Chapter III: The Great Enemies of Rome (2)

Of Scipio's domestic life we do not know much: but he was a man of many warm and devoted friendships and certainly showed deep attachment to his father, to his brother, and to Scipio Aemilianus, his grandson by adoption. When young he was distinguished by his slim height and extreme fairness of complexion; a skin that flushed easily and showed the feelings he afterwards learned to conceal.

Something of his character may be seen in his bust, which shows, above the firm mouth and powerful chin of the man of action and resolute will, the questioning eyes and fine brow of the thinker. It is a stern, but not altogether a cold face; above all it is the face of a man to whom nothing was indifferent. Like most portraits of great men, it represents its subject well on in middle life, when the enthusiasms of youth have cooled and settled, but it is the face of a man capable of enthusiasm, if an enthusiasm controlled by judgement.

Scipio was capable of enthusiasm: but not of a kind that carried him away or made him do reckless things. The Romans of his time believed that he had been born under a lucky star, was in some sense a special favourite of the gods. Certainly the chances that destroy or make men seemed throughout his life always to turn out for good. He made mistakes, and they proved more successful than the wisest judgements could have been. But the real secret of his success was not luck but his sureness of himself. He never lost his head. He believed he could do anything he put his hand to. This belief not only inspired others with confidence; it carried him through the stages of difficulty and apparent failure in which all but the strongest are apt to give up an enterprise for lost. More than that, thanks to his belief in himself, Scipio was never disturbed by jealousy or by envy of other men's success. Men's praise did not excite him; his own opinion was what mattered and he knew what it was. At the same time Scipio had in his nature no tinge of what the Greeks called the 'daemon' in man and we the divine spark. The impossible did not beckon to him. His imagination and his desires moved among the things that could be done. He was incapable of a passion like Hannibal's. He could never have set out to conquer the world, and held on year after year, beaten but not defeated, knowing that he could not win but refusing to give up. He was the natural leader of a successful people. Always he had Rome behind him. Hannibal had nothing behind him, in that sense. He had to create his instruments by the sheer force of his own fiery energy. Scipio could never have done this. It would have seemed to him foolish to try.

Although Scipio cared for many things outside the business of war, it was as a soldier that he was admired and honoured by most of his countrymen. War was the only road to high place and distinction recognized in Rome. Scipio, like other young men of his class--he belonged to a very ancient and honourable family, that of the Cornelii--was trained as a soldier from his boyhood.

At the battle of the Ticinus the life of the consul Publius Cornelius Scipio was saved by the gallantry of a lad of eighteen, serving his first campaign. This lad was his son, named like himself Publius Cornelius Scipio. He fought again at Cannae, and was, with the son of old Fabius Cunctator, among the very few young officers who escaped alive. As he made his way from the stricken field he came upon a group of men, one or two being officers, who in despair after the frightful day felt that Rome was lost. All that was left for them was to cross the seas and try, in a new country, to carve a career for themselves. Scipio and young Fabius, their swords drawn, compelled them to give up this idea and swear that they would not desert their country. These young men did yeoman service in helping Varro to collect the remnants of his scattered army; and Scipio was clearly marked out for high command in years to come.

That it would come as soon as it actually did no one, however, could have foreseen. After the battles of Ticinus and Trebia, Scipio's father and his uncle were sent to Spain to reconquer the lost provinces there and prevent any help coming to Hannibal. They also stirred up trouble in Africa. But their success was brief. When Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal returned to Spain the Spaniards who had enlisted in the Roman armies deserted. Finally, four years after Cannae, Publius Scipio was defeated and killed and Cnaeus, shut in by three armies, suffered the same fate. To allow the Carthaginians to hold Spain was a serious danger; to defeat them a big task. Long did the Roman Senate deliberate over who was to be sent. There did not seem to be any one capable who could be spared. Fabius was very old; Aemilius dead; Marcellus needed against Hannibal. The younger generals thought the Spanish command carried more risk than glory.

At last Scipio came forward and offered himself. A vivid account of the impression he made on the men of his day is given by Livy.

_Africanus, the Young Proconsul_

At Rome, after the recovery of Capua, the Senate and people were
as anxious about the situation in Spain as in Italy, and it was
determined to strengthen the army there and to send a new
commander. There was, however, no agreement about the best man for
the post, though all felt that, as two great generals had fallen
in the course of thirty days, their successor ought to be chosen
with unusual care. After various names had been proposed, it was
finally arranged that the people should elect a proconsul for the
Spanish command, and the consuls gave notice of the day of
election. It had been assumed that any who thought themselves
equal to the responsibility would come forward as candidates, and
when this expectation was disappointed, there was renewed mourning
for the recent disasters and regret for the lost generals. Thus it
happened that on the day of the election the citizens went down to
the Plain despondent and without definite purpose. Turning to the
assembled magistrates, they scanned the features of the leaders,
who were looking helplessly from one to another, and murmured that
the blow had been so great and that the position was now so
hopeless that no one dared to accept the Spanish command. All at
once P. Scipio, the son of Publius who had fallen in Spain,
proposed himself as a candidate, though he was only twenty-four
years of age, and took his stand in a conspicuous place. Every eye
was fixed on him, and the shouts of applause that at once burst
forth predicted good luck and success to his mission. Then the
election proceeded, and P. Scipio received the votes, not only of
every century, but of every individual. However, when the business
was finished and impetuosity and enthusiasm had cooled, men began
to ask themselves amid the general silence what they had really
done, and whether favour had not carried the day against
judgement. There was a strong feeling that the proconsul was too
young, and some even found a bad omen in the misfortunes of his
family and in the very name of Scipio, as he was leaving two
households in mourning to go to provinces where he would have to
fight over the tombs of his father and of his uncle.

When Scipio saw the trouble and anxiety caused by this hasty
action, he invited the people to meet him, and spoke with such
pride and confidence of his youth and the duty entrusted to him
and the war which he was to conduct that he awakened and renewed
all the former enthusiasm, and filled his hearers with a more
sanguine hope than is usually suggested by trust in promises or by
inference from established facts. Scipio, indeed, did not merely
deserve admiration for his genuine qualities, but from his youth
upwards he had been endowed with a peculiar faculty for making the
most of them. When he gave counsel to the people, he founded it on
a vision of the night or an inspiration seemingly divine, either
because he was in some sort influenced by superstition, or because
he expected that his wishes and commands would be carried out
readily if they came with a kind of oracular sanction. In very
early life he began to create this impression, and as soon as he
was of age, he would do no business, public or private, till he
had gone to the Capitol and entered the temple, generally sitting
there for a time alone and apart. By this habit, which he
maintained all through his life, he gave support, either of set
purpose or by accident, to a belief held by some that he was of
divine parentage, and he thus revived a similar and equally
baseless story, once current about Alexander the Great, that he
was the son of a huge serpent, which had often been seen in the
house before his birth, but glided away at the approach of any one
and disappeared from sight. Scipio did nothing to discredit these
wonders; in fact, he indirectly confirmed them, for, if he
asserted nothing, he did not deny anything.

Livy, xxvi. 18-19.

He was still very young, nevertheless he had already made people feel confidence in him. In Spain, although he began with a bad failure since he allowed Hasdrubal to cross the Pyrenees with his army and march to Italy to assist Hannibal, his Spanish campaign was ably carried out and his capture of New Carthage was a bold and brilliant exploit. When the time came to choose a general, after the Metaurus, to attack Hannibal at home, every one in Rome felt that Scipio was the man. He would finish the war. There was, indeed, no serious rival; the long struggle had worn the older generals out. Some of the old-fashioned senators distrusted Scipio. He was too cultivated; too much interested in Greek literature and too young. But he was the idol of the people, who adore success, and was nominated by acclamation.

Soon the Carthaginians were so hard pressed that they sent frantic messages to Hannibal to come to their aid. They knew that the death struggle was upon them. Hannibal came. Even his genius could not, at this stage, change the fortunes of war. He had no time to train the raw Carthaginian levies. His veterans were invincible, but they were vastly outnumbered when on the plains of Zama, five days' march from Carthage, he met Scipio in the final battle (202). It was a victory for Rome. Hannibal, who always saw things as they were, knew that the long struggle was over. Carthage must make what terms it could. These terms were severe. The city lost all its foreign possessions, had to pay a big indemnity, and hand over all but twenty men-of-war and all elephants; no military operations even within Africa could be undertaken save by permission of Rome. The city, however, was left free. Scipio set his face firmly against those who clamoured for the utter destruction of Carthage. In the same way he protested against the demand made six years later for the banishment of Hannibal.

Scipio returned to Rome amid scenes of extraordinary enthusiasm and rejoicing. All the way from Rhegium, where he landed, to Rome itself the people came out and lined the roads, hailing him as the man who had saved his country. He entered the city in triumph, marching to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline hill to lay before the altar his wreaths of olive and laurel. Magnificent games were held, lasting for several days, in honour of his victory, and he himself was given the name Africanus.

For the next few years Africanus lived in Rome the life of a private citizen, concerned with politics, giving his spare time to the study of Greek literature, to which he was devoted. This study he shared with many friends, among them Laelius, who had been his devoted lieutenant in the Spanish and African wars, Tiberius Gracchus the Elder, the husband of Scipio's daughter Cornelia, herself a woman of high character and educated ability; and Aemilius Paulus, whose sister he married and whose nephew was afterwards adopted into the family of the Scipios by the son of Africanus and known as Scipio Aemilianus. As they read the plays, poetry, and philosophy of the Greeks, educated Romans learned that they were not alone in the world. Before them had lived a people who were skilled in all the arts of life at a time when they themselves were rude barbarians, like the Gauls whom they despised.

The Greece of their day, however, was no longer the Greece of the glorious past. Alexander's great empire, which had extended over half Asia, had fallen to pieces. In Greece itself the different peoples were quarrelling among themselves. Even after the Roman armies had freed the Greeks from Philip of Macedonia, Antiochus of Asia threatened them; at the Court of Antiochus was Hannibal. It was as an envoy from Rome to his Court that Scipio met and talked with Hannibal. Later he went out as assistant to his brother Lucius, when the latter was made commander in the war against Antiochus, and finally defeated him at the battle of Magnesia in Asia Minor.

By no means all educated Romans shared Scipio's feelings about Greece. On the contrary there were many who thought that the simplicity of the grand old Roman character was being destroyed, while the young men were falling into luxurious and effeminate ways. Marcus Porcius Cato, for example, a man of the utmost uprightness and courage, took this view. He was a hard man himself, and he wanted others to be hard. He could see no difference between a love of beauty and luxury. He saw nothing that was bad in the old order, nothing that was good in the new.

The Scipios, Africanus and his brother, who now bore the name of Asiaticus, were Cato's particular enemies. He had struggled in the Senate with Africanus over Carthage, for the old man wanted to see the city of Hannibal razed to the ground. He hated Scipio's Greek ideas. He thought him too proud and self-willed to be a good servant of the State. After the Greek campaign Cato called upon Asiaticus to give an account of the money spent in the wars against Antiochus, suggesting that he had been extravagant. That such a charge should be brought against his brother roused Scipio Africanus to passionate anger. He refused to defend him; the character of a Scipio was its own defence. In the presence of the Senate he tore up the account books which Cato had called for. When Lucius was, nevertheless, condemned Scipio rescued him by force. Thereupon he himself was charged with treason by two tribunes. Even then his haughty spirit did not bend. Instead of pleading his cause he reminded the people that it was the anniversary of the day on which he had defeated Hannibal at Zama. Let them follow him to the Temple of Jupiter and pray for more citizens like himself. The crowd obeyed. No more was heard of the trial.

Scipio's pride, however, was deeply injured. He had been the idol of Rome in his youth. That he and his brother should be accused before the Roman people was to him an unbearable sign of ingratitude and baseness of mind. He left Rome, shaking its dust from his feet, and retired to the country. There a few years later he died at the age of fifty-three. In his will he ordered that his ashes should not be taken to Rome.

In the same year (183) Hannibal also died. To the last the Romans feared him; Hannibal took poison when he heard that Nicomedes of Bithynia, at whose Court he was, had been ordered to hand him over to Rome.

Scipio Aemilianus

The young man left to carry on the great name of Scipio was the son of Aemilius Paulus and nephew by marriage of Africanus, whose son adopted him into the Cornelian family.

Scipio Aemilianus, to give him the name by which he was always known after this adoption, saw, even more clearly than Africanus had done, both that Rome was changing and what was good and what was bad in the change. He shared in both good and bad. No one saw more clearly than he the baseness of the destruction of Carthage and the cruelty of the sack of Numantia; yet it was he who, as general, had to carry them out. He saw the dangers of the growing contrast between the increasing wealth of the few rich, as treasures poured from all parts of the world into their coffers, and the wretchedness of the poor in Rome; he saw the cruelty, indifference to human life, and love of pleasure that filled men's minds after a series of successful wars; he saw the old simplicity of life and high devotion to country disappearing and a new selfishness and personal ambition growing up.

Scipio was a man of action; an excellent soldier and general. Even old Cato, who hated the Scipios, had to admire Aemilianus. Speaking of him he quoted a famous line of Homer: 'He is a real man: the rest are shadows.' In a very profound sense this was true. The mind of Scipio Aemilianus saw below the surface of things to the reality. He could act, but like all really first-rate men of action--Napoleon, Hannibal, Caesar--he was a thinker. Round his table there gathered the most interesting men in Rome. They talked of all the questions that have puzzled and perplexed men's minds since men began to think at all. Closest of his friends was Polybius, the great Greek historian who wrote the history of the wars with Carthage. He lived in his house and accompanied him in his wars in Spain and Africa. Polybius stood by Scipio's side as he watched Carthage burning to the ground (146). Orders had come from Rome that the city was to be utterly destroyed; a ploughshare was to be drawn across the site and a solemn curse laid on any one who should ever rebuild there. 'It is a wonderful sight,' said Aemilianus as they watched walls toppling and buildings collapsing in the flames which rose up, a huge cloud of ruddy smoke darkening and thickening the noonday sky of Africa, 'but I shudder to think that some one may some day give the same order--for Rome.'

The following sketch of his character by Polybius shows some of his distinguishing traits:

_Scipio Aemilianus as a Sportsman_

After the war was decided, Paulus, in the belief that hunting was
the best training and recreation that a young man could have, put
the king's huntsmen at the orders of Scipio, and gave him full
authority over everything connected with the chase. Scipio readily
accepted the charge and, regarding it almost as a royal office,
continued to occupy himself with it as long as the army remained
in Macedonia after the battle. His youth and natural disposition
qualified him for this pursuit, like a high-bred hound, and his
devotion to hunting became permanent, being continued when he came
to Rome and found Polybius as enthusiastic as himself.
Consequently, all the time that other young men spent in the
law-courts and with morning calls, waiting about in the Forum and
trying thus to make a favourable impression on the people, was
passed by Scipio in hunting; and as he was constantly performing
brilliant and notable exploits, he distinguished himself more than
all the rest. For they could not win credit except by injuring
others; such are the conditions of legal action; but Scipio,
without doing any harm to any one, gained a popular reputation for
courage, matching words with deeds. Therefore he soon excelled his
contemporaries more than any Roman of whom we have record, though
he followed a path to fame which, in view of Roman character and
prejudice, was the very opposite of that chosen by his rivals.

Polybius, xxxvi. 15. 5-12.

From Carthage came another friend of Scipio's--the poet Terence. Born in that city about the time of Hannibal's death, the lad had come to Rome as a slave. His rare parts attracted the notice of his owner, who finally set him free. Terence was introduced to Scipio by another friend of his. This was Caecilius, the playwriter. His plays are unfortunately all lost, so that we have no means of judging what they were like. One day when Caecilius was at supper he was told that the managers of the games had sent a young man to read him a play which he had submitted to them, and of which they thought well. Caecilius called him in and bade him sit down on a stool on the other side of the table from that at which he and his friends were reclining on sofas, and begin to read to him. The young man had only read a few lines when the elder poet stopped him. The work was so good, he said, that he ought to sit at the author's feet, not he at his; he called Terence up to the table. Afterwards Caecilius took the young man to see Scipio Aemilianus; and he soon became one of the intimate circle which Scipio had gathered round him. Scipio and Caecilius helped him with advice, and they all worked together at Scipio's favourite task of improving and purifying the Latin language. A line in one of Terence's plays expresses the point of view which Scipio Aemilianus and his friends tried to take. 'I am human: nothing human is alien to me.' These plays are among the earliest works of pure literature in Latin, and they show in every line the influence of Greece. The Greek spirit was one of questioning; and its influence on Roman thought was profound.

Scipio Aemilianus questioned but looked on. He saw much in the present state of Rome to disturb and displease him; he dreaded what might come in the future, as the few grew richer and the many poorer; but he did not take any action. His was the mind of the philosopher; like his friends Polybius and Terence he wanted to understand. He did not believe that things could be changed. What was to happen would happen; to perturb and perplex oneself was useless and might be dangerous. The people who got excited and believed that great improvements could be brought about easily seemed to him stupid and dangerous. It was easy to breed disorder; to spoil the things that had made Rome great; very hard to make alterations. The men who really served the Republic were not the politicians clamouring in the market-place, orating in the Assembly, or the idle dirty mobs who listened to them and were ready to shout for this to-day and the other thing to-morrow. Them Scipio scorned. The real workers and builders he thought were the silent soldiers fighting and working in all the dreariness and discomfort of camps in foreign countries. In Scipio there was a good deal of the temper of that Lucius Junius Brutus who in the earliest days of the Republic had condemned his own sons to death for treason to the State. He judged his own friends and relations more, not less, severely than other people. Thus when Tiberius Gracchus, the kinsman and brother-in-law of Scipio (his own wife was Sempronia, the sister of Gracchus) brought in his Land Bill and came, over it, into conflict with the Senate, Scipio was against him. When disorders and rioting in the streets of Rome grew out of the struggle over the Land Bill and Tiberius was murdered, Scipio made a speech in the Senate in which he said that Tiberius had deserved his death. He quoted a line of Homer: 'So perish all who do the like again.' When the people shouted him down in their anger he turned on them with cold contempt--fear of any kind was not in Scipio--and said, 'Be silent, ye to whom Italy is only a step-mother.' Speeches like that did not make him popular. Scipio was so much respected that men always listened when he spoke. There was something lofty and splendid about him and no soldier of his day could compare with him. But he stood aloof. Outside his own circle of close friends he was little known and less understood.

His death was sudden and mysterious. One day after speaking in the Senate he returned home apparently well and in his ordinary calm frame of mind. Nothing had occurred to disturb him. He did not seem to be disturbed about anything. Next morning he was found dead in his bed. What had happened was never known. It was whispered about that he had been murdered.

V

The Gracchi

No account of the heroes of Roman History would be complete or truthful which left out the women. Although the Roman woman was not supposed to take any share in public affairs, although she was, until she married, subject to the authority of her father, and afterwards to that of her husband, there are innumerable stories which show how great was the real part played by women in Roman life, even in quite early times. They were often as well educated as the men, sometimes better.

This was clearly the case with Cornelia, the daughter of Scipio Africanus, and wife of Tiberius Gracchus the elder. Left a widow when the eldest of her three children, named Tiberius after his father, was but a lad, she conducted their training herself. From her her sons and daughter learned to be simple and hardy in their habits, truthful and upright in their minds, and to care for things of the spirit rather than of the body, as she did herself. When her friends boasted to her of the rich furnishing of their houses, of their robes of silk, their ornaments and jewels, Cornelia would turn to her children and say, 'These are my treasures.' She taught Tiberius and Caius and their sister that what mattered was not what a man had but what he was. They were rich. They bore an honoured name. But these things would not give honour unless they had the soul of honour in themselves. They must strive not for their own pleasure or comfort or even for their own personal glory, but to live a life of true service to their fellow citizens. And that meant that they must see things as they were, and not be contented with the names people gave them. They wanted to see Rome great and to help it to grow greater. She taught them that a city, like a man, was great only when it strove for right and justice. Mere wealth and power did not make it so.

These thoughts sank into the minds of the young Gracchi. As they grew up they cared for Greek learning, art, and literature, poetry, and all the things that make life beautiful, as Scipio Aemilianus and Laelius did; but it troubled them, as it had not troubled Scipio, that these good things reached only the few, while the great body of the people had no share in them at all. To them, as once to Caius Flaminius, it seemed wrong as well as dangerous that Rome should be made up, as they saw that it was, of two sorts of people, ever more and more separated from each other; the few who had everything and the many who had nothing. They could not feel, as Coriolanus had done, as Fabius had done, as Cato did, and as Scipio Aemilianus, it seemed to them, was doing more and more, that all good was to be found among the well-to-do and cultured few, and that what happened to the many did not matter. It seemed to them that it did matter if the many were poor, ignorant, stupid. It was not necessary that they should be so. They were ignorant and stupid because they were poor. If their lot were less hard they might be clever and good, or at any rate better than at present.

So it seemed to Tiberius Gracchus and later to his younger brother Caius, as they looked at what they saw in the light of what Cornelia had taught them. They could not find life beautiful while so many people were wretched, or feel that Rome was the city of their dreams, however rich and powerful it might be, however many lands across the seas owned its sway, so long as the ordinary men who served as soldiers in Rome's armies, the ordinary women who kept their homes and brought up their children, were miserable.

The great wars which brought glory to generals and wealth and pride to Rome actually made the poor more miserable, for many reasons, and for two in particular. One was the growing number of slaves in the city. After every campaign thousands of prisoners were taken and these prisoners were not given back at the end of the war; they became the slaves of the conqueror. There were so many slaves in Rome after the wars with Sicily, Carthage, Spain, Greece, Asia Minor, that it was by no means easy for the ordinary Roman to get work. The other reason was the difficulty of getting land. Once, before the long wars, Italy had been a country of small farmers and peasants who lived on a little piece of land, sometimes rented and sometimes their own, and cultivated it. There were very few of these happy farmers now. The men had been called away to the wars; many never came back. What happened was this. While the man was away at the wars, his wife, with children to look after, and less strong than he, could seldom cultivate the land fully. Even if she managed to keep the children fed, she had no money or produce over with which to pay the rent. Then the landlord would turn her out and take the plot and add it to his own estate. This was happening all over Italy. If the owner were not turned out, the land went to rack and ruin from neglect. Thus many a soldier, when he did come back, found his home gone. Others, weary, worn, and perhaps disabled after long years of the hardships of war, had neither the strength nor energy to set to the heavy work of digging and preparing land that had been neglected for years. At the same time the common lands, which were supposed to belong to the whole people, who might graze their cattle or cut wood on them, were taken in bit by bit by the big landlords in the war years. Thus men who wanted land could not get it. Big estates grew bigger, and they were run largely by slave-labour. The independent husbandman, who had been the backbone of the Roman army, was vanishing. A few people began, in Scipio's day, to be worried about this question of the land, because they saw that if the peasants and farmers disappeared, the best soldiers would disappear also.

All this was well known; it had been going on for long. People talked, but nothing was done. Sometimes, however, there comes a man who has the power to see and be moved to action by a thing which most people, out of habit or laziness, take as a matter of course. Tiberius Gracchus was such a man. In his young manhood he was quiet, rather shy, and very silent; he thought a great deal and said little about it. Some people regarded him as slow. His was the slowness of a mind that takes a long time to be sure of a thing but, once sure, never lets go. When he did speak, men observed that his remarks were just and well considered and went to the heart of the matter. His devotion to duty was obvious; as a soldier he won the respect and love of his men by his unvarying fairness of temper and the fact that he never asked them to take a risk or bear a hardship that he did not share himself. And he acquired, too, a reputation for integrity which was, as Plutarch tells us, of infinite value.

_Tiberius Gracchus. The Value of a Reputation for Integrity_

After the Libyan expedition Gracchus was elected quaestor, and it
was his lot to serve against the Numantines under the Consul Gaius
Mancinus, who had some good qualities, but was the most
unfortunate of Roman generals. Thus unexpected situations and
reverses in the field brought more clearly into light, not only
the ability and courage of Tiberius, but--what was more
remarkable--his respect and regard for his superior, who was so
crushed by disaster that he hardly knew whether he was in command
or not. After some decisive defeats Mancinus left his camp and
attempted to retire by night, but the Numantines, being aware of
his movements, at once occupied the camp, fell upon his troops as
they fled, made havoc of the rear, and drove the whole army on to
difficult ground, from which it was impossible to escape.
Whereupon, in despair of forcing a way into safety, he sent envoys
with proposals for a truce and conditions of peace. The enemy
replied that they trusted no one except Tiberius and insisted that
he should be sent to them. This attitude was partly due to their
high opinion of Tiberius, whose reputation was familiar to all,
partly to the memory of his father, who after fighting against the
Spanish tribes and subduing many of them settled terms of peace
with the Numantines and persuaded the Roman people strictly to
confirm and keep them. Thus it came about that Tiberius was sent;
and after some give and take in negotiations he made a treaty, and
beyond question saved twenty thousand Roman citizens, besides
attendants and camp followers.

Plutarch, liii. 5.

As Tiberius travelled through Italy on his way to the wars in Spain he looked at the condition of the people of his own country, thought of the fortunes of his own soldiers, and was moved to indignation and distress by what he saw. On the banners carried into battle, above the public buildings, at the head of the laws and decrees issued by the Government, there stood the letters 'S.P.Q.R.'--the Senate and People of Rome. The senators, he knew, were rich and growing richer. The name of Rome was carried far and wide. But what of the people? As Tiberius himself said, 'The wild beasts of Italy have their lairs and hiding places, but those who fight and die for Italy wander homeless with their wives and children and have nothing that they can call their own except the air and sunlight.'

Tiberius saw and felt. But seeing and feeling were not enough. He determined to act. The land question, the homelessness and poverty of the people, and the army question were, as he saw it, really part of the same. He resolved to deal with them together.

When he came back from his second term of service in Spain (134) he got himself elected as one of the tribunes of the people. Almost at once he introduced his Land Bill. The idea of this Bill was simple. All over Italy the State of Rome owned great estates. But for years back the estates had either been let to or occupied by the big landowners or wealthy men of Rome. They were in possession. But the lands did not belong to them. There was no reason in law or justice why the Republic should not take back and use what was its own. These lands, cut up into small holdings, would provide a means of livelihood to hundreds of thousands of peasant proprietors. The miserable poverty of Rome could be swept away. A new race would grow up.

The Bill was a reasonable one. It was received with enthusiasm by the poorer classes. Moderate men saw that it was a sincere effort to tackle a state of things they knew and deplored. It was necessary to do something for the poor, they knew; they were glad of any plan which promised to reduce the luxury and display of the rich. But the big landowners, whose estates were going to be divided, who were being called upon to give back what, after all, had never been their own, were furious. They were ready to go to any lengths to defeat the Bill. To them Tiberius was a dangerous man, a traitor to his own class. Since they were in a minority they knew that if the matter came to a vote they would be defeated. Feeling grew more excited as the voting day drew near. Tiberius had become the darling of the people; but he had to go about armed for fear of an attack from the landlords' party. At last the latter hit on an ingenious device. The tribunes, the magistrates who represented the poor classes, or plebeians as they were called, were ten in number, one to represent each of the original ten tribes. If one of them chose he could stop anything the others wanted to do by saying 'Veto'--I forbid. This power was intended to be used sparingly and only in times of grave danger. Originally, indeed, the tribune could only say Veto on religious grounds; because having inspected the omens he saw something which showed that the gods were unfavourable. The landlords, however, now persuaded Octavius, one of the colleagues of Tiberius, to say Veto to his Land Bill. Tiberius understood what had happened. He tried to persuade Octavius to give way. In vain. Then, as happens with men who appear very quiet and hard to move, his anger, which had been slowly mounting, burst out. He went down to the assembly of the people and made a powerful attack upon Octavius. How could a man be said to represent the people, he asked, to be a tribune of the people, who was doing his best to prevent a measure which the people desired and which was altogether for their good? There was a scene of great excitement. Tiberius called upon Octavius to resign. Octavius refused. Then Tiberius called for the election of another tribune in Octavius's place. This was against all rule and order. Nevertheless it was done. Octavius was removed. A new tribune was elected in his stead. Amid great rejoicing the Land Bill was passed.

The landlords were full of a deep bitterness against Tiberius and accused him of all kinds of things. They said that he wanted to upset the State and tear up the laws because he had passed a Bill taking from them a portion of their lands which had never really belonged to them. He, however, went quietly on with his work. A committee was set up, on which were both Tiberius and his brilliant young brother Caius, to divide the common land and give it out in lots to the citizens who needed and could work it. This was a long task. At the end of the year Gracchus ceased to be tribune. His work was not finished. The Senate had refused to give the Land Commission any money for their expenses and was putting every kind of difficulty in the way of their getting on with their task. Moreover, in view of the hatred of the landlords Gracchus himself, as a private person, was hardly safe. Therefore, when the election time came he asked to be chosen as tribune again.

A great many of the citizens who had come in from the country districts to vote for the Land Bill had gone back again; others had left Rome to prepare for or take up the new allotments. The charges made against Gracchus made timid people afraid; they were worried when it was said that a man could not legally be elected tribune for two years running. They were still further alarmed by Gracchus's own speeches. Feeling ran very high on both sides, and it was plain that the election day would not go off without some disturbance.

Rioting, indeed, broke out in the Capitol almost before the sun rose and fighting with sticks and stones between those who wanted Tiberius elected and those who did not. As always happens, many joined in who neither knew nor cared what the trouble was all about. When Tiberius himself appeared he raised his hand to summon his friends to gather round him. This was reported to the Senate by a man who cried, 'Tiberius Gracchus has raised his hand to his head: he is asking the citizens to crown him.' On this Nasica, a senator who hated Gracchus, demanded that he should be put to death as a traitor. When the consul refused Nasica rushed out with a body of senators and, charging the people who stood round Tiberius, broke through and killed him almost at once (133). In the panic many others were slain and trampled underfoot. The body of Gracchus was cast into the Tiber. Many of his supporters were imprisoned. Others had all their property taken away.

The senators doubtless hoped that, Tiberius dead, his work would soon be forgotten. But the evils he had tried to remedy remained. And abroad serving in the army was his brother Caius, who did not forget. 'Whither can I go?' said Caius. 'What place is there for me in Rome? The Capitol reeks with my brother's blood. In my home my mother sits weeping and lamenting for her murdered son.' His was a nature very different from his brother's. Tiberius was quiet, gentle, kindly, naturally rather dreamy; a man who in happier times would have been content with the uneventful life of a gentleman. Caius was fiery and passionate, filled with an energy that must have found some outlet for itself in whatever circumstances he had lived. He loved his brother and his death filled his heart with glowing anger and a fixed determination that his work and life should not be wasted. He would carry out Tiberius's ideals; and carry them farther than Tiberius had ever dreamed.

Caius Gracchus was nine years younger than Tiberius and a man of more remarkable character and more brilliant gifts than his brother. The sense of a great wrong made Tiberius burn with indignation, and in his indignation he took to politics; Caius had a natural genius for politics. His mind ranged forward into the future; whereas Tiberius worked blindly, in the dark, Caius knew where he wanted to go. And he understood men as his brother had never done. Without any of the shy aloofness that at times gave Tiberius the appearance of more strength than he really possessed, Caius made people like him without moving away by so much as an inch from the purpose he had in mind. That purpose was a change far more revolutionary than Tiberius had dreamed of.

Only twenty years of age at the time of his brother's murder, Caius spent the next ten years in public service. Like Aemilianus he held it every man's duty to work for the Republic. But while Aemilianus thought that for such work obedience, faithfulness, courage, temperance were all that were required of a man, Caius, who had these virtues in a high degree, had also an active questioning mind. It did not seem to him that the men who ruled the State were wise or just or generous enough to lay down, once for all, the lines on which it was to move for ever. The citizen had a duty to the Republic beyond that of loyal and obedient devotion. He must use not only his arm in its service but his mind also. He must help it to grow; make Rome worthy of the greatness about which people talked so lightly and easily. The greatness had been won at a fearful price. Hundreds of thousands of Roman soldiers had laid down their lives to make it; hundreds of thousands more had given their best years to its service, asking no reward but that the Republic should stand safe. It could, Caius thought, only be safe, only be great in so far as it became more and more the city of free men in fact as well as name.

With such thoughts as these moving in his mind he turned in loathing from the life of the young Roman noble of his own age and class. He had no use for personal luxury; wine and fine clothes and a gorgeous house in which to live a life of ease and idleness--these things were nothing to him. While serving abroad in Spain, Sardinia, and elsewhere, he shared the hardships of his soldiers, and spent his own money in the effort to make their hard lot less severe. Such leisure as he had was occupied in reading. In this way he disciplined and fortified his mind. Moreover, Caius had before him a fixed purpose, a clearly determined work in life. For that he was preparing. One of his weapons was to be the art of speech. He studied, therefore, particularly the works of the great Greek orators. He wanted to learn, and he did learn, how to use words to persuade men and impel them to action. He made himself one of the greatest orators Rome knew. His speeches are lost, but accounts of them remain, and they tell how Caius could set his hearers on fire, stir them to tears or anger.

When, nine years after Tiberius's death, Caius Gracchus came back to Rome (124), he found that men were waiting eagerly for him. Tiberius had not been forgotten. The poor hoped, the rich feared that Caius had come as his avenger. When he stood for the tribuneship the party in the Senate that had thwarted and finally murdered Tiberius strained every nerve to prevent Caius's election. They did not wait to hear what his plans were. They knew that he belonged to the men of the new generation who wanted far-reaching changes, and they believed that any change must be at their expense. They at once began attacking Caius. They accused him of coming home before his time of service abroad was up. They even declared that he, the most scrupulously honest and disinterested of men, had made more money than he ought to have done from the various posts he had held. Caius turned on them. He had already served twelve years in the army. As for making money: 'I am the only man who went out with a full purse and returned with an empty one. Others took out casks of wine for themselves, and when they had emptied them brought the casks back filled with gold and silver.' He lived not in the rich quarter of Rome among the high-born and wealthy, but among the poor near the Forum. He was elected tribune by an overwhelming majority and at once set to work.

His main idea was a really great and original one; nothing less than the extension of Roman citizenship, in so far as voting rights went, to the people of Italy. The Italians were called to serve in Rome's armies. The best soldiers, indeed, had always come from outside the capital. The Italians paid heavier taxes; they ought to share in the benefits of Rome and have a voice in its government. Caius Gracchus indeed dreamed of making the Government of Rome a real democracy. It was a magnificent dream; but the people were not ready for it. In fact it was only after a bitter war that the Italians won from the Romans the right to vote. Gracchus knew that his plan could not be carried through at once; but he had worked out a series of Bills which would, he believed, pave the way for it. Until they were through he said nothing of his great scheme.

_Caius Gracchus. The varied Activities of a popular Leader_

When the people had not only passed this law, but actually
commissioned Gracchus to appoint the judges from the Order of the
Knights, he became invested with a kind of royal authority, and
even the senators were ready to listen to his counsel. When he
gave it, he always proposed something to their credit, as, for
example, a most just and honourable decree about the corn which
the proconsul Fabius had sent from Spain. He persuaded the Senate
to sell the corn and return the money to the cities from which it
came, and furthermore to censure Fabius for making his rule
burdensome and unendurable to the inhabitants; and this brought
him great reputation and popularity in the provinces. He proposed,
too, to send out colonies and to make roads and to build
granaries, personally managing and controlling all these
undertakings, never failing in attention to a mass of details, but
with extraordinary quickness and application working out each task
as if it alone engaged his efforts, with the result that even
those who hated and feared him were astounded at his universal
thoroughness and efficiency. Most people on meeting him were
surprised to see him surrounded by contractors, craftsmen,
ambassadors, commanders, soldiers, and scholars. Treating them all
with an easy good nature, being at once kind and dignified, and
suiting himself to the character of the individual, he proved that
it was gross slander to call him dictatorial, or presumptuous, or
violent. Thus his gift for popular leadership was shown rather in
personal association and conduct than in public speeches.

Plutarch, liv. 6.

He was a tremendous worker and all his plans were thought out to the smallest detail. They were not vague ideas on paper. He began on his land policy. If it were to have any chance of being carried he must, he saw, break the solid majority of the landowning classes and their friends. The most important of these friends were the class known as the Knights, or Equestrian Order. The Senate was composed of men selected from among those who had held one of the high offices of State. Senators might not take part in business, but they alone served as jurors to try the cases which concerned people who carried it on, and particularly those who carried on one important kind of business, that of tax-collecting in the provinces. This was largely in the hands of the knights. Their name went back to the days of the old constitution when men of a certain wealth served in the cavalry, and were given votes as so serving. The so-called Equestrian Order had greatly grown in number. They were the money-makers, financiers, capitalists of Rome. As against changes in the land system they might stand with the Senate, but when Caius Gracchus proposed that the juries which tried people for political offences should be drawn not from the Senate, but from the knights, he won their support against it. He then turned to win that of the people by a new Corn Law which arranged that the Government should buy corn wholesale and supply it to the Roman people at a fixed low price. From this he turned to other constructive measures. He revived his brother's Land Laws; started a great road-building scheme; and worked out a plan for the reorganization of the army. Over the detailed working out of all these big plans he watched himself with the eye of a practical man whom nothing escaped. For Caius, though his ideas were large and far-reaching, and his mind grasped problems that the ordinary Roman politician did not begin to see, was no dreamer. He was an organizer of consummate ability and possessed a remarkable knowledge of facts and of men. His house became a sort of great Government office, buzzing with hard work from morning until night.

In the following year he was re-elected and at once moved on to the next stage in his policy, a big scheme of land settlement and colonization, very much on the lines now worked by Canada and our other Colonies who assist intending settlers by giving them cheap passages out and plots of land in new territories. This done, he launched his plan of granting Roman citizenship to the Italians.

Here, however, he came into collision with rich and poor at once. The ordinary Roman citizen was jealous of his rights and did not want to share them. Caius's popularity began to fall off at once. The idea of Italy a nation was one for which the Romans were not ready. They had been angry when Tiberius wanted to give farms to the Italians; Caius's plan of giving them votes and thereby a share in the games, cheap corn, and other joys of Roman life, made them far more angry. They despised the Italians and cared nothing for their grievances. Caius could not stir them to any sympathy.