Chapter IV (2)

Had Gracchus thought of restoring this jurisdiction to the Comitia, he would have taken a step which had the theoretical justification that, of all the powers at Rome, the people was the one which had least interest in provincial misgovernment. But it would have been a retrograde movement from the point of view of procedure; it would not necessarily have abolished senatorial influence, and it would not have attained his object of holding the government permanently in check by the political recognition of a class which rivalled the senate in the definiteness of its organisation and surpassed it in the homogeneity of its interests. The body of capitalists who had assumed the titular designation of knights, had long been chafing at the complete subjection of their commercial interests to the caprice of the provincial governor and the arbitrary dispositions of the home government. Tiberius Gracchus, when he revealed the way to the promised land, had probably reflected rather than suggested the ambition of the great business men to have a more definite place in the administration assigned them. His appeal had come too late, or seemed too hopeless of success, to win their support for a reformer who had outraged their feelings as capitalists; but since his death ten years for reflection had elapsed, and they were years which witnessed a vast extension of their potential activity, and aroused an agonised feeling of helplessness at the subordinate part which they played both to senate and people when the disposal of kingdoms was in question. The suggestions for giving them a share in the control of the provincial world may have been numerous, and their variety is reflected in the different plans which Caius Gracchus himself advanced. The system at which his brother had hinted was that of a joint board composed of the existing senators with the addition of an equal number of equites; and we have already suggested the possibility that this House of Six Hundred was intended to be the senate of the future, efficient for all purposes and not exclusively devoted to the work of criminal jurisdiction. The same significance may attach to the scheme, which seems to have been propounded by Caius Gracchus during, or perhaps even before, his first tenure of the tribunate, and appears at intervals in proposals made by reformers down to the time of Sulla. Gracchus is said to have suggested the increase of the senate by the addition of three, or, as one authority states, six hundred members of the equestrian order.[623] The proposal, if it was one for an enlarged senate, and not for a joint panel of _judices_, in which a changing body of equites would act as a check on the permanent senatorial jurors, must soon have been seen to be utterly unsuited to its purpose. It is a scheme characteristic of the aristocrat who is posing as a friend of the mercantile class and hopes to deceive the vigilance of that keen-sighted fraternity. To give the senate a permanent infusion of new blood would be simply to strengthen its authority, while completely cutting away the links which bound the new members to their original class. Even the swamping of the existing body by a two-thirds majority of new members would have been transitory in its effects. The new member of the Curia would soon have shed his old equestrian views and assumed the outlook of his older peers. It might indeed have been possible to devise a system by which the senate would, at the recurring intervals of the _lustra_, have been filled up in equal proportions from ex-magistrates and knights: and in this way a constant supply of middle-class sentiment might have been furnished to the governing body. But even this scheme would have secured to the elected a life-long tenure of power, and this was a fatal obstacle both to the intentions of the reformer and the aspirations of the equestrian order. While the former desired a balance of power, the latter wished that the interests of their class should be enforced by its genuine representatives. Both knew that a participation in the executive power was immaterial, and that all that was needed might be gained by the possession of judicial authority alone. Gracchus's final decision, therefore, was to create a wholly new panel of _judices_ which should be made up exclusively from the members of the titular class of knights.[624]

It was not necessary or desirable that the judiciary law should make any mention of a class, or employ the courtesy title of _equites_ to designate the new judges. The effect might be less invidiously secured by demanding qualifications which were practically identical with the social conditions requisite for the possession of titular knighthood. One of the determining factors was a property qualification, and this was possibly placed at the modest total of four hundred thousand sesterces.[625] This was the amount of capital which seems at this period to have given its possessor the right of serving on horseback in the army and therefore the claim to the title of _eques_, but it was a sum that did not convey alarming suggestions of government by millionaires, but rather pointed to the upper middle class as the fittest depositaries of judicial power. Not only were magistrates and ex-magistrates excluded from the Bench, but the disqualification extended to the fathers, brothers and sons of magistrates and of past or present senators. The ostensible purpose of these provisions was doubtless to ensure that the selected jurors should be bound by no tie of kindred to the individuals who would appear before their judgment seat; but they must have had the effect of excluding from the new panel many of the true knights belonging to the eighteen centuries; for this select corps was largely composed of members of the noble families. A similar effect would have been produced by the age qualification. The Gracchan jurors were to be over thirty and under sixty, while a large number of the military _equites_ were under the former limit of age, in consequence of the practice of retiring from the corps after the attainment of the quaestorship or selection into the senate. The aristocratic element in the equestrian order, if this latter expression be used in its widest sense to include both the military and civilian knights, was thus rigorously excluded: and there remained but the men whose business interests were in no way complicated by respect for senatorial traditions. The official list of the new jurors _(album judicum)_ was probably to be made out annually; and there is every reason to suppose that there was a considerable change of personnel at each revision, since one of the conditions of membership of the panel--residence within a mile of Rome--could hardly have been observed by business men with world-wide interests for any extended period. The conception which still prevailed that judicial service was a burden _(munus)_, would alone have led the revising authority to free past jurors from the service: and the practice must have been welcome to the capitalists themselves, many of whom may well have desired the share of power and perhaps of profit which jurisdiction over their superiors conferred. We are told that the selection of the first panel was entrusted to the legislator himself;[626] for the future the Foreign Praetor was to draw up the annual list of four hundred and fifty who were qualified to hear cases of extortion.[627] It is not known whether this was the full number of the new jurors, or whether there were additional members selected by a different authority for the trial of other offences. It is not probable that the judiciary law of Gracchus imposed the new class of _judices_ directly on the civil courts. The _judex_ of private law still retained his character of an arbitrator appointed by the consent of the parties, and it would have been improper to restrict this choice to a class defined by statute. But the practical monopoly of jurisdiction in important cases, which senators seem to have acquired, was henceforth broken through, and the _judex_ in civil suits was sometimes taken from the equestrian order.[628]

The superficial aspect of this great change seemed full of promise for the future. The ample means of the new jurors might be taken as a guarantee of their purity; their selection from the middle class, as a security of the soundness and disinterestedness of their judgments. Perhaps Gracchus himself was the victim of this hope, and believed that the scourge of the nobility which he had placed in the hands of the knights, might at least be decorously wielded. The judgment of the after-world varied as to the mode in which they exercised their power. Cicero, in advocating the claims of the order to a renewed tenure of authority, could urge that during their possession of the courts for nearly fifty years, their judgments had never been tainted by the least suspicion of corruption.[629] This was a safe assertion if suspicion is only justified by proof; for the Gracchan jurors seem to have been from the first exempted from all prosecution for bribery.[630] This legal exemption is all the more remarkable as Gracchus himself was the author of a law which permitted a criminal prosecution for a corrupt judgment.[631] It is difficult to understand the significance of this enactment, for the magistrates, against whom it was directed, were in few cases judges of fact, except in the military domain. It could not have referred to the president of a standing commission who was a mere vehicle for the judgment of the jury; but Gracchus probably contemplated the occasional revival of special commissions sanctioned by the people, and it is possible that even the two praetors who presided over the civil courts may have been subject to the operation of the law, which may not have been directed merely against corrupt sentences in criminal matters, as was subsequently the case when the law was renewed by Sulla. It is even possible that the law dates from a period anterior to the creation of the equestrian _judices_; but, even on this hypothesis, the exclusion of the latter from its operation was something of an anomaly; for even the civil _judex_ of Rome, on whose analogy the jurors of the standing commissions had been created, was in early times criminally, and at a later period at least pecuniarily, liable for an unjust sentence.[632] We shall elsewhere have occasion to dwell on the value which the equestrian order attached to this immunity, and we shall see that its relief at the freedom from vexatious prosecution is of itself no sign of corruption. One of our authorities does indeed emphatically assert the ultimate prevalence of bribery in the equestrian courts:[633] and circumstances may be easily imagined which would have made this resort natural, if not inevitable. A band of capitalists eager to secure a criminal verdict, which had a purely commercial significance, would scarcely be slow to employ commercial methods with their less wealthy representatives on the Bench, and votes might have been purchased by transactions in which cash payments played no part. But the corruption of individuals was of far less moment than the solidarity of interest and collective cupidity of the mercantile order as a whole. The verdicts of the courts reflected the judgment of the Exchange. It was even possible to create a prosecution[634] simply for the purpose of damning a man who, in the exercise of his authority, had betrayed tendencies which were interpreted as hostile to capitalism.

The future war between the senate and the equites would not have been waged so furiously, had not Gracchus given his favoured class the chance of asserting a positive control, in virtue of an almost official position, over the richest domains of the Roman world. The fatal bequest of Attalus was still the plaything of parties; but the prize which Tiberius had destined for the people was used by Caius to seal his compact with the knights. The concession, which could not be openly avowed, was accomplished by means so indirect that its meaning must have escaped the majority of the voters who sanctioned it, and its consequences may not have been fully grasped by the legislator himself. The masses who applauded the new law about the province of Asia, may have seen in it but a promise of the increase of their revenues; while the desire of swelling the public finances, which he had so heavily burdened, of putting an end to the anomalous condition of a district which was neither free nor governed, neither protectorate nor province, perhaps even of meeting the wishes of some of the Asiatic provincials, who preferred regular to irregular exactions, may have been combined in the mind of Gracchus with the wish to see the equites confront the senate in yet another sphere. The change which he proposed was one concerned with the taxation of the province. It cannot be determined how far he was responsible for the infliction of new burdens on Rome's Asiatic subjects. The increase of the public revenue, of which he boasted in one of his speeches to the people,[635] the new harbour dues with which he is credited,[636] may point to certain creations of his own; but the end at which he aimed seems to have been mainly a revival of the system of taxation which had been current in the kingdom of the Attalids, accompanied by a new and, as he possibly thought, better system of collection. It could not have been he who first burdened the taxpayer with the payment of tithes; for this method of revenue was of immense antiquity in all Hellenised lands and is not likely to have been unknown to the kings of Pergamon. It is a method that, from its elastic nature, bears less heavily on the agriculturist than that of a direct impost; for the payment is conditioned by the size of the crops and is independent of the changing value of money. The chief objection to the tax, considered in itself and apart from its accompanying circumstances, was the immensity of the revenue which it yielded; the sums exacted by an Oriental despot were unnecessary for the economical administration of Rome; and the Roman administration of half a century earlier might have reduced the tithe to a twentieth as it had actually cut down the taxes of Macedonia to one-half of their original amount. Sicily, indeed, furnished an example of the tithe system; but the expenses of a government decrease in proportion to the area of administration, and Sicily could not furnish the ample harbour dues and other payments in money, which should have made the commercial wealth of Asia lighten the burden on the holder of land. The rating of the new province was, in fact, an admission of a change in the theory of imperial taxation. Asia was not merely to be self-supporting; her revenues were to yield a surplus which should supplement the deficit of other lands, or aid in the support of the proletariate of the capital.

The realisation of this principle may not have imposed heavier burdens than Asia had known in the time of her kings. But the fiction that the new dependency was to be maintained in a state of "freedom," which even after the downfall of Aristonicus seems to have exercised some influence on Roman policy, had led to a suspension of regular taxation for the purposes of the central government, which caused the Gracchan proposals to be regarded by certain political circles at Rome in the light of a novelty, and probably of a hardship.[637] They could hardly have borne either character to the Asiatic provincials themselves. The war indemnities and exactions which followed the great struggle, must have been a more grievous burden than the system of taxation to which they were inured: and it is incredible that during the six years which had elapsed since the suppression of the revolt, or even the three years that had passed since the completion of Aquillius's organisation, no revenues had been raised by Rome from her new subjects for administrative purposes. They probably had been raised, but in a manner exasperating because irregular. What was needed was a methodical system, which should abolish at once the fiction of "freedom" and the reality of the exactions meted out at the caprice of the governor of the moment. Such a system was supplied by Gracchus, and it was doubtless reached by the application of the characteristic Roman method of maintaining, whether for good or ill, the principles of organisation which were already in existence in the new dependency.

The novelty of the Gracchan system lay, not in the manner of taxation, but in the method adopted for securing the returns. The greatest obstacle to the tithe system is the difficulty of instituting an efficient method of collection. To gather in taxes which are paid in kind and to dispose of them to the best advantage, is a heavy burden for a municipality. The desire for a system of contract is sure to arise, and in an Empire the efficient contractor is more likely to be found in the central state than in any of its dependencies. It was of this feeling that Gracchus took advantage when he enacted that the taxes of Asia should be put up for auction at Rome,[638] and that the whole province should be regarded as a single area of taxation at the great auction which the censor held in the capital. It was certain that no foreign competition could prevail in this sale of a kingdom's revenues. The right to gather in the tithes could be purchased only by a powerful company of Roman capitalists. The Decumani of Asia would represent the heart and brain of the mercantile body; they would form a senate and a Principate amongst the Publicani.[639] They would flood the province with their local directors, their agents and their freedmen; and each station would become a centre for a banking business which would involve individuals and cities in a debt, of which the tithe was but a fraction. Nor need their operations be confined to the dominions of Rome; they would spread over Phrygia, rendered helpless by the gift of freedom, and creep into the realms of the neighbouring protected kings, safe in the knowledge that the magic name of "citizen of Rome" was a cover to the most doubtful transaction and a safeguard against the slightest punishment. The collectors were liable to no penalties for extortion, for that crime could be committed only by a Roman magistrate: and their possession of the courts enabled them to raise the spectre of conviction on this very charge before the eyes of any governor who might attempt to check the devastating march of the battalions of commerce.

As merchants and bankers the Knights would be sufficiently protected by the judicial powers of their class; but their operations as speculators in tithes needed another safeguard. The contracts made with the censor would extend over a period of five years, and the keenness of the competing companies would generally ensure to the State the promise of an enormous sum for the privilege of farming the taxes. But the tithe might be reduced in value by a bad harvest or the ravages of war, and the successful company might overreach itself in its eagerness to secure the contract. The power of revising such bargains had once assured to the senate the securest hold which it possessed over the mercantile class.[640] This complete dependence was now to be removed, and Gracchus, while not taking the power of decision from the senate, formulated in his law certain principles of remission which it was expected to observe.[641]

By these indirect and seemingly innocent changes in the relations of the mercantile order to the senate, a new balance of power had been created in the State. The Republic, according to the reflection of a later writer, had been given two heads,[642] and this new Janus, more ominous than the old, was believed to be the harbinger of deadly conflict between the rival powers. In moments of calm Gracchus may have believed that his reforms were but a renewed illustration of that genius for compromise out of which the Roman constitution had grown, and that he had but created new and necessary defences against a recently developed absolutism; but, in the heat of the conflict into which he was soon plunged, his vindictive fancy saw but the gloomier aspect of his new creation, and he boasted that the struggle for the courts was a dagger which he had hurled into the Forum, an instrument which the possessor would use to mangle the body of his opponent.[643]

But even these limitations of senatorial prerogative were not deemed sufficient. A proposal was made which had the ingenious scope of limiting the senate's control over the more important provinces in favour of the magistrates, the equestrian order and the people. One of the most valuable items of patronage which the senate possessed was the assignment of the consular provinces. They claimed the right of deciding which of the annual commands without the walls should be reserved for the consuls of the year, and by their disposition in this matter could reward a favourite with wealth or power, and condemn a political opponent to impotence or barren exile. This power had long been employed as a means of coercing the two chief magistrates into obedience to the senate's will, and the equestrian order must have viewed with some alarm the possibility of Asia becoming the prize of the candidates favoured by the nobility. Had Gracchus declared that the direct election to provincial commands should henceforth be in the hands of the people, the change would have been but a slight departure from an admitted constitutional precedent; for there is little more than a technical difference between electing a man for an already ascertained sphere of operations, as had been done in the cases of Terentius Varro and the two Scipios during the Punic wars, and attaching a special command to an individual already elected. But Gracchus preferred the traditional and indirect method. He did not question the right of the senate to decide what provinces should be assigned to the consuls, but he enacted that this decision should be made before these magistrates were elected to office.[644] The people would thus, in their annual choice of the highest magistrates, be electing not only to a sphere of administration at home, but to definite foreign commands as well; the prize which the senate had hitherto bestowed would be indirectly the people's gift, and the nominees of the Comitia would find themselves in possession of departments which were presumably the most important that lay at the disposal of the senate. To secure the finality of the arrangement made by the senate, and to prevent this body subsequently reversing an awkward assignment to which it had unwittingly committed itself, Gracchus ordained that the tribunician veto should not be employed against the senate's decision as to what provinces should be reserved for the future consuls;[645] for he knew that the tribune was often the instrument of the government, and that the suspensory veto of this magistrate could cause the question of assignment to drag on until after the consuls were elected, and thus restore to the senate its ancient right of patronage. The change, although it produced the desired results of freeing the magistrates from subservience, the mercantile order from a reasonable fear, and the people from the pain of seeing their favourite nominee rendered useless for the purposes for which he was appointed, cannot be said to have added anything to the efficiency of provincial administration. It may even be regarded as a retrograde step, as the commencement of that system of routine in provincial appointments, which regarded proved capacity for the government and defence of the subjects of Rome as the last qualification necessary for foreign command. The senate in its award may often have been swayed by unworthy motives; but it was sometimes moved by patriotic fears. Of the two consuls it might send the one of tried military ability to a province threatened by war and dismiss the mere politician to a peaceful district. But now, without any regard to present conditions or future contingencies, it was forced to assign departments to men whose very names were unknown. The people, in the exercise of their elective power, were acting almost as blindly as the senate; for the issues of a Roman election were often so ill-defined, its cross-currents, due to personal influence and the power of the canvass, so strong and perplexing, that it was rarely possible to predict the issue of the poll. On the other hand, if there was a candidate so eminent that his return could be predicted as a certainty, the senate might assign some insignificant spheres of administration as the provinces of the future consuls; and thus, in the one case where the decision might be influenced by knowledge and reason, the Gracchan law was liable to defeat its own ends. A further weakness of the enactment, from the point of view of efficiency, was that it made no attempt to alter the mode in which the designated provinces were to be occupied by their claimants. If the consuls could not come to an agreement as to which _provincia_ each should hold, the chance of the lot still decided a question on which the future fortunes of the empire might turn.

It is a relief to turn from this work of demolition, which in spite of its many justifications is pervaded by a vindictive suspicion, to some great constructive efforts by which Gracchus proved himself an enlightened and disinterested social reformer. He did not view agrarian assignation as an alternative to colonisation, but recognised that the industrial spirit might be awakened by new settlements on sites favourable to commerce, as the agricultural interest had been aroused by the planting of settlers on the desolated lands. Gracchus was, indeed, not the first statesman to employ colonisation as a remedy for social evils; for economic distress and the hunger for land had played their part from the earliest times in the military settlements which Rome had scattered over Italy. But down to his time strategic had preponderated over industrial motives, and he was the first to suggest that colonisation might be made a means of relief for the better classes of the urban proletariate, whose activities were cramped and whose energies were stifled by the crowded life and heated atmosphere of the city. His settlers were to be carefully selected. They were actually to be men who could stand the test of an investigation into character.[646] It seems clear that the new opportunities were offered to men of the lower middle class, to traders of cramped means or of broken fortunes. His other proteges had been cared for in other ways; the urban masses who lived on the margin of destitution had been assisted by the corn law, and the sturdy son of toil could look for help to the agrarian commission. Of the many settlements which he projected for Italy,[647] two which were actually established during his second tribunate[648] occupied maritime positions favourable for commerce. Scylacium, on the bay which lies southward of the Iapygian promontory, was intended to revivify a decayed Greek settlement and to reawaken the industries of the desolated Bruttian coast; while Neptunia was seemingly the name of the new entrepot which he founded at the head of the Tarentine Gulf. It was apparently established on the land which Rome had wrested from Tarentum, and may have originally formed a town distinct from this Greek city, once the great seaport of Calabria, but retaining little of its former greatness since its partial destruction in the Punic wars.[649] Its Hellenism was on the wane, and this decline in its native civilisation may account for the fact that the new and the old foundations seem eventually to have been merged into one, and that Tarentum could receive a purely Latin constitution after the close of the Social War.[650] Its purple fisheries and rich wine-producing territory were worthy objects of the enterprise of Gracchus. Capua was a still greater disgrace to the Roman administration than Tarentum. Its fertile lands were indeed cultivated by lessees of Rome and yielded a large annual produce to the State. But the unredeemed site, on which had stood the pride of Southern Italy, was still a lamentable witness to the jealousy of the conqueror. Here Gracchus proposed to place a settlement[651] which through its commercial promise might amply have compensated for a loss of a portion of the State's domain. Neither he nor his brother had ever threatened the distribution of the territory of Capua, and it is, therefore, probable that in this case he did not contemplate a large agricultural foundation, but rather one that might serve better than the existing village to focus the commerce of the Campanian plain. But the revenue from the domain, and the jealousy of Rome's old and powerful rival, which might be awakened in all classes, were strong weapons in the hands of his opponents, and the renewal of Capua was destined to be the work of a later and more fortunate leader of the party of reform. The colonising effort of Gracchus was plainly one that had the regeneration of Italy, as well as the satisfaction of distressed burgesses, as its object; none of the three sites, on which he proposed to establish his communes of citizens, possessed at the time an urban centre capable of utilising the vast possibilities of the area in which it was placed. But this twofold object was not to be limited to Italy. He dreamed of transmarine enterprise taking a more solid and more generally useful form than that furnished by the vagrant trader or the local agent of the capitalist.[652] The idea and practice of colonisation across the sea were indeed no new ones; isolated foundations for military purposes, such as Palma and Pollentia in the Balearic Isles, were being planted by the direction of the government. But these were small settlements intended to serve a narrow purpose; they doubtless spread Roman customs and formed a basis for Roman trade; but, if these motives had entered into their foundation, the experiment would have been tried on a far larger scale. In truth the idea of permanent settlement beyond the seas did not appeal either to the Roman character or to the political theories of the governing classes. It is questionable whether an imperial people, forming but a tiny minority amongst its subjects, and easily reaping the fruits of its conquests, could ever take kindly to the adventure, the initial hardships, and the lasting exclusion from the dazzling life of the capital, which are implied in permanent residence abroad. The Roman in pursuit of gain was a restless spirit, who would voyage to any land that was, or was likely to be, under imperial control, establish his banking house and villa under any clime, and be content to spend the most active years of his life in the exploitation of the alien; but to him it was a living truth that all roads led to Rome. The city was the nucleus of enterprise, the heart of commerce; and such sentiment as the trader possessed was centred on the commercial life of the Forum and the political devices on which it fed. Such a spirit is not, favourable to true colonisation, which implies a detachment from the affairs of the mother city; and it was not by this means, but rather by the spontaneous evolution of natural centres for the teeming Italian immigrants already settled in the provinces, that the Romanisation of the world was ultimately assisted. Consequently no great pressure had ever been put on the government to induce it to relax the principles which led it to look with indifference or disfavour on the foundation of Roman settlements abroad. There was probably a fear that the establishment of communities of Roman citizens in the provinces might awaken the desire of the subject states to participate in Roman rights. It was deemed better that the highest goal of the provincial's ambition should be the freedom of his state, and that he should never dream of that absorption into the ruling body to which the Italian alone was permitted to aspire. Added to this maxim of statecraft was one of those curious superstitions which play so large a part in imperial politics and attain a show of truth from the superficial reading of history. It was pointed out by the wise that colonies had often proved more potent than their parent states, that Carthage had surpassed Tyre, Massilia Phocaea, Syracuse Corinth, and Cyzicus Miletus. In the same way a daughter of Rome might wax greater than her mother, and the city that governed Italy might be powerless to cope with a rebellious dependency in the provinces.[653] This was not altogether an idle fear in the earlier days of conquest; for at any period before the war with Pyrrhus a transmarine city of Italian blood and customs might have proved a formidable rival. Nor at the stage which the empire had reached at the time of Gracchus was it without its justification; for Rome was by no means a convenient centre for a government that ruled in Asia as well as in Europe. It is more likely that the dread of rivalry was due to the singular defects of the aspect and environment of Rome, of which its citizens were acutely conscious, rather than to the awkwardness of its geographical position; but, had the latter deficiency been realised, it would be unfair to criticise the narrowness of view which failed to see that the change of a capital does not necessarily involve the surrender of a government. But, whether the objections implied in this superstition were shadowy or well defined, they could not have been lessened by the choice which was made by Gracchus and his friends of the site for their new transmarine settlement. It was none other than Carthage, the city which had been destroyed because the blessings of nature had made a mockery of conquest, the city that, if revived, would be the centre of the granary of Rome. A proposal for the renewal of Carthage under the name of Junonia was formulated by Rubrius, one of the colleagues of Gracchus in his first tribunate.[654] The number of the colonists, which was less than six thousand, was specified in the enactment, and the proportion of the emigrants to the immense territory at his disposal rendered it possible for the legislator to assign unusually large allotments of land. A better and an inferior class of settlers were apparently distinguished, the former of whom were to hold no less than two hundred _jugera_ apiece.[655] The recipients of all allotments were to maintain them in absolute ownership, a system of tenure which had hitherto been confined to Italy being thus extended to provincial soil.[656] Caius Gracchus and Fulvius Flaccus were named amongst the triumvirs who were to establish the new colony.[657] It is probable that Roman citizens were alone considered eligible for the colonies both in Italy and abroad, when these foundations were first proposed, and that it was not until Gracchus had embarked on his enterprise of enfranchising the Latins, that he allowed them to participate in the benefits of his colonial schemes and thus indirectly acquire full Roman citizenship.

But the commercial life of Italy might be quickened by other means than the establishment of colonies whether at home or abroad. Gracchus saw that the question of rapid and easy communication between the existing towns was all important. The great roads of Rome betrayed their military intent in the unswerving inflexibility of their course. The positions which they skirted were of strategic, but not necessarily of industrial, importance. To bring the hamlet into connection with the township, and the township into touch with the capital, a series of good cross-roads was needed; and it was probably to this object that the law of Gracchus[658] was directed. But ease of communication may serve a political as well as a commercial object. The representative character of the Comitia would be increased by the provision of facilities for the journey to Rome; and perhaps when Gracchus promulgated his measure, there was already before his mind the possibility of the extension of the franchise to the Latins, which would vastly increase the numbers of the rural electorate. In any case, the measure was one which tended to political centralisation, and Gracchus must have known that the attainment of this object was essential to the unity and stability of a popular government.

The great enterprise was carried through with extraordinary rapidity during his second tribunate. But the hastiness of the construction did not impair the beauty of the work. We are told that the roads ran straight and fair through the country districts, showing an even surface of quarried stone and tight-packed earth. Hollows were filled up, ravines and torrent beds were bridged, and mounting-blocks for horsemen lay at short and easy distances on both sides of the level course.[659] Although the initial expense of this construction may have borne heavily on the finances of the State, it is probable that the future maintenance of the roads was provided for in other ways. The commerce which they fostered may have paid its dues at toll-gates erected for the purpose:[660] and the ancient Roman device of creating a class of settlers on the line of a public road, for the purpose of keeping it in repair,[661] was probably extended. Road-making was often the complement of agrarian assignation,[662] and the two may have been employed concurrently by Gracchus. It was the custom to assign public land on the borders of a highway to settlers, the tenure of which was secured to them and their heirs on condition of keeping the road in due repair. Sometimes their own labour and that of their slaves were reckoned the equivalent of the usual dues; at other times the dues themselves were used by the public authorities for the purpose. Gracchus may thus have turned his agrarian law to an end which was not contemplated by that of Tiberius.

The execution of the law must have been a heavy blow to the power and prestige of the senate. Its control of the purse was infringed and it ceased to be the sole employer of public labour. For Gracchus, in defiance of the principle that the author of a measure should not be its executant,[663] was his own road-maker, as his brother Tiberius had been his own land commissioner. He was the patron of the contractor and the benefactor of the Italian artisan. The bounties which he now gave were the reward of labour, and not subject to the criticism which had attended his earlier efforts for the relief of poverty in Rome; but some pretended to take the sinister view that the bands of workmen by which he was surrounded might be employed for a less innocent purpose than the making of roads.[664].

The proceedings of Gracchus during his first year of office had made it inevitable that he should hold the tribunate for a second time. Enough had been performed to win him the ardent support of the masses; enough had been promised to make his return to office desirable, not only to the people, but to the expectant capitalists. The legal hindrances to re-election had been removed, or could be evaded, and the continuity of power, which was essential to the realisation of an adequate programme of reform, could now for the first time be secured. In the present state of public feeling there was little probability of the veto being employed by any one of his future colleagues, although some of these would inevitably be moderates or members of the senatorial party. But Gracchus was eager that his cause should be represented in another department of the State, which presented possibilities of assistance or of mischief, and that the spectacle of the tribunate as the sole focus of democratic sentiment, exalting itself in opposition to the higher magistracies of the people, should, if possible, be averted. In one of his addresses to the commons he said he had to ask a favour of them. Were it granted, he would value it above all things; should they think good to refuse, he would bear no grudge against them. Here he paused; the favour remained undisclosed; and he left popular imagination to revel in the possibilities of his claims. It was a happy stroke; for he had filled the minds of his auditors with a gratifying sense of their own boundless power, and with suspicions of illegal ambitions, with which it was well that they should become familiar, but which one dramatic moment would for the time dispel. His words were interpreted as a request for the consulship: and the prevalent opinion is said to have been that he desired to hold this office in combination with the tribunate. The time for the consular elections was approaching and expectation was roused to its highest pitch, when Gracchus was seen conducting Gaius Fannius into the Forum and, with the assistance of his own friends, accosting the electors in his behalf.[665] The candidate was a man whose political temperament Caius had had full opportunities of studying. As a tribune he had been much under the influence of Scipio Aemilianus,[666] and as he rose slowly through the grades of curule rank,[667] he must still have retained his character as a moderate. He was therefore preferable to any candidate put forward by the optimates: and the influence of Gracchus secured Fannius the consulship almost at the moment when, without the trouble of a canvass or even of a formal candidature, he himself secured his second term of office. His position was further strengthened by the return of the ex-consul Fulvius Flaccus, as one of his colleagues in the tribunate.

It was now, when the grand programme was actually being carried through, and the execution of the most varied measures was being pressed on by a single hand, that the possibilities of personal government were first revealed in Rome. The fiery orator was less to be dreaded than the unwearied man of action, whose restless energy was controlled by a clearness of judgment and concentration of purpose, which could distinguish every item of his vast sphere of administration and treat the task of the moment as though it were the one nearest to his heart. Even those who hated and feared Gracchus were struck with amazement at the practical genius which he revealed; while the sight of the leader in the midst of his countless tasks, surrounded by the motley retinue which they involved, roused the wondering admiration of the masses.[668] At one moment he was being interviewed by a contractor for public works, at another by an envoy from some state eager to secure his mediation; the magistrate, the artisan, the soldier and the man of letters besieged his presence chamber, and each was received with the appropriate word and the kindly dignity, which kings may acquire from training, but men of kingly nature receive from heaven as a seal of their fitness to rule. The impression of overbearing violence which had been given by his speeches, was immediately dispelled by contact with the man. The time of storm and stress had been passed for the moment, and in the fruition of his temporary power the true character of Gracchus was revealed. The pure intellectual enjoyment which springs from the sense of efficiency and the effective pursuit of a long-desired task, will not be shaken by the awkward impediments of the moment. All the human instruments, which the work demands, reflect the value of the object to which they contribute: and Gracchus was saved from the insolent pride of the patrician ruler and the helpless peevishness of the mere agitator whom circumstances have thrust into power, by the fact that his emotional nature was mastered by an intellect which had outlived prejudice and had never known the sense of incapacity. By the very character of its circumstances the regal nature was forced into a style of life which resembled and foreshadowed that of the coming monarchy. The accessibility to his friends and clients of every grade was the pride of the Roman noble, and doubtless Gracchus would willingly have modelled his receptions on the informal pattern which sufficed the proudest patrician at the head of the largest _clientele_. But Gracchus's callers were not even limited to the whole of Rome; they came from Italy and the provinces: and it was found to be essential to adopt some rules of precedence, which would produce a methodical approach to his presence and secure each of his visitors an adequate hearing. He was the first Roman, we are told, to observe certain rules of audience. Some members of the crowd which thronged his ante-chamber, were received singly, others in smaller or in larger groups.[669] It is improbable that the mode of reception varied wholly with the official or social rank of those admitted; the nature of the client's business must also have dictated the secrecy or publicity of the interview; but the system must have seemed to his baffled enemies a welcome confirmation of their real or pretended fears--a symptom of the coming, if not actual, overthrow of Republicanism, the suspicion of which might one day be driven even into the thick heads of the gaping crowds, who stood by the portals to gaze at the ever-shifting throng of callers and to marvel at the power and popularity of their leader. Had Gracchus been content to live in the present and to regard his task as completed, it is just possible that the diverse interests which he had so dexterously welded together might have enabled him to secure, not indeed a continuity of power (for that would have been as strenuously resisted by the middle as by the upper class), but immediate security from the gathering conspiracy, the preservation of his life, and the probability of a subsequent political career. It is, however, difficult, to conceive that the position which Gracchus held could be either resigned or forgiven; and, although we cannot credit him with any conscious desire for holding a position not admitted by the laws, yet his genius unconsciously led him to identify the commonwealth with himself, while his mind, as receptive as it was progressive, would not have readily acquiesced in the view that a political creation can at any moment be called complete. The disinterested statesman will cling to power as tenaciously as one devoured by the most sordid ambition: and even on the lowest ground of personal security, the possession of authority is perhaps more necessary to the one than to the other. So indissolubly blended are the power and the projects of a leader, that it is idle to raise the question whether personal motives played any part in the project with which Gracchus was now about to delight his enemies and alienate his friends. He took up anew the question of the enfranchisement of the Italians--a question which the merest political tyro could have told him was enough to doom the statesman who spoke even a word in its favour. But Caius's position was no ordinary one, and he may have regarded his present influence as sufficient to induce the people to accept the unpalatable measure, the success of which might win for himself and his successors a wider constituency and a more stable following. The error in judgment is excusable in one who had never veiled his sympathy with the Italian cause, and had hitherto found it no hindrance to his popularity; but so clear-sighted a man as Gracchus must have felt at times that he was staking, not only his own career, but the fate of the programme and the party which he had built up, on the chance of securing an end, which had ceased to be regarded as the mere removal of an obstacle and had grown to be looked on as the coping-stone of a true reformer's work.

The scope of his proposal[670] was more moderate than that which had been put forward by Flaccus. He suggested the grant of the full rights of citizenship to the Latins, and of Latin rights to the other Italian allies.[671] Italy was thus, from the point of view of private law, to be Romanised almost up to the Alps;[672] while the cities already in enjoyment of some or all of the private privileges of the Roman, were to see the one anomaly removed, which created an invidious distinction between them and the burgess towns, hampered their commerce, and imperilled their landed possessions. The proposal had the further advantage that it took account of the possible unwillingness of many of the federate cities to accept the Roman franchise; such a refusal was not likely to be made to the offer of Latin rights: for the Latin community was itself a federate city with its own laws, magistrates and courts, and the sense of autonomy would be satisfied while many of the positive benefits of Roman citizenship would be gained. Grades of privilege would still exist in Italy, and a healthy discontent might in time be fostered, which would lead all Italian communities to seek absorption into the great city. Past methods of incorporation might be held to furnish a precedent; the scheme proposed by Gracchus was hardly more revolutionary than that which had, in the third and at the beginning of the second centuries, resulted in the conferment of full citizenship on the municipalities of half-burgesses. It differed from it only in extending the principle to federate towns; but the rights of the members of the Latin cities bore a close resemblance to those of the old _municipes_, and they might easily be regarded as already enjoying the partial citizenship of Rome. The conferment of this partial citizenship on the other Italians, while in no way destroying local institutions or impairing local privileges, would lead to the possibility of a common law for the whole of Italy, would enable every Italian to share in the benefits of Roman business life, and appear in the court of the urban praetor to defend such rights as he had acquired, by the use of the forms of Roman law. The tentativeness of the character of Gracchus's proposal, while recommending it as in harmony with the cautious spirit of Roman development which had worked the great changes of the past, may also have been dictated by the feeling that the more moderate scheme stood a better chance of acceptance by the mob of Rome. All he asked was that the grievances which had led to the revolt of Fregellae, and the dangers revealed by that revolt, should be removed. The numbers of the added citizens would not be overwhelming; for the majority of Italians all that was asked was the possession of certain private rights, which had been so ungrudgingly granted to communities in the past. Throughout the campaign he probably laid more stress on the duty of protecting the individual than on the right of the individual to power. And the fact that the protection was demanded, not against the Roman State, but against an oppressive nobility that disgraced it by a misuse of its powers, gave a democratic colouring to the demand, and suggested a community of suffering, and therefore of sympathy, between the donors and recipients of the gift. Even before his franchise law was before the world, he seems to have been engaged in educating his auditors up to this view of the case; for it was probably in the speeches with which he introduced his law for the better protection of the life of the Roman citizen, that he illustrated the cruel caprice of the nobility by grisly stories of the sufferings of the Italians. He had told of the youthful legate who had had a cow-herd of Venusia scourged to death, as an answer to the rustic's jesting query whether the bearers of the litter were carrying a corpse: and of the consul who had scourged the quaestor of Teanum Sidicinum, the man of noblest lineage in his state, because the men's baths, in which the consul's wife had elected to bathe, were not adequately prepared for her reception.[673] Since the objections of the populace to the extension of the franchise were the result of prejudice rather than of reason, they might be weakened if the sense of jealousy and distrust could be diverted from the people's possible rivals to the common oppressors of Rome and Italy.

The appeal to sentiment might have been successful, had not the most sordid passions of the mob been immediately inflamed by the oratory of the opponents of the measure. The most formidable of these opponents was drawn from the ranks of Gracchus's own supporters; for the franchise question had again proved a rock which could make shipwreck of the unity of the democratic party. His _protege_, the consul Fannius, was not ashamed to appeal to the most selfish instincts of the populace. "Do you suppose," he said, "that, when you have given citizenship to the Latins, there will be any room left for you at public gatherings, or that you will find a place at the games or festivals? Will they not swamp everything with their numbers?" [674]