The Storm Before the Storm полностью

THE CORE OF the future Caesarian coalition that would reduce the Senate to a tiresome social club was rooted in the old Gracchan coalition of rural peasants, plebs urbana, publicani merchants, and renegade nobles. Mixing populare rhetoric with direct appeals to self-interest, the Caesars would be able to harness these powers to finally destroy the senatorial aristocracy. But that did not mean every member shared equally in the spoils.

The original demographic tapped by the Gracchans was the rural poor. The small farmers had been the focus of reform efforts going back to Tiberius Gracchus’s original Lex Agraria. The Gracchi had tried to rebuild the population of small farmers by redistributing ager publicus to poor citizens. But within a generation the rich had bought back all the plots. Gaius Marius addressed the problem by recruiting landless plebs into the armies and then discharging them with land in the province in which they had fought. Marian colonies now existed in Africa, Sicily, and Gaul. Sulla then attempted one last redistribution of Italian land, but as we just saw this redistribution also failed. The economic momentum toward sprawling latifundia was by then inexorable. The solution to the problem of the small farmer in Italy was only solved when they were all dead.⁴²

The plebs urbana, meanwhile, grew in numbers and strength. As the dislocations in rural Italy continued, migration to the cities began in earnest. By the age of Augustus, the population of Rome had ballooned to 750,000. During the imperial Golden Age in the 100s AD, it went over a million. The growth of Rome is partly attributable to expansion of the grain dole. The subsidized grain supply introduced by Gaius Gracchus became a permanent feature of Roman municipal policy. But it is important to remember that the grain dole only applied to male citizens, and only entitled those citizens to a subsistance ration. So though the idleness of the plebs urbana was a frequent complaint, true idleness would have been fatal. For the rest of the Republic, and the entirety of the imperial age, feeding the plebs urbana a stable supply of cheap grain was a routine part of municipal administration. The grain dole helped create stability—as welcome to the rulers as to the ruled.⁴³

Benefiting most from the triumph of the Caesars were the Equestrians. After the death of Sulla, Rome only continued to expand and open up new opportunities for business. As the principal merchants of the most dominant power in the Mediterranean, the Equestrians controlled huge quantities of wealth. When Augustus imposed his imperial settlement in the 20s, he used men of Equestrian rank to fill his growing provincial bureaucracy. In Egypt, Augustus would not even let a man of senatorial rank enter. Under Augustus’s regime, the governor of Egypt had to be a man of Equestrian rank. The Equestrians would go on to manage the empire for the next five hundred years.⁴⁴

One pillar of the original Gracchan coalition that had triumphed already was the Italians. The Italian question had been answered when Sulla accepted unqualified civitas and suffragium in the spring of 83. Now full and equal citizens, every Italian was legally indistinguishable from a Roman. Prosperous Italian Equestrians became prosperous Roman Equestrians. Powerful Italian leaders became powerful Roman leaders. There was, of course, always lingering social elitism. To the snobs on the Palatine Hill a man like Cicero would always be a novus homo Italian. This snobbery would persist for a thousand years but was legally meaningless. Rome was Italy, and Italy was Rome.

Supplanting the Italians as Rome’s second-class citizens would be the foreign provincials. Republican governors continued to pump the provinces for money, much of which went to fund factional politics back in Rome. This problem was not solved until the Augustan settlements of the 20s BC. With Augustus claiming supreme proconsular authority outside Italy, his provinces were run by stable groups of Equestrian administrators operating under Augustus’s personal sovereignty. Recognizing that the provincials were just as deserving of good government as the Italians, Augustus dialed back the haphazard exploitation and created a self-perpetuating balance between power and mercy. The emperor Tiberius would chide an overzealous governor: “It was the part of a good shepherd to shear his flock, not skin it.”⁴⁵