinth, the tribute from the new provinces of Sicily and Sardinia, and the income from the mines of Spain brought a massive injection of money into the city, so Rome was flourishing. The city became a hive of industry and expenditure: new docks and markets were constructed, the water supply was doubled, and large building projects sprang up. And yet, despite Rome’s new-found prosperity, not all sections of the population shared in its wealth. The city that Tiberius found on his return to Rome reflected the ever-widening gap between rich and poor.
Rome during this period was not yet the glorious, marbled city of the high empire, of organized public spaces and cool colonnades. It was a city of extremes and contradictions. As soon as Tiberius strayed from the Forum, temples and public assembly areas, leaving behind the main thoroughfares of the Via Sacra and Nova Via, he could easily have got lost in the warren of chaotic, claustrophobic streets. Alleys were so narrow that houses with balconies and upper floors almost touched; from their windows people would throw out waste and sewage. In very poor districts, such as the Esquiline, houses built from cob and wattle were so rickety that they often stood up only by leaning against each other for support. As a result, they regularly collapsed or burnt down when fire spread rapidly from building to building. The sight of a charred house standing next to a temple beautifully restored by a wealthy aristocrat was nothing out of the ordinary.
In spite of their poor quality, the houses were divided into apartments so that tenants could crowd into attics, basements and even shacks on flat roofs. Romans advertised rental property by painting ‘For Rent’ on the outside of the building, and the rents they charged were increasingly exorbitant. Those who could not afford to pay them set up lodgings in the nooks and crannies of public buildings, under stairs or even in large tombs. As there were no kitchens in the cheap tenement housing, the activity of Rome’s poor citizens and slaves spread out to the streets, and the numerous bars and restaurants heaved with people. And all this activity took place against a background of mayhem and constant noise from carts, wagons, litters and horses. Rome at the end of the second century BC really was a city that never slept.
Into the pulsing metropolis the majority of Rome’s population, which was approaching one million, was crammed. The aristocratic élite, however, in whose circles Tiberius moved, had a very different experience of the city. While the air was suffocating down in the crowded, messy streets, up on the Palatine Hill it was fresh and clean. It was to these exclusive heights that the wealthy and aspirational, borne aloft in litters, retreated to their luxurious villas and colonnaded gardens. The style of these new residences was strikingly innovative. Empire-building had not only made the élite lots of money, but it had opened their eyes to foreign influences. Greek style had the greatest cachet, as Roman aristocrats admired Greece’s ancient, sophisticated and aesthetic civilization.
Befitting Rome’s position at the heart of the new empire, the city now became the centre through which Greek art and influence circulated and gained value. The conquering aristocrats beautified not just the city, but also their homes with Greek-influenced monuments, temples and porticoes. Keeping up with the Fabii or the Claudii or any of the aristocratic families was a trick accomplished only by the conspicuous display of an exotic mural of Hellenistic inspiration, or a chic marble statue from Greece. Tiberius’s mother caused quite a sensation when she inherited from her uncle Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the conqueror of Macedon, Rome’s largest library of Greek manuscripts.
Such conspicuous displays of prosperity and success served a dangerous purpose. They were not only a manifestation of a nobleman’s prestige and political standing. They were a spur, an incitement to others too. When, for example, an aristocrat such as Aemilianus returned from conquest abroad, he might put his new wealth towards a grand monument, a luxurious work of art, or use it to influence his political associates and woo the Roman people. A new benchmark was set. Now other aristocrats had to play catch-up or else lose status. The only way for them to achieve that was to run in elections and win further office. A praetorship might win the successful candidate a chance to profit personally from administering a province. Winning a consulship, of course, was to hit the jackpot. It provided the chance to command the republic’s armies and clean up by conquest. Only by holding such an office did an aristocrat stand a chance of matching his rival’s success; only in this way could he hope to put his family’s status on a par with theirs. Where the families of the Cornelii Scipiones, the Aemilii Paulli or the Sempronii Gracchi blazed a trail, their aristocratic rivals had to follow.26 By the 140s BC, however, the pattern of self-serving competition was, so it was said, corrupting the republic.