The Storm Before the Storm полностью

As the tribunes watched their constituents driven off the land or hauled off to fight in the quagmire in Spain, they took their first steps toward curbing the power of the nobles. For the entire history of the Republic, citizens had declared their vote out loud, making it easy for powerful patrons to ensure clients voted the way they had been ordered to. In 139, a tribune defiantly passed a law requiring secret ballots for elections. Two years later the secret ballot was extended to judicial assemblies. It would take time for the effects of these reforms to be felt, but the introduction of the secret ballot would prove a hammer blow to the foundations of the senatorial oligarchy.¹⁸

Surveying the state of Italy in the 130s, some among the nobility could see that there was a greater problem. Conscripts still had to meet a minimum property requirement to be enrolled, but with the rich pushing the poor off the land fewer citizens could meet the minimum requirement to be drafted. The Romans had faced crises like this in the past and responded by lowering the property requirements to bring more men under arms. But by the mid-second century, many citizens could not even meet minimal standards of service. The consuls were forced to rely on an ever-shrinking pool of men to fight wars and garrison the provinces.¹⁹

WITH ALL THESE social and economic problems swirling, Tiberius Gracchus was elected quaestor for 137. This was supposed to be the routine first step on his ascent up the cursus honorum, but instead it nearly ended Tiberius’s public career before that career even began. Attached to the command of consul Gaius Hostilius Mancinus, Tiberius landed in Spain in the spring of 137 to continue the war against the Numantines, a Celtiberian tribe who had managed to resist all Roman attempts at pacification. Upon arrival Tiberius found himself caught up in one of the most embarrassing defeats the legions ever suffered. The consul Mancinus was far more a scholar than a soldier and the experienced Numantine guerrillas ran circles around his clumsy maneuvers. After a series of poorly executed skirmishes, Mancinus attempted a strategic retreat under cover of darkness, but discovered as the sun rose that his army was surrounded.²⁰

Having fallen prey to Roman treachery in the past, the Numantine leaders demanded young Tiberius Gracchus be sent forward to negotiate. While serving in Spain a generation earlier, Tiberius’s father had brokered an equitable peace treaty with the Numantines, and they remembered the name Gracchi and trusted the son to play as fair as his father. On his first campaign and with as many as thirty thousand lives on the line, Tiberius negotiated a treaty that allowed the legions safe passage out of the region in exchange for a pledge of future peace.²¹

Though there was little else Tiberius could have done under the circumstances, when Rome heard about the surrender, senators tripped over themselves bewailing the humiliating terms. The Senate recalled Mancinus and his senior staff to Rome to explain the cowardly capitulation. Though the embarrassed Mancinus attempted to justify his conduct, the Senate brutally smacked him down. They stripped Mancinus of his consulship and ordered him deposited at the gates of Numantia in chains to signal Rome’s rejection of the treaty. The Numantines responded by sending Mancinus back to Rome with a message that “a national breach of faith should not be atoned for by the blood of one man.”²²

Tiberius and his fellow junior officers escaped official censure for their role in the scandal, but that did not spare them a severe tongue lashing. Tiberius cannot have expected to return home to a hero’s welcome, but the intensity of the invective the Senate laid on him seemed disproportionate to his “crime.” All he had done was save tens of thousands of men from certain death—did the Senate really expect him to choose voluntary mass suicide? But in contrast to the self-righteous fury of the old men in the Senate, when Tiberius emerged from the Senate house, he was greeted by cheers from the families of the men he had saved.²³

WHILE TIBERIUS LICKED his political wounds, the road to redemption was already being paved by a group of senators intent on rebuilding the population of small citizen-farmers. These reformist senators were crafting a novel piece of legislation called the Lex Agraria that would hopefully reverse the decades-long trend of growing economic inequality. They believed they had hit upon an ingenious method of redistributing land from rich to poor without running afoul of the iron-clad private property rights that defined Roman law. They would focus exclusively on ager publicus illegally occupied by wealthy squatters.