For the more the élite vied with each other for office and prestige, the blinder they became to the growing poverty in Rome. The gap between rich and poor grew wider and wider as the spoils of the empire were unevenly divided. Some feared that the élite would become ever more selfish and grasping, and that the mob of Rome would run riot, frustrated by their own grievances and offended by the greed of the rich.27 In other words, the great and noble ‘free’ republic was on the verge of a precipice. It was about to tear itself apart. How had it come to this?
The single inflammatory issue on which the rich and poor were growing increasingly divided was land. It was a source of tension closely connected to the problem of military service. In the second century BC the Roman army was not, as modern armies have become, a professional standing army paid for by the state. It was a temporary militia made up of Roman citizens and allies from Italian communities throughout the peninsula. Participation in the army was the key obligation of being a Roman citizen, and as Rome conquered Italy, it imposed this obligation on those outside the city too. To qualify for service in the army, a citizen had to be able to meet a minimum property requirement. The logic behind this qualification was that ownership of property gave you a stake in the republic, which, as a free-born citizen, it was your duty to protect through service in the army. As a result, the army was made up principally of smallholding farmers.
While Rome fought short, local campaigns in Italy, the system of citizen-soldiers worked well because it allowed the men to return to their farms at regular intervals. However, with the conquest of the Mediterranean, the Roman armies found themselves serving for long periods of time in Spain, Africa or the east. Commanders of the armies also made the problem worse by continually choosing the most experienced soldiers. As a result, these soldiers were kept in the army year after year. Some eventually returned to their land, but many others never did. Inevitably, the farms suffered: they fell into disuse and neglect, and the family members still living on them faced accumulating debt and starvation. To alleviate the pressure, small landowners or their families were forced to sell or abandon their holdings.
The smallholders’ loss became the aristocrats’ gain. In the Roman republic the safest investment for capital was land. As the élite grew rich from the spoils of conquests and the subsidiary businesses of empire-building (such as state contracts for roads, sewers, buildings and aqueducts, arms manufacture, provisioning of the army and navy, the leasing of mines and quarries), they used their wealth to take advantage of the desperate smallholders and acquire their land ‘partly by purchase, partly by persuasion and partly by force, cultivating wide estates instead of single farms’.28 Exacerbating the problem was another hard fact of empire-building: it made financial sense for the élite to employ gangs of slaves imported from all corners of the Mediterranean as herdsmen and fieldworkers. As a result, even the possibility of work as hired hands on the large estates was closed to free-born smallholders.
Deracinated and dispossessed, some peasants survived on small, marginal plots of land, eking out an existence from what they could produce and from seasonal work, such as harvesting. Others, however, drawn by the prospect of employment in an arms manufactory, in construction or in shipbuilding, increasingly went to where they believed the streets were paved with gold: Rome. They were to be rapidly disappointed. The industries were not big enough to absorb the large influx of peasants, while other potential avenues of employment were off limits too: the expert work of the potter, the textile worker and the artisan was better accomplished by the slaves who came from the skilled, sophisticated societies of the east, and who could provide Rome cheaply with desirable and fashionable goods for the consumer market. For these reasons the unemployed mob of Rome began to swell. The real trouble, as Tiberius would quickly find out during his time back in Rome, was that the aristocratic élite were utterly divided on how to resolve the growing crisis.
Take Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, a cousin of both Aemilianus and Tiberius. Waspish, arrogant and a highly practised politician, he was in his fifties and a leading senator of the day. As one of the Roman élite’s largest landowners, he was interested in maintaining the status quo. His view was clear. Material benefits flowed through to the lower orders just as they had always done: through the goodwill and generous patronage of the élite. The traditional system worked perfectly well.29 Aristocratic patrons, he argued, provided the lower orders with large gifts of money for public buildings, food schemes and entertainment, such as gladiatorial games and chariot races. What more could they possibly want?
Others took quite the opposite stance. What was required to resolve the problem, they said, was not the laissez-faire attitude of the conservatives in the Senate. The remedy was active reform and new laws. One advocate of this approach was the senator Appius Claudius Pulcher. He was a passionate, philosophical and ambitious elder statesman, as well as a descendant of one of the oldest patrician families in Rome. The republic, he said, depended upon the concord between the orders, between the Senate and the people. The crisis over land was destroying that concord, and action was now urgently needed. In 140 BC the two factions came to blows. A senator called Gaius Laelius was appointed consul for that year, and in this capacity he put forward a proposal for land reform in an attempt to redress the grievances of the increasing number of landless peasants. When he took it before the Senate, however, the bill was met with such outrage by the majority whose interests were threatened that Laelius abandoned it. For this decision he was rewarded with the name Laelius the Wise.
By 138 BC, with Nasica’s conservative faction outmanoeuvring the reformers led by Pulcher, there were clear signs that the crisis over land was not about to go away; in fact, it was getting much worse. A rebellion of 200,000 slaves broke out in Sicily, and, with the Roman army at full stretch elsewhere, a grain shortage consequently struck Rome. In the same year too, Roman soldiers deserted en masse from campaigning in Spain, frustrated at their length of service and absence from their lands. Many were caught and punished by Nasica himself: they were flogged in public and then sold into slavery for one humiliating sesterce.30 However, it would not be long before the crisis was witnessed at first hand by another man. Tiberius would soon see for himself quite how bad the situation had become.
While 138 BC may have been a year of political turmoil for Rome, for Tiberius it was the year in which his political career took off. In the summer he was elected to his first junior office, that of quaestor, an office connected mainly with state financial activities. However, his duties would not detain him in the metropolis, but take him off to war once again, this time in Spain. In the northeast of Rome’s Iberian province, the republic had been struggling for some years to put down resistance from the semi-independent Celtiberian tribes of the Numantines. The Spanish warriors had shown amazing physical courage and fierce determination. The geography of the land too was something of a metaphorical quagmire; the fighting had been confined to defiles, dangerous ravines and precarious mountain passes. For these reasons, a string of Roman commanders had tried and failed to make any headway in finishing off this nagging, dogged war. In a new expedition Gaius Hostilius Mancinus, the consul for 137 BC, was determined to crush the rebels once and for all. As his financial officer, he took along with him the twenty-five-year-old Tiberius.
With his official account books in hand, and his foot set firmly on the ladder of political office holding, Tiberius was living up to the memory of his father’s glorious career. En route to war, however, he saw something that would prove to be his real political awakening. It would also prove crucial to the legend of Tiberius. As his detachment marched through Etruria, the Italian countryside north of Rome, he was able to see for himself how Roman empire-building had transformed it for the worse. What he saw was not industrious single farms of Roman citizens, but large estates worked by gangs of foreign slaves.31 It is possible that en route he even met peasants who had been forced off their land through the death of their males, or whose farms had simply fallen into disuse through neglect and shortage of help. The ancient sources certainly make clear that Tiberius’s experience in Etruria inspired the dramatic course his life took when he returned to Rome. The events in Spain, however, would be the trigger.