Gaius also launched a broad project to improve and extend the roads of Italy. Introducing for the first time uniform methods and specifications, Gaius’s roads became known for their utility and elegance. They were made from good stone laid on tightly packed sand. They were of uniform height and width and equipped with excellent drainage systems. Gaius also ordered the work crews to mark each mile with a stone pillar so travelers could calculate distances easier. In the long run, Gaius’s roads helped improve lines of communication, supply, and trade. And for short-term political purposes, the roads promised profits for publicani contractors and steady work for rural laborers.29
Since this roadwork would occur way off in the rural hinterlands it offered little for the plebs urbana of Rome. So to secure their support, Gaius promised them what they always wanted: a stable supply of cheap grain. Just as Gaius was coming to office, a plague of locusts decimated crops in North Africa, causing food shortages back in Rome. Gaius introduced legislation directing the state to purchase and stockpile grain and then sell it to citizens for a fixed price. Cicero later denounced the project as an obvious handout to secure political support and said that better men at the time “resisted it because they thought that its effect would be to lead the common people away from industry to idleness.” But this was not the free-grain dole that would later become a hallmark of imperial municipal policy. It was simply offering grain at a fixed price to create some semblance of stability. The plebs urbana loved the bill so much they made further expansion of subsidized grain their central political demand for the next hundred years.30
Gaius then introduced measures to redress thirty years of complaints about the ruinous cost of service in the legions. The state had provided arms, equipment, and clothes for the legions through publicani contractors but always deducted expenses from a soldier’s pay—a ruinous burden for the already impoverished legionaries. Gaius passed a law that the state would stop deducting the expenses. As with the evolution of the grain dole, it would take a century to move from the ad hoc armies of the middle Republic to the permanent legions of Augustus, but Gaius’s law to move expenses from the citizens’ pockets to the state treasury was a big step.31
Finally, Gaius put the capstone on his project with two major pieces of legislation in support of the Equestrians generally but, more specifically, the publicani. The first addressed an issue Gaius had already campaigned against: Aquillius’s settlement in Asia. All the old royal domains had now been converted into Roman ager publicus and were available for taxation, the profits from which would be astronomical. But a controversial clause in the settlement stipulated that tax-farming contracts for Asia would be sold by the Roman governor in Asia, giving the governor control over the flow of enormous wealth. Gaius passed a law stipulating that Asian tax-farming contracts would be sold by the censors back in Rome. It was billed as a measure to curb senatorial power, but it also ensured the largest and most powerful of the publicani companies would be able to monopolize the business. This earned Gaius backing from some of the richest and most influential men in Rome who were already impressed with Gaius’s public works projects. These men were not yet part of the political power structure but were fast being integrated into the system.32
Gaius helped further politicize the publicani with his second major piece of legislation: reform of the Extortion Court. The jury pool of the Extortion Court had always been drawn from the Senate, and the senatorial jurors had long turned a blind eye to each other’s misdeeds. These were, after all, the jurors that had just found Aquillius innocent despite clear evidence of his guilt. Gaius passed a law that barred senators from serving on the jury; instead jurors would be drawn from the ranks of the Equestrians. But not just any Equestrians. To be available for jury duty a man had to be permanently domiciled in Rome. Since the official residence for the majority of Equestrian families was their country estates, the only men “permanently domiciled in Rome” were those who supported themselves strictly through business—especially the publicani. The publicani now had a powerful mechanism to defend their own interests.33
