The Storm Before the Storm полностью

Gaius returned to Rome in 132. It had been less than a year since Tiberius’s death, and Gaius now found himself not just the patriarch of the household, but also expected to be the leader of a political movement his brother had started. Gaius took his first step onto the public stage a few months later when he was called to defend a family friend in court. The power of Gaius’s oratory was the stuff of instant legend. Gaius pioneered a new form of theatrical oratory: he was the first Roman to pace the rostra energetically and pull his toga off his shoulder as he spoke. Even Cicero—an unrelenting critic of the Gracchi—reckoned that Gaius was the finest orator of his generation: “How great was his genius! How great his energy! How impetuous his eloquence! So that all men grieved that all those good qualities and accomplishments were not joined to a better disposition and to better intentions.” Gaius also had a hand in changing speechmaking “from an aristocratic to a democratic form; for speakers ought to address themselves to the people, and not to the Senate.” We do not have any record of this first great speech. The only thing we do know is that Gaius’s performance “made the other orators appear to be no better than children.” He was just twenty-two years old.⁵

The following year, Gaius continued to put his oratory to use in defense of his family’s legacy. He publicly supported Carbo’s bill to retroactively legitimize Tiberius’s attempt at reelection. Though the bill failed, Gaius’s performances put the political elite on notice that Tiberius would not be the only Gracchus to be reckoned with. Indeed, the leading nobiles began to fret about the power of Gaius, and there was a general consensus that he must not be allowed to become a tribune.⁶

The nobles were right to fret because the visit from his dead brother was not the only dream Gaius had. Over the past century the Republic had undergone a massive transformation without any comprehensive attempt to refit the ship of state to survive the new waters within which it sailed. Where Tiberius had proposed a single piece of radical agrarian legislation to blunt the effects of rising economic inequality, Gaius dreamed of an entire slate of reforms to ameliorate the most destabilizing aspects of Rome’s imperial expansion. Gaius Gracchus had a dream, and this dream would lead him to share one life with his brother and die a champion of the people.

WHILE GAIUS PUT together the early pieces of his reform package, one thing had already become clear: the future of Rome lay in Italy. As his brother had likely recognized in the early draft of the Lex Agraria, restoring the health of the Republic meant restoring the health of all Italians—not just Roman citizens. It was time to stop treating the Italian Allies as foreigners rather than what they really were: integral members of the Roman community. The loose, Roman-led confederation that had knitted the peninsula together over the last two hundred years was exhausted. With the Mediterranean now revolving around Italy it was time for the peninsula to unify.⁷

In the years after Tiberius’s death, fellow land commissioner Marcus Fulvius Flaccus had become something of an older brother to Gaius. While Gaius was just starting his public career, Flaccus was on the cusp of a consulship. When it came time to run, he introduced a provocative idea that he most likely discussed with Gaius in advance: to make every Italian a full Roman citizen. While this proposal had enormous long-term implications, it was premised on the more immediate and practical concern of resolving disputes with the land commission. Flaccus believed that “the Italian Allies should be admitted to Roman citizenship so that, out of gratitude… they might no longer quarrel about the land.” And though their gratitude was key, even more important was that by accepting citizenship the legal roadblock that had stalled the agrarian commission would be resolved. Flaccus and Gaius both believed the Italians would make that deal.⁸

Offering the Italians full citizenship was, of course, a radical proposition that sent shivers up the spines of the conservative nobility in Rome. They could not stand the thought of their subjects becoming their equals. But Flaccus also ran into difficulty with the common plebs urbana who jealously guarded the privileges of citizenship. To guard against the proposal, the Senate induced a tribune to expel all noncitizens from Rome in preparation for the consular election. If Flaccus wanted to win on a platform of citizenship for the Italians, he was going to have to sell it to the Roman citizens. Periodic expulsions of foreigners became a recurring feature of the later Republic, and Cicero deplored the practice, saying, “It may not be right… for one who is not a citizen to exercise the rights and privileges of citizenship,” but actually expelling non-Romans was “contrary to the laws of humanity.”⁹