That same day the land bill finally became law with an overwhelming vote. The law stipulated the immediate appointment of three commissioners charged with surveying, recovering and reallocating public land. The three were Tiberius, his younger brother Gaius and his father-in-law, Appius Claudius Pulcher. After the elation of having their bill passed, however, the reformers were stymied from the start. The showdown with Octavius had served only to make the aristocratic faction more hardline and entrenched. Whenever the commissioners requested funds to carry out their work, the Senate successfully sabotaged any progress by refusing to finance it. It is also possible that even Tiberius’s allies felt that he had gone too far in exploiting the power of the office of tribune.
Mutterings in the Senate House spread to the streets of Rome, and a smear campaign now gained momentum: Tiberius was not interested in the people, but only in power; he was simply using the plebs to assert his personal ambition and dominion over the apparatus of the republic. In short, went the word, he was a tyrant who wanted to be king. His violent removal of Octavius from the sacrosanct office of tribune proved as much!40 As the rumours grew apace, Tiberius, cresting a wave of popular acclaim and dizzy with direct action, played into the hands of his opponents. Early in 133 BC came news that Attalus, the king of Pergamum, a wealthy Greek city in Asia Minor loyal to Rome, had died. In his will he named the Roman people as his heirs. At a stroke, Rome acquired a rich, cultured economy. But this was not how Tiberius took the news. He saw it as a windfall, the very injection of cash that his land commission urgently needed. He immediately brought another bill before the Plebeian Assembly, proposing to use the royal money to finance the land reform. Since the Roman people were the nominated heirs of Attalus, ran Tiberius’s argument, they should be able to dispose of the money as they wished.
Once again, the bill drove Nasica and the conservatives in the Senate to fury. Control of foreign and economic affairs had always belonged to the Senate, and the Senate alone. Tiberius’s enemies immediately seized on his action as further proof of his naked ambition for absolute power. In the Senate one of Nasica’s faction, Pompeius, stood up and threw fuel on the flames. As Tiberius’s neighbour, he said, he had witnessed how envoys from Pergamum had come to the tribune’s house, bringing with them a crown and a purple robe from the royal treasures ‘in the expectation that he would soon be king of Rome’.41 The senators erupted in horror. However, there was another reason why Tiberius’s controversial bill had played into his enemies’ hands: it was grounds for prosecution. No criminal case could be brought against a magistrate while he was still in office, but Tiberius’s tenure of the Tribunate was quickly running out. At last, believed the senators, they had their man.
Constantly in fear of his life, Tiberius was now accompanied by a bodyguard wherever he went. Death threats and rumours of plots to kill him had so rattled him that his associates and supporters now guarded his house by camping outside it day and night. Inside, he took advice from them. The only way to avoid prosecution, they said, was to remain in office: why not stand for tribune for the following year? Running for the same office for two consecutive years was unconstitutional by custom, but a vote in the people’s assembly could create a new precedent. Fired by this idea and the encouragement of his immediate coterie, Tiberius entertained grand ideas for a new manifesto on which to campaign, a new set of proposals designed to curb the power of the Senate even further.42 Increasingly, the rumours and slanders against Tiberius and his motives were beginning to wear the look of truth. Was this indeed a quest for personal power, a vendetta of revenge against the very men who had so humiliated him, a quest that was, in the end, out of step with what even the people wanted?
There were certainly signs that his own faction in the Senate was estranged from him, for the ancient sources now go increasingly silent on the role of the eminent politicians who had once backed him. Furthermore, the rural voters whose support had been so critical in passing the land reform bill had returned to the countryside for the harvest. They could not be counted on to come back to the city for the vote on Tiberius’s re-election. Nonetheless, the young man went ahead with his crusade and the greatest gamble of his life. The decision would set him on the ultimate collision course with the Senate.
At daybreak on the morning of the elections the auspices were taken. They did not bode well. The birds, although enticed with food, would not even leave their cage. Other bad omens followed. When Tiberius left his house he stubbed his toe so hard on the threshold that it split his toenail. Then a raven dislodged a stone from the roof of a house he was passing on his way to the Forum, which landed on his foot. The signs shook his resolve so much that he thought about abandoning the election. But one of his Greek tutors, who had been influential in shaping his political thought since he was young, told him that ‘it would be a shame and an unbearable disgrace if Tiberius, the son of Gracchus, a grandson of Scipio Africanus and a champion of the Roman people, should fail to answer his fellow-citizens’ call for help because he was afraid of a raven’.43
When Tiberius reached the Forum and climbed the Capitol Hill, he walked into mayhem. Amid the cheers and applause for him, the rival gangs of supporters for the tribune of the people and for the aristocratic élite were jostling and pushing each other around. As the voting got under way, a senator loyal to Tiberius threw himself into the mêlée and made his way towards him with a warning: the Senate, he said, was in session, and Nasica and his faction were at this very moment rallying their colleagues to kill Tiberius. Alarmed, Tiberius passed on the word to his nearby supporters, who prepared themselves for a fight. Some of them, however, were out of earshot, caught up in the swarms of people. To them Tiberius signalled that his life was in danger by putting his hand to his head. His enemies took this gesture to mean something else entirely. They rushed to the steps of the Senate House and made an announcement: Tiberius was calling for his crown!44
In the Senate, Nasica used this news to drive home his case. He shouted at the consul to save the republic and kill the tyrant. The consul, however, stood his ground and defended the principle of justice on which the republic was founded: he would authorize neither the use of violence in politics, he said, nor the execution of a man without trial. At this point, in frustration and fury, Nasica jumped to his feet and declared a state of emergency: ‘Now that the consul has betrayed the state, let every man who wishes to uphold the laws follow me!’ Then, in the manner of a priest before a sacrifice, Nasica pulled his toga around his head and left the Senate House.45
Joined by their slaves and associates who had come armed with clubs, the hundreds of senators following Nasica now tied their togas around their waists to free up their legs, armed themselves with whatever they could find en route – broken staves or legs of benches – and marched towards the Capitol. Many of the crowd gave way out of respect to their rank and seniority, and fear at the sight of so many noblemen bent on a single, violent purpose. Others, even Tiberius’s supporters, panicked and trampled over each other in their attempts to disperse. In the confusion and chaos, Tiberius too tried to run. At first someone caught hold of his toga, so he threw it off. Then, dressed only in his tunic, he tried once again to get away, but tripped over some bodies. He fell down and was promptly clubbed to death.
No fewer than three hundred people were killed in this way: not honourably with swords, but ignobly and brutally with clubs, sticks and stones. In the aftermath, Tiberius’s younger brother Gaius requested that his dead brother’s body be returned to him. But the aristocratic senators refused Tiberius the dignity of a proper burial and threw his bludgeoned corpse into the Tiber that same night, along with those of his supporters and friends. It was the first time in the history of the republic that a political conflict had ended in murder.