SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

Many of them, from different ends of the political spectrum, tried to find some effective remedies. We should not allow our hindsight, their ultimate failure or the succession of civil wars and assassinations to blind us to their efforts, which are the main theme of this and the next chapter.

Tiberius Gracchus – a grandson of Scipio Africanus,

How far the smallholders really had disappeared from the land has puzzled modern historians much more than it did their ancient counterparts. It is not difficult to see how an agricultural revolution of that kind might have been a logical consequence of Roman warfare and expansion.

Tiberius proposed to restrict their holdings to a maximum of 500 iugera (roughly 120 hectares) each, claiming that this was the old legal limit, and to parcel out the rest in small units to the dispossessed. It was a typical style of Roman reform, justifying radical action as a return to past practice.

A replacement was found for him on the commission, and its activity over the next few years can still be traced in a series of boundary stones marking the intersections of the new property units, each one blazoning the names of the commissioners responsible.

another line of Homer, to the effect that he had brought it on himself, returned to Italy from fighting in Spain to take up the cause of those rich Italian allies who were being ejected from public land. He was found dead in his bed in 129 BCE, on the very morning when he was due to give a speech on their behalf. Unexplained deaths – and there were many of them – provoked Roman suspicion. In both these cases there

were rumours of foul play. Some Romans, as they often did when no evidence was available, alleged malign female influence behind the scenes: the triumphant conqueror of Carthage, they claimed, had been the victim of a tawdry domestic murder by his wife and mother-in-law, who were determined that he should not undo the work of Tiberius Gracchus, their brother and son.

example, to be seen as delegates of the voters, bound to follow the will of their electorate? Or are they representatives, elected to exercise their own judgement in the changing circumstances of government?

That certainly is the point of a reported exchange between Gaius and one of his most implacable opponents, the wealthy ex-consul Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi (his last name, appropriately enough, means ‘stingy’). After the law had been

passed, Gaius spotted Frugi standing in line for his allocation of grain and asked him why he was there, since he so disapproved of the measure. ‘I’m not keen, Gracchus,’ he replied, ‘on you getting the idea of sharing out my property man by man, but if that’s what you’re going to do, I’ll take my cut.’ He was presumably turning Gaius’ rhetoric back on him. The debate was about who had a claim on the property of the state and where the boundary lay between private and public wealth.

Rome was the only place in the ancient Mediterranean where the state took responsibility for the regular basic food supplies of its citizens.

Angelica Kauffmann’s

Lucius Opimius, a diehard who became something of a hero to the conservatives, to cancel much of his legislation.

When he had the nerve, or naivety, to celebrate his suppression of the Gracchans by lavishly restoring the temple of the goddess Concord (‘Harmony’) in the Forum, some realist with a chisel summed up the whole murderous debacle by carving across the façade the words ‘An act of senseless Discord produces a Temple of Concord’.

Shortly before Gaius’ revolutionary reforms, in the mid 120s BCE a Roman consul was travelling through Italy with his wife and came to the small town of Teanum (modern Teano, about 100 miles south of Rome). The lady decided she wanted to use the baths there usually reserved for men, so the mayor had them prepared for her and the regular bathers thrown out. But she complained that the facilities were neither ready in time nor clean enough. ‘So a stake was set up in the forum, and Teanum’s mayor, the most distinguished man in the town, was taken and tied to it. His clothes were stripped off and he was beaten with sticks.’

He was not the first to suggest this. His proposal was part of a growing controversy about the status of Rome’s allies and the Latin communities in Italy. It ended with many of the allies going to war on Rome in the Social War, one of the deadliest and most puzzling conflicts in Roman history. The puzzle turns largely on what the aims of the allies were. Did they resort to violence to force Rome to grant them full Roman citizenship? Or were they trying to shake themselves free of Rome? Did they want in or out?

At Praeneste, for example, just over 20 miles from Rome, a vast new sanctuary of the goddess Fortune was built, a masterpiece of display architecture – with a theatre, terracing, porticoes and colonnades – to rival anything anywhere else in the Mediterranean. It is hardly a coincidence that the names of several families from this town are found among those of the Roman and Italian traders on the Aegean island of Delos, one of the biggest commercial centres at the time, and a hub of the slave trade.

The close personal relationships that some of the Italian elite had with leading Romans (how else did they enlist Scipio Aemilianus’ help against Tiberius’ land reform?) did not make up for the fact that they had no formal stake in Roman politics or decision-making.

That murder heralded full-blown war on a terrible scale. The tipping point came at the end of 91 BCE, when a Roman envoy insulted the people of Asculum in central Italy. They responded by killing him and all the other Romans in the town.

This brutal piece of ethnic cleansing set the tone for what followed, which was not far short of civil war: ‘It can be called a war against socii, to lessen the odium of it; the truth is it was a civil war, against citizens,’ as one Roman historian later summed it up. And it involved fighting throughout much of the peninsula, including at Pompeii, where the marks of the battering by Roman artillery in 89 BCE can be seen even now

And a favourite story of the successful transformation of Italians into Romans highlights the career of a man from the northern Italian region of Picenum: as a babe in arms he had been paraded among the prisoners in one of the triumphs celebrated at Rome for victories over the allies-turned-enemies; fifty years later, now a Roman general, he celebrated his own triumph for victory over the Parthians – the only man known to have been on both sides of a triumphal procession, a victim turned victor. But Roman writers may have been too ready to equate the outcome of the war with its aims or to give the Italians a goal that fitted more comfortably the later unity of Rome and Italy.

But there are more subtle considerations too, and hints that – like it or not – it was too late for Italian independence from Rome. The coinage certainly blazons some anti-Roman imagery. But it was based entirely on the weight standards of Roman coinage, and many of the other designs were directly borrowed from Roman issues.

Whatever the causes of the Social War, the effects of the legislation of 90 and 89 BCE that extended full citizenship to most of the peninsula were dramatic. Italy was now the closest thing to a nation state that the classical world ever knew, and the principle we glimpsed centuries earlier that ‘Romans’ could have dual citizenship and two civic identities, that of Rome and that of their home town, became the norm.

The most aggressively anti-Roman coin minted by the Italian allies in the Social War. The Roman wolf is entirely overpowered by the Italian bull, and beneath the design the name of the moneyer responsible is written in the Italian language of Oscan. The other side of the silver coin blazons the head of the god Bacchus and the name, also in Oscan, of one of the leading Italian generals.

Aulus Licinius Archias, on the grounds that he had emigrated to Italy, had become a citizen of the town of Heraclea and so after the Social War had the right to Roman citizenship. This status was being contested in the courts. The defence ran into difficulties, however. There was no written proof that Archias was a citizen of Heraclea, because the town’s record office had burned down in the Social War. There was little written proof of his Roman citizenship either, as he did not appear on any census list; he had, suspiciously we might think, been out of the country on the occasions of both the most recent censuses. So Cicero had to rely on some witnesses to vouch for him and on the private records of the praetor, now dead, who had first approved his claim.

The Roman commander at the siege of Pompeii in 89 BCE, where the teenaged Cicero served as a very junior officer, was Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, meaning ‘lucky’ or, rather more imposingly, ‘the favourite of the goddess Venus’. He faced well-organised opposition inside the town, to judge from a series of notices, uncovered beneath later plaster on the street façades, apparently giving instructions to the local militia on where to muster.

Many slaves wanted freedom for themselves, but all the evidence from ancient Rome suggests that slavery as an institution was taken for granted, even by slaves. If they had a clearly formulated aim, the best guess is that Spartacus and his fellow escapees wanted to return to their various homes – in Spartacus’ case probably Thrace in northern Greece; for others, Gaul. One thing is certain, though: they managed to hold out against Roman forces for an embarrassingly long time.

The most vivid testimony, however, to the risks and dilemmas for the ordinary people caught up in these wars comes from a story about the outbreak of the Social War at Asculum in 91 BCE. An eager audience, a mixture of Romans and locals, was enjoying some shows in the town theatre when the drama moved offstage. The Roman part of the crowd had not liked the anti-Roman stance of one comic performer and attacked him so fiercely that they left the hapless actor dead. The next comedian on the bill was a travelling player of Latin origin and a great favourite with Roman audiences for his jokes and mimicry. Terrified that the other side of the audience would now turn on him, he had no option but to walk on to the stage where the other

man had just been killed and to talk and joke his way out of trouble. ‘I’m not a Roman either,’ he said to the spectators. ‘I travel throughout Italy searching for favours by making people laugh and giving pleasure. So spare the swallow, which the gods allow to nest safely in all your houses!’ This touched them, and they sat back to watch the rest of the show. But it was only a brief comic interlude: soon after, all the Romans in the town were killed. It is a poignant and revealing story, which captures the point of view of an ordinary stand-up comic facing an ordinary audience, which on this occasion was not just hostile but potentially murderous. And it is a powerful reminder of the very fine line throughout this period between normal civic life – going to the theatre, enjoying a comic turn or two – and deadly massacre. Sometimes the swallows were not spared.

In fact, so spectacular was Cicero’s success that after two weeks of what was set to be a long trial, Verres decided that the outcome was hopeless and, before the court reconvened after a holiday break, went into voluntary exile in Marseilles, with many of his ill-gotten gains. He lived on there till 43 BCE, when he was put to death in another pogrom of proscriptions that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar. The reason, ostensibly, was that he had refused to let Mark Antony have some of his precious Corinthian bronze.

The case over, and keen not to waste his hard work, Cicero circulated in written form what he had said at the opening of the trial, along with the remaining speeches that he would have given against Verres had it continued. The full text of these still survives, copied and recopied throughout the ancient world and the Middle Ages as a model of how to denounce an enemy. Several hundred pages in all, it is a litany of lurid examples of Verres’ cruel exploitation of the inhabitants of Sicily, with flashbacks to earlier villainies before he reached the island in 73 BCE.

Cicero details, at enormous length, Verres’ grooming of innocent virgins, his fiddling of the taxes, his profiteering from the corn supply, and his systematic thieving of some of the famous masterpieces of Sicily, interspersed with poignant tales of the victims. He lingers, for example, on the plight of one Heius, once the proud possessor of statues by some of the most renowned classical Greek sculptors, including Praxiteles and Polyclitus, heirlooms kept in a ‘shrine’ in his house. Other Romans had admired these, even borrowed them. Verres turned up and forced him to sell them for a ridiculously low price. Even worse, according to the culminating anecdote in this anthology of crime, was the fate of Publius Gavius, a Roman citizen living in Sicily.

Roman rule was for the most part fairly hands off by the standards of more recent imperial regimes: the locals kept their own calendars, their own coinages, their own gods, their own varied systems of law and civic government.

One young colleague in Rome pestered him to have some panthers caught and dispatched back to the city – to star, and be slaughtered, in shows he was putting on there. Cicero

was evasive, claiming that the animals were in short supply: they must have decided to emigrate to the neighbouring province to escape the traps, he quipped. Less of a joking matter was a problem over loans made by Marcus Junius Brutus. The man who six years later led Caesar’s assassins was at this point up to his neck in usury,

councillors. But then, rather than offend the well-connected creditor, he proceeded to turn a blind eye to the whole issue. His main priority, anyway, was to quit the province and the job of governor as soon as he legitimately could (‘the business bores me’). When his year was up, he walked out, leaving the vast region in the charge of one of his underlings, whom he admitted was ‘only a boy, probably stupid, with no authority or self-control’: so much for responsible government.

Many of the tales of misdeeds were part of a wider discussion that began towards the end of the second century BCE about what the rules and ethical principles for overseas government should be, or – to put it even more generally – about how Rome should relate to the outside world when foreigners became people to be governed as well as fought. This was a distinctive, and novel, Roman contribution to political theory in the ancient world. Cicero’s earliest philosophical treatise, written in 59 BCE in the form of a letter to his brother, is largely concerned with honesty, integrity, impartiality and consistency in provincial rule. And a century before, in 149 BCE, a permanent criminal court had been established at Rome, with the main aim of giving foreigners compensation and the right of redress against extortion by their Roman rulers. No ancient Mediterranean empire had ever systematically tried to do this before. It may be a sign that corrupt government abroad started early. It also shows that there had long been a political will to tackle corruption. The law under which Verres was indicted, originally part of Gaius Gracchus’ reform programme, shows what an enormous amount of care, precision and sophisticated legal thought had been devoted to this problem by the 120s BCE.

Marius’ career had an enormous impact on the rest of Republican history, in ways he can hardly have planned. First, when he returned to Africa to take command against Jugurtha, he enrolled in his army any citizen who was prepared to volunteer. Up to then, except in emergencies, Roman soldiers had officially been recruited only from families with some property. On that basis, recruitment problems had been evident for some time and may have lain behind Tiberius Gracchus’ anxieties about the landless poor; for, if they had no land, they could not serve in the legions.

By enrolling all comers, Marius cut through that, but in the process he created a dependent, quasi-professional Roman army, which destabilised domestic politics for eighty years or so. These

Mithradates VI

against the Parthian Empire, centred in what is now Iran, which in many ways replaced Mithradates in Roman fears.

The decisive Parthian victory came in 53 BCE at the Battle of Carrhae, on what is now the border between Turkey and Syria. Crassus’ head was sent as a trophy to the Parthian king’s residence, where it was instantly reused as a prop, standing in for the head of the tragic Pentheus, decapitated by his mother, in a performance of Euripides’ play The Bacchae (interestingly part of the Parthian repertoire).

Publius Clodius Pulcher

Battle of Bovillae.

Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus,

Caesar’s description of these campaigns in the seven volumes of his Commentaries on the Gallic War, an edited version of his official annual dispatches from the front line sent back to Rome, starts with its famous, clinical opener, ‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres’ (‘The whole of Gaul is divided into three parts’). It ranks alongside Xenophon’s description (the Anabasis, or Going Up) of his exploits with a Greek mercenary army, written in the fourth century BCE, as the only detailed eyewitness account of any ancient warfare to survive.

In doing this, Caesar laid the foundations for the political geography of modern Europe, as well as slaughtering up to a million people over the whole region. It would be wrong to imagine that the Gauls were peace-loving innocents brutally trampled by Caesar’s forces. One Greek visitor in the early first century BCE had been shocked to find enemy heads casually pinned up at the entrance to Gallic houses, though he conceded that, after a while, one got used to the sight; and Gallic mercenaries had done good business in Italy until the power of Rome had closed their market. Yet the mass killing of those who stood in Caesar’s way was more than even some Romans could take. Cato, driven partly no doubt by his enmity of Caesar and speaking from partisan as well as humanitarian motives, suggested that he should be handed over for trial to those tribes whose women and children he had put to death. Pliny the Elder, trying later to arrive at a headcount of Caesar’s victims, seems strikingly modern in accusing him of ‘a crime against humanity’.

For us, ‘to cross the Rubicon’ has come to mean ‘to pass the point of no return’. It did not mean that to Caesar.

Gaius Asinius Pollio,

Caesar quoted in Greek two words from the Athenian comic playwright Menander: literally, in a phrase borrowed from gambling, ‘Let the dice be thrown.’ Despite the usual English translation – ‘The die is cast’, which again appears to hint at the irrevocable step being taken – Caesar’s Greek was much more an expression of uncertainty, a sense that everything now was in the lap of the gods. Let’s throw the dice in the air and see where they will fall! Who knows what will happen next?