The Two Great Republics: Rome and the United States Part 6

At the close of the Second Punic War Rome was in possession of five provinces--Sicily, Sardinia, Hither Spain, Farther Spain, and the Gallic coast of Umbria. This latter province soon became an integral part of Italy, but the number of Roman provinces was kept at five by the creation of the province of Cisalpine Gaul. From this time on the number of Roman provinces rapidly increased. The existence of the provinces perpetuated the existence of various cla.s.ses of political rights.

We will close this account with a description by Gibbon of the relations between Rome and the provinces as they existed during the closing years of the republic and the early days of the empire:

"Till the privileges of Romans had been progressively extended to all the inhabitants of the empire, an important distinction was preserved between Italy and the provinces.

The former was esteemed the centre of public unity, and the firm basis of the const.i.tution. Italy claimed the birth, or at least the residence, of the emperors and the senate. The estates of the Italians were exempt from taxes, their persons from the arbitrary jurisdiction of governors. Their munic.i.p.al corporations, formed after the perfect model of the capital, were intrusted, under the immediate eye of the supreme power, with the execution of the laws. From the foot of the Alps to the extremity of Calabria, all the natives of Italy were born citizens of Rome. Their partial distinctions were obliterated, and they insensibly coalesced into one great nation, united by language, manners, and civil inst.i.tutions, and equal to the weight of a powerful empire.

The republic gloried in her generous policy, and was frequently rewarded by the merit and services of her adopted sons. Had she always confined the distinction of Romans to the ancient families within the walls of the city, that immortal name would have been deprived of some of its n.o.blest ornaments. Virgil was a native of Mantua; Horace was inclined to doubt whether he should call himself an Apulian or a Lucanian; it was in Padua that an historian was found worthy to record the majestic series of Roman victories. The patriot family of the Catos emerged from Tusculum; and the little town of Arpinum claimed the double honor of producing Marius and Cicero, the former of whom deserved, after Romulus and Camillus, to be styled the Third Founder of Rome; and the latter, after saving his country from the designs of Catiline, enabled her to contend with Athens for the palm of eloquence.

"The provinces of the empire (as they have been described in the preceding chapter) were dest.i.tute of any public force, or const.i.tutional freedom. In Etruria, in Greece, and in Gaul, it was the first care of the senate to dissolve those dangerous confederacies, which taught mankind that, as the Roman arms prevailed by division, they might be resisted by union. Those princes whom the ostentation of grat.i.tude or generosity permitted for a while to hold a precarious sceptre were dismissed from their thrones as soon as they had performed their appointed task of fas.h.i.+oning to the yoke the vanquished nations. The free states and cities which had embraced the cause of Rome were rewarded with a nominal alliance, and insensibly sunk into real servitude. The public authority was everywhere exercised by the ministers of the senate and of the emperors, and that authority was absolute and without control. But the same salutary maxims of government, which had secured the peace and obedience of Italy, were extended to the most distant conquests. A nation of Romans was gradually formed in the provinces, by the double expedient of introducing colonies, and of admitting the most faithful and deserving of the provincials to the freedom of Rome."

CHAPTER VII

THE CRISIS--THE ATTEMPTED REFORMS OF THE GRACCHI

"Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, G.o.d's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

"Backward look across the ages and the beacon-moments see That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry Of those Crises, G.o.d's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly; Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath pa.s.sed by.

"Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,-- Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth G.o.d within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."

--Lowell's _The Present Crisis_.

The critical days of any contest are seldom those of its final culmination. The end has generally been long foreshadowed. The time at which the last stand for the Roman liberties was made was not during the civil wars of the last century before Christ, but at the time of the attempted reforms of the previous century. The years in which the great crisis of the Roman republic was reached were those from 134 to 121 B.C., the years marked by the activities of the Gracchi.

The story of the Gracchi const.i.tutes one of the strangest, grandest, and saddest stories in the whole course of history. It is a double story of sacrifice, suffering, and untiring labor; of temporary success, of ultimate death and failure--but a failure which stands forth more glorious in the pages of history than the greatest successes of others. It is the story of two brothers, possessed of wealth and of high rank and connections, in the richest and most powerful country of the world--men to whom was open either an easy path along the old established road to the highest honors of the Roman state or the life of luxurious ease so eagerly embraced by the majority of the rich young Romans of that day. Casting aside both these choices, and recognizing the dangers of their native state, these brothers sacrificed all in an attempt to restore to Rome those conditions which in the past had built up her greatness, and to secure a redress of those conditions which had made the status of the great ma.s.s of the citizens of the "Mistress of the World" hardly superior to that of the very serfs. It is a story of the most aggravated selfishness and relentless hatred on the part of those favored few whose special and illegal interests were threatened by the attacks of the young reformers. It is also, unfortunately, to too great an extent a story of ingrat.i.tude and cowardice on the part of those for whose interest Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus sacrificed themselves in vain.

The Gracchi were fortunate in having as father one of those Romans who still retained the Roman virtues of an earlier age,--patriotism, bravery, and honor. Not only had the administration of the elder Gracchus of the offices of consul and censor at Rome been free from corruption, but his administration of the governors.h.i.+p of the Province of Ebro had been of great service to his native country and had, furthermore, endeared his memory to the Spaniards themselves.

The mother of the Gracchi was Cornelia, daughter of Africa.n.u.s Scipio, the greatest Roman hero of the previous generation. Of the twelve sons and one daughter born of this union, only the daughter and two sons lived to maturity. The two surviving sons were the first born, Tiberius Semp.r.o.nius Gracchus, born about 166 B.C., and his brother Gaius, nine years younger.

Few young Romans were afforded the opportunity of such close relations and intercourse with the leading men of Rome as was Tiberius Gracchus in his early years. Even in boyhood his mind seems to have been of a serious cast, more interested in study and speculation than in the pleasures customary in youth.

In his father's house, which was to a large extent a common meeting place for all that was best in Roman society, he frequently heard the leading men of the city lament the disappearance from the country districts of the free citizens, and the attendant evils which seemed to be hovering over the Roman state. But what to his elders appeared lamentable princ.i.p.ally on account of its effect upon the recruiting of the Roman legions, and consequently upon the control of Rome over her provinces and her foreign influence, was to young Tiberius an evil of a very different and more serious character. To him alone of this group did this condition appear as a great moral and social wrong--a wrong, moreover, whose effect would not be limited to the character of the soldiers in the Roman army, but which, if not remedied, would, like a cancer, eat out the very life of the Roman republic. Another difference was that those evils which brought forth from others languid, pessimistic, speculative reflections roused in Tiberius Gracchus the determination to action.

Hardly was the boyhood of Tiberius over when his public life began.

"Scarcely had Tiberius a.s.sumed the garb of manhood when he was elected into the college of augurs. At the banquet given to celebrate his installation, App. Claudius, the chief of the senate, offered him his daughter's hand in marriage.

When the proud senator returned home, he told his wife that he had that day betrothed their daughter. 'Ah,' she cried, 'she is too young; it had been well to wait a while--unless, indeed, young Gracchus is the man.' Soon after his marriage he accompanied Scipio to Carthage, where he was the first to scale the walls.

"The personal importance of Gracchus was strengthened by the marriage of Scipio with his only sister. But this marriage proved unhappy. Semp.r.o.nia had no charms of person, and her temper was not good; Scipio's austere manners were little pleasing to a bride; nor were children born to form a bond of union between them." (Liddell's _History of Rome_.)

A brief taste of military life was added to the experience and training of Tiberius Gracchus when he served, while a mere youth, in the capture of Carthage.

His thirtieth year was spent as a quaestor in Spain. While traveling to and from this province he was forcibly impressed by the industrial and economic conditions in Etruria. Throughout this rich and extensive territory the small freeholder seemed to have entirely disappeared, and the land was now occupied by large estates cultivated by slaves.

Tiberius returned to Rome just as the so-called "slave war" in Sicily broke out. This war not only called attention to the vast number and the depths of wretchedness of the slaves already in Italy and the adjoining island, but it also served to emphasize the perilous condition of a state whose foundation rested upon such a smoldering volcano.

In this servile war the slaves throughout large portions of the island of Sicily arose in a body, murdered those of their masters who were not fortunate enough to escape, and selected a Syrian juggler as their king. A Greek slave, named Achaeus, proved not only a skillful commander in the field but also a capable organizer, and he soon mustered a large army containing both slaves and free laborers.

Another leader, Cleon, a Sicilian slave, captured the important city of Agrigentum. The united forces defeated the Roman praetor Lucius Hypsaeus, and temporarily drove the Romans out of Sicily.

It was not until after three years of continued warfare, after the Romans had suffered numerous defeats and great armies had been sent under three different Roman consuls, that the rebellion in Sicily was finally put down.

Upon his return from Spain, and at the breaking out of the servile war, Tiberius Gracchus had not hesitated to freely express his feelings as to the cause of the existing evils, and as to the necessary remedies for their amelioration, and it was not long before that part of the Roman people who were dissatisfied with existing conditions turned to Gracchus as the only logical leader for the reform movement. As his views on the cause of the evils and the general character of the remedies which he proposed had been shown to the people by his speeches, Tiberius was elected tribune in 134 B.C., taking office on December 10 of that year.

The reforms proposed by Tiberius Gracchus in the bill presented before the comitia tributa, almost immediately after his installation as tribune, were entirely of an economic character. In the field of mere political rights nothing more remained to be asked by the lowest of the Roman citizens; their pitiable condition was the result of the existing agrarian situation. The agrarian bill proposed by Tiberius Gracchus, while a radical departure from existing conditions, was neither illegal, confiscatory, nor unjust; it merely provided for a rea.s.sumption on the part of the state of land long held illegally by the "special interests" of the place and age.

The agrarian law of Tiberius Gracchus was in its main features merely a revival of the Licinian agrarian law of 367 B.C. By the original law (which for more than two centuries had been so flagrantly violated) it had been provided that no head of a family should hold more than five hundred jugera (a jugera being a little more than three fifths of an acre) of the public land. Tiberius proposed to reenact this law, but with the concession added that adult sons might hold each an additional two hundred and fifty jugera; but not more than one thousand jugera, in all, were to be held by any single family. Whoever was unlawfully in possession of the public land was required to return the same, above the permitted maximum, to the state; fair compensation, however, was to be allowed for improvements made by the holder of the land while it was in his possession.

The law further provided that all public lands were to be placed under the control of three commissioners. This commission was to allot the public land, in small parcels, to such poor citizens as might apply for it. These new occupiers of the land were to hold it in perpetuity as tenants of the state, paying a small annual rental.

These estates were to descend to the children of the holders, but were not to be alienated, thus preventing the possibility of the land being once again gathered together into large estates.

No valid objection could be made to the proposals of Tiberius Gracchus, which were merely the righting of one of the worst of the existing scandals of the Roman administration; a reform, moreover, which was to be carried out in such a manner as to give to the wrongdoers far greater consideration than that to which they were ent.i.tled. The law, however, dealt a heavy blow against the richest and most powerful cla.s.s in Rome. The greater Roman capitalists had so long held possession, in utter defiance of the law, of the great bulk of the public lands of the state that their wrongful possessions had, in their eyes, ripened into a rightfully vested interest.

An indirect method of attack has always been used by the opponents of Gracchus, both by the opponents of his own day and by those historians who have attempted to a.s.sail his memory. A recent historian, unfriendly both to Gracchus and to his democratic reforms (Ferrero), refers to this bill as follows:

"The bill was very favorably received by the peasants and the small proprietors. It appears also to have given great satisfaction to the clients, freemen, and artisans, who made up the proletariat of the metropolis; they fell into the not unnatural mistake--often made by the poor before and since--of regarding the greed of the rich, and the indifference of the government, as a sufficient explanation of their own distress."

The ancient historian Plutarch thus refers to this contest:

"Tiberius defending the matter, which of itself was good and just, with such eloquence as might have justified an evil cause, was invincible; and no man was able to argue against him to confute him, when, speaking in the behalf of the poor citizens of Rome (the people being gathered round about the pulpit for orations), he told them, that the wild beasts through Italy had their dens and caves of abode, and the men that fought, and were slain for their country, had nothing else but air and light, and so were compelled to wander up and down with their wives and children, having no resting-place nor house to put their heads in. And that the captains do but mock their soldiers when they encourage them in battle to fight valiantly for the graves, the temples, their own houses, and their predecessors. For, said he, of such a number of poor citizens as there be, there cannot a man of them show any ancient house or tomb of their ancestors, because the poor men go to the wars, and are slain for the rich men's pleasures and wealth; besides, they falsely call them lords of the earth, where they have not a handful of ground that is theirs. These and such other like words being uttered before all of the people with such vehemency and truth, so moved the common people withal, and put them in such a rage, that there was no adversary of his able to withstand him. Therefore, leaving to contradict and deny the law by argument, the rich men put all their trust in Marcus Octavius, colleague and fellow-tribune in office, who was a grave and wise young man, and Tiberius' very familiar friend. That the first time they came to him, to oppose him against the confirmation of this law, he prayed them to hold him excused, because Tiberius was his very friend. But, in the end, being compelled to it through the great number of the rich men that were importunate with him, he withstood Tiberius' law, which was enough to overthrow it."

A more deep-dyed treachery than that to which Marcus Octavius at length consented is, fortunately, but seldom met with in history. It was a treachery not only to one of his closest friends, not only to the cla.s.s which he represented and the voters who had elected him, but also to the character and traditions of the very office which he held.

The creation of the office of tribune had been the first great victory won by the plebeians; the duties of those holding this office had been to protect the lives and property, the rights and the liberties, of the weaker cla.s.s in the community--the plebeians.

To make it possible for the tribunes to give such protection, the veto had been granted to them. From the time when this power had first been secured by the tribunes down to the day when the agrarian law of Tiberius Gracchus came before the comitia tributa for its final decision, the veto power of the Roman tribune had been the greatest bulwark of the poor man of Rome. Now, in the greatest crisis of the long contest in Roman history of human rights against cla.s.s privileges, this power was to be the weapon by which a traitor was to secure the victory of the rich landowners over the great body of the Roman citizens.

The day upon which the bill was to come before the comitia tributa found the Forum crowded with what was probably the largest number of citizens who, up to this time, had ever attended a meeting of this a.s.sembly. Tiberius Gracchus made his speech in favor of the law, which speech was received with great applause. The moment of his great triumph was apparently just at hand. The clerk was about to read the words of the bill, before it was voted upon, when the renegade tribune Marcus Octavius stood up and forbade the clerk to read the bill.

Gracchus was surprised and, for the time, helpless. After much bitter discussion, the meeting was adjourned; but Gracchus gave notice that he would take up his bill again upon the next regular meeting day of the comitia tributa.

The cowardly treachery of his colleague, instead of discouraging Tiberius Gracchus, merely spurred him on to greater efforts. His policy, formerly in the main a conciliatory one, now became militant.

In retaliation for the veto of Octavius he too made use of this power.

Indeed, a more thorough and effective use of this power than that made by Gracchus at this time can hardly be imagined. A veto was put upon the exercise of any of his functions by any of the Roman officials; even the treasury was shut up and the courts of justice discontinued.

As the great landowners had now forfeited all claims to consideration on account of the methods which they had adopted, the compensation clauses were struck out of the bill, which in its amended form simply provided that the state should resume possession of all lands held in contravention of the Licinian Law. Even in this amended form there was nothing revolutionary about the bill; it was merely the reenactment of a law which already existed, and should have been in operation.

On the second day when the bill came before the comitia an attempt was again made to read the law, and this was again prevented by the veto of the tribune Octavius. Party feeling by this time ran so high that a riot seemed inevitable. Trouble was for the time averted by an agreement to refer the matter to the Senate.

A few months before, Gracchus' name would have possessed great influence in the Senate, and, furthermore, a number of the senators--the most patriotic and clear sighted, who saw the dangers with which Rome was confronted--had in the beginning sympathized with Gracchus in the objects which he sought. By this time, however, Gracchus had lost all the sympathy and support which he had ever possessed in this direction. This is sometimes explained by saying that Tiberius Gracchus had alienated all the conservative elements in his support by the intemperance of his actions. Such an explanation cannot stand the scrutiny of history. The proposals and objects of Gracchus were never anything but moderate--never anything more than the claim that the existing laws must be enforced. The methods of Gracchus were not only strictly legal but also strictly conventional and usual, until the disgraceful tactics of his opponents constrained him to more forcible action.

At this time Tiberius Gracchus, meeting only reproaches from the senators, who were enraged at him because he had called attention to and made an issue of a state of political corruption from which their cla.s.s had benefited for generations, returned to the comitia. Upon his return the meeting was again dissolved; but before it had adjourned Gracchus gave notice that he would still again bring up his measure before the comitia tributa, on its next regular meeting day, and that if Marcus Octavius again interposed the veto power to prevent a vote being taken upon the bill, he would move the people that Octavius be deposed as tribune.

Before the day for the next meeting of the comitia tributa arrived, Gracchus appears to have made every effort to induce his colleague and former friend to recede from his position. All efforts in this direction, however, proving ineffectual, Gracchus immediately upon the a.s.sembling of the comitia moved that the tribune Marcus Octavius be removed from office. Of the first seventeen tribes to vote, each, by a unanimous or practically unanimous vote, was in favor of the deposition of Octavius. Before the vote of the eighteenth tribe was taken, Gracchus made a final appeal to Octavius to withdraw his opposition. After some hesitation Octavius refused, and the vote of the next tribe furnished the required majority for his deposition.

For the first time in a popular government the principle of the right of the people to recall an unworthy public official had been put into practical operation. A more fitting occasion for this action can hardly be imagined.

The action of Tiberius Gracchus in adopting this innovation has been bitterly denounced, and as strongly defended. One of the liberal historians refers to this action as follows: