The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

THE GRACCHI AND THEIR REFORMS

B.C. 133

THEODOR MOMMSEN

Cornelia, whose father was Scipio Africanus, preferred to be called "Mother of the Gracchi" rather than daughter of the conqueror of Numantia. Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, her sons, were born at a time when the social condition of Rome was rank with corruption. The small farmer class were deprived of holdings, the soil was being worked by slaves, and its products wasted on pleasure and debauchery by the rich; the law courts were controlled by the wealthy and powerful, while oppression, bribery, and fraud were generally rampant in the city.

On December 10, B.C. 133, Tiberius Gracchus entered upon the office of tribune, to which he had been elected, and pledged himself to the abolition of crying abuses. His first movement was in the direction of agrarian legislation. He proposed to vest all public lands in the hands of three commissioners (triumviri), who were to distribute the public lands, at that time largely monopolized by the wealthy, to all citizens in needy circumstances. The bill met with bitter opposition from the rich landholders, but was eventually passed, and Gracchus rose to the summit of popular power. He also brought forward a measure limiting the necessary period of military service; a second bill was drawn up by him for the reformation of the law courts, and a third established a right of appeal from the law courts to the popular assembly. These measures were afterward carried by his brother Caius. Tiberius Gracchus was killed in a tumult which was raised in the Forum by the nobles and their partisans, and three hundred of his followers lost their lives in the fray.

Caius Gracchus, his brother, returned to Rome B.C. 124 from Sardinia, where he had been engaged in subduing the mountaineers. For ten years he had kept aloof from public life, but was at once elected tribune, in the discharge of which office he showed distinguished powers as an orator. He brought forth the important measures known as the Sempronian Laws, the provisions of which were quite revolutionary in character. The first of these laws renewed and extended the agrarian laws of his brother and instituted new colonies in Italy and the provinces. By the second Sempronian law the State undertook to furnish corn at a low price to all Roman citizens.

Other measures aimed at diminishing the great administrative power of the senate, which had so far monopolized all judicial offices. By the law of Gracchus the administration of justice was entirely transferred to a body of three hundred persons who possessed the equestrian rate of property. The Sempronian law for the assignment of consular provinces, which hitherto had been left to the senate, made the allotment of two designated provinces to be decided by the newly elected consuls themselves. The power of the senate was also crippled by the law of Gracchus in which he transferred to the tribunes the burden of improving the roads of Italy, contracts for which had hitherto been awarded by the censor under the approval of the senate. These movements were all in the direction of increasing popular and democratic power, and the work of the Gracchi tended to the extension of political freedom. In the history of politics these social struggles are among the most important events illustrative of the gradual dawn of civil liberty among a people which had been dominated and oppressed by a selfish aristocracy.

The power of Gracchus rested on the mercantile class and the proletariat; primarily on the latter, which in this conflict—wherein neither side had any military reserve—acted, as it were, the part of an army. It was clear that the senate was not powerful enough to wrest either from the merchants or from the proletariat their new privileges; any attempt to assail the corn laws or the new jury arrangement would have led under a somewhat grosser or somewhat more civilized form to a street riot, in presence of which the senate was utterly defenceless. But it was no less clear that Gracchus himself and these merchants and proletarians were only kept together by mutual advantage, and that the men of material interests were ready to accept their posts, and the populace, strictly so called, its bread, quite as well from any other as from Caius Gracchus.