A serious problem of unfairness arose as Roman citizenship was increasingly conferred on Italian communities at a distance from Rome. Democratic participation in Roman political life was direct and not based on the representative principle: the General Assembly was not a parliament. Those who lived more than a few hours’ travel from the city (say, twenty miles or so) were effectively disfranchised and “rural” communities were often represented by a handful of voters, who therefore exerted considerably more influence than members of city wards. Well-targeted bribes could easily swing bloc votes.
These were not the only obstacles to orderly process. Meetings were often convened at the Assembly Ground (Comitium), a circular open space looking like a gigantic sundial, in the Forum, Rome’s central square, although elections were held on the Field of Mars, a stretch of open land just outside the city limits, also the venue for military exercises. This was a matter of some tactical importance. The Assembly Ground had limited space and it was easy for the authorities or armed groups of toughs to take control of a meeting—or, for that matter, of the entire Forum. Public opinion as expressed through the medium of a General Assembly often represented no more and no less than the view of a particular faction.
The main trouble with the Roman constitution was that it contained too many checks and balances, whether to restrain ambitious power-seekers or to protect ordinary citizens from the executive. It is somewhat surprising that anything was ever decided. However, so long as the different forces in the Republic were prepared to resolve disputes through compromise, the system worked well enough. AS far as it could, the Senate allowed events to take their course, intervening only when absolutely necessary.
Most Romans believed that their system of government was the finest political invention of the human mind. Change was inconceivable. Indeed, the constitution’s various parts were so mutually interdependent that reform within the rules was next to impossible. AS a result, radicals found that they had little choice other than to set themselves beyond and against the law. This inflexibility had disastrous consequences as it became increasingly clear that the Roman state was incapable of responding adequately to the challenges it faced. Political debate became polarized into bitter conflicts, with radical outsiders trying to press change on conservative insiders who, in the teeth of all the evidence, believed that all was for the best under the best of all possible constitutions.
Towards the end of the second century BC, disputes led to bloodshed, and, unprecedentedly, leading personalities found themselves at personal risk. The long crisis that destabilized and eventually destroyed the Republic opened in the 130s, more than two decades before Cicero’s birth. A repetitive pattern emerged of civilian reformers (mostly dissident members of the ruling class), who argued for reform and were usually assassinated for their pains, and successful generals, who imposed it.
The problem was twofold: an agricultural crisis and the changing role of the army. In Rome’s early days the army was a militia composed of citizen-farmers who went back to their fields as soon as a campaign was over. However, the responsibilities of empire meant that soldiers could no longer be demobilized at the end of each fighting season. Standing forces were required, with soldiers on long-term contracts. In Cicero’s childhood the great general Caius Marius supplemented and largely replaced the old conscript army with a professional body of long-service volunteers. When their contracts expired, they wanted to be granted farms where they could settle and make livings for themselves and their families. Their loyalty was to their commanders, whom they expected to make the necessary arrangements, and not to the Republic.
Unfortunately, land was in short supply. AS the second century BC proceeded, a rural economy of arable smallholdings gave way to large sheep and cattle ranches, owned by the rich and serviced largely by slave labor. Many peasants were forced off the countryside and swelled Rome’s population; jobs were scarce and they soon became dependent on supplies of subsidized, cut-price grain. The state owned a good deal of public land (ager publicus) throughout Italy and in theory this could be distributed to returning soldiers or the urban unemployed, but much of it had been quietly appropriated by wealthy landowners. These eminent squatters were extremely difficult to dislodge. Many of them were Senators and they fiercely resisted any proposals for land reform.
Even before Marius’ army reforms, wiser heads in the Senate realized that the land question had to be addressed. They backed a leading aristocrat, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, who was elected Tribune in 133 BC, to introduce a land-redistribution scheme. During riots in and around the Forum, a group of Senators lynched him. A Roman historian wrote in the following century: “This was the first time in Rome’s history that citizens were killed and recourse had to brute force—in both cases without fear of punishment.… From now onwards, political disagreements which had previously been resolved by agreement were settled by the sword.”
Ten years later Tiberius’s brother, Caius, returned to the fray. In addition to land reform, he tried to address another challenge facing the Republic, to which diehards in the Senate were turning blind eyes. The conquered and partly assimilated communities in Italy were becoming more and more envious of the rising tide of wealth flowing exclusively into Rome from its imperial possessions.
Italy was a patchwork quilt of communities and ethnic groups. Many of them had their own non-Latin languages—among them the civilized Etruscans, who had once dominated Rome when it was little more than a village, the fiercely independent Samnites in the impregnable Apennines, and the Volscians to the south of Rome. In the heel of Italy there were a number of well-established city-states founded by Greeks in the preceding four centuries. Some communities were granted Roman citizenship, but this was a comparatively rare privilege; others were given only what were called Latin Rights, a package of legal entitlements and duties which allowed a limited degree of involvement in the political process. Certain city-states or tribes kept a theoretical independence and were honored as Allies but exercised only a local autonomy. AS a security measure, a network of citizen settlements, coloniae, peopled by army veterans, was established across the peninsula.
The Italian communities were obliged to supply soldiers to fight the Republic’s wars, but they received nothing in return. The peninsula was becoming increasingly Romanized, but most of its inhabitants were not allowed to be Roman. Unless they were soon granted full rights of citizenship, an armed showdown was going to be unavoidable. Caius Gracchus’s attempt to give them what they wanted was a sensible move but deeply unpopular with public opinion in Rome. Suspecting that his brother’s fate awaited him, he armed a bodyguard and turned to violence. The Senate declared a state of emergency and he and some of his followers were summarily killed in a skirmish.
Now an external threat intervened. From 113 BC word filtered south that two huge Germanic tribes, the Cimbri and the Teutones, were on the move, traveling slowly from their homes in the Jutland area with their wives and children and without any ascertainable destination. It was feared that they intended to invade Italy.
A hero came forward to meet the hour: Caius Marius, who not only professionalized the army but also transformed its tactics. The basic unit was the legion, a body of between 4,000 and 5,000 men. It had traditionally fought in a formation of three lines; Marius changed that, dividing the legion into ten subgroups or cohorts. These were more mobile than the lines and could be deployed flexibly to meet threats on the battlefield as they arose. In 102 BC, when Cicero was still only a four-year-old child, Marius broke the Germanic threat in two colossal battles at Aquae Sextiae in southern France and Vercellae in northern Italy so completely that it was centuries before migrating tribes again dared to threaten Rome.