EPILOGUE
In foreign wars, campaigns and battles spanning 150 years between 275 BC and 132 BC, the aristocratic élite of Rome had led the republic to victory across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean. They had generated amazing wealth, both for themselves and for Rome; in the process they had won an empire and become a superpower. But the price they paid for this, so a conservative commentator of the time might have said, was the loss of the very principles of justice, decency and honour that they had used to justify their conquests and that had helped to make the republic so powerful in the first place.
Following the destruction of Carthage, the nobles’ pursuit of military excellence, riches and prestige served only to intensify the rivalry and competition for office between the families of the aristocracy. As a consequence, they turned in on themselves and, through greed and self-interest, ignored the developing social and economic problems that empire-building had brought in its wake. As a result, they alienated many sections of society – sections that, in the 130s BC, crystallized into a power base for Tiberius and his associates to use in their bid for reform.
Although Tiberius took a controversial political path in championing the cause of the people against the interests of his own milieu, the aristocratic élite, his aim was essentially conservative: to save the republic by alleviating the problems of the needy. Constitutionally too, Tiberius had been well within his rights as tribune in proposing the land bill without the Senate’s approval and in deposing Octavius. But in setting the people against the Senate in such a directly confrontational manner, Tiberius was damaging the customary respect that the élite liked to think underpinned the relationship between the Senate and the sovereign Roman people. In the nobles’ eyes such behaviour was utterly offensive. Ever since the expulsion of the kings from Rome, concord and cooperation between the political orders had been seen as cornerstones of the republic, its unique source of strength, power and dynamism. For this reason alone it was easy for enemies, such as Nasica, to paint Tiberius as a revolutionary, to pick at the sensitive nerve of the Romans’ fear of domination by one man and to suggest that he was capitalizing on the people for his own ends.
In reality, though, Tiberius and his land bill sought only to restore things to the way they had been centuries earlier before Rome had won the riches of its empire abroad. That aim continued after Tiberius’s death. The land commission carried on its work for three more years. Six years later, in 123 BC, his proud younger brother Gaius picked up the baton, was also elected tribune and introduced an even more ambitious and comprehensive programme of reform. He too was branded an enemy of the republic by the conservatives in the Senate and murdered. As with his brother, they despised what he stood for. To the mass of the Roman people, however, Tiberius and Gaius were heroes. In their eyes at least, the two sons of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus the elder and Cornelia had honoured the funeral masks of their father and their dead aristocratic ancestors. Those ghostly likenesses were displayed in cases in the atrium of their family home. The glorious memory of the men they represented had been renewed.
What really motivated Tiberius and Gaius – whether ideological drive or simple ambition – will always remain debatable. What is clear is that, behind the mud-slinging and the eruption of blood-letting in politics, there was a genuine principle at stake. This was the crucial issue of who benefited from the empire, the rich or the poor, and it was one that Tiberius addressed in the most thrilling, explosive fashion. No one before him (certainly no one who was supposed to be ‘one of us’) had so extravagantly antagonized the political élite or so bravely exposed their hypocrisy. In doing so, he did much more than stretch the constitution of the republic to its very limit. He also unleashed the potential of an untapped and highly combustible political force – the mob. The sleeping giant of the Roman republic had been awoken.
But where Tiberius’s character was by turns idealistic and gentle, stubborn and ambitious, it would take an altogether more meticulous, cold and ruthless mind to harness the power of the people and drive it to its logical conclusion. Such a mind would use the people not simply to take on the conservatives in the Senate, but to rise to power entirely outside the legal apparatus of the republic; it would use them not for the sake of land reform, but to achieve sole mastery of the Roman world. That mind belonged to Julius Caesar.
II
CAESAR
In 46 BC, two years before he was assassinated, Julius Caesar was voted some extraordinary honours by the Senate of the Roman republic. It was decreed that he be called Liberator and that a Temple of Liberty be built and dedicated in his honour.1 And yet the man who had freed the Roman people was now their dictator. The man who had liberated the Romans was also partly responsible for thousands of their deaths in a civil war. Indeed, Caesar, the great champion of the people, had now become in effect an autocrat, on the verge of being worshipped as a god. Two years after the Senate’s vote of honours in 46 BC he would even be murdered in the name of liberty. How had such a state of affairs come to pass? What had happened to the glorious Roman republic? What had happened to its cherished liberties?
In Rome, during the hundred years before Christ, the idea of liberty became the subject of a fierce debate. In that debate two freedoms clashed time and again: the freedom of the aristocratic élite and the freedom of the Roman people. The two different ideas of liberty amounted to two different versions of what the republic was all about. It was this clash of ideas that would entwine the lives of Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, and that would rock the entire Roman world to its foundations.
Settling the question of which freedom was supreme would bring the state of the Roman republic crashing down in a bloody civil war. The ancient system of public voting, popular elections, annual office holding and joint government by the Senate and the Roman People would cease to function, and would eventually be replaced with a dictatorship, with rule by one man. Elections did indeed continue under Caesar, but now they were no longer free: it was the dictator who influenced them, who had the last vote. It would prove to be one of the greatest turning points in all Roman history.
But the destruction of the Roman republic was not the consequence of a dry clash of ideas. What turned this ideological debate about freedom into a bloody, violent and messy revolution was a highly personal quality, one that went to the very core of Roman aristocratic values: dignity. A Roman noble’s sense of prestige, honour and political standing was paramount – prized by aristocrats above everything else. Ironically, it would be the very same quality that would drive Julius Caesar to fight a civil war and to destroy the corrupt aristocratic milieu that so cherished it. It was this quality that would fuel the titanic power struggles of Rome in the last years of the republic. It was this quality that would lie at the heart of the republic’s complete meltdown.
POPULAR POLITICS
The murder of the tribunes Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus cleaved a fatal divide in the politics of the late Roman republic. Their mother Cornelia declared the Forum of Rome, where both men had been martyred at the hands of the conservative faction of the aristocratic élite, a sacred ground. The very heart of the city thus became their open, public tomb, and around it grew the cult of the popular politician. Henceforth, over the next hundred years, ambitious young men on the make faced a choice: to use the winning of political office to protect the interests of the conservative élite, or to follow the example of the Gracchus brothers and enact legislation that increased the power of the Roman people. One fork of the political path allowed the noble senators to maintain their traditional grip on both the wealth of the ever-increasing empire and the levers of influence in the republic, while the other fork tried to reform the balance of power and wealth in favour of the people.