The Storm Before the Storm полностью

But though the Gracchi were now dead, many of their reforms lived on. The Extortion Court remained staffed by Equestrian jurors. The grain dole remained in place, and though for the moment it was merely a small price-controlled ration, it entered permanently into the fabric of Roman administration. The road building and public works continued, and though the colonies were never completed, any early colonist who had secured land was allowed to keep it. Drusus’s magical twelve colonies were never heard from again now that Gaius’s headless body had been dumped in the Tiber.

As for the land commission, it remained existent but inert. Within a few years the Assembly amended the Lex Agraria to allow possessors of the Gracchan allotments to sell their land. It did not take long for wealthy magnates to buy up the majority of the lots. By 111, a further law transferred all currently held ager publicus to outright private property. The Lex Agraria had been a creative attempt to solve the problem of widening inequality in Italy and reverse the gradual disappearance of the small Roman farmer—a problem that ultimately would not be solved until after the fall of the Republic.⁶⁰

After their deaths, the Gracchi brothers themselves were transformed into legendary martyrs of the people. The Romans erected statues of them where each had been slain. Citizens dropped offerings and sacrifices at these quasi-religious shrines. Their mother Cornelia was moved by the devotion and said, “the sacred places where her sons had been slain… were tombs worthy of the dead which occupied them.” Cornelia herself retired to a villa at the port city of Misenum and lived for another twenty years. She maintained a running salon of Greek intellectuals and philosophers and welcomed visitors from all corners of the Mediterranean including the kings from the Hellenic east. Of her sons, she always spoke “without grief or tears, and narrated their achievements and their fate… as if she were speaking of men of the early days of Rome.” Some found her calm demeanor off-putting, but as Plutarch says, “While fortune often prevails over virtue when it endeavors to ward off evils, she cannot rob virtue of the power to endure those evils with calm assurance.” When Cornelia died, the Romans built a statue of her in the Forum.⁶¹

As the years passed the Gracchi name came to mean more than just the brothers: it stood for an array of programs and tactics that collectively represented a new populare movement in Roman politics. The standard populare programs included a grain dole for the urban poor, land for the rural poor, control of the courts with the Equestrians, secret ballots in the Assembly, subsidies for military service, and punishment of corrupt nobles. Tactically, the populare harnessed the democratic power of the Assembly rather than the aristocratic weight of the Senate. While populare leaders came and went, the citizens of Rome remained the same and would support those who offered them what they wanted.

Opposing the populares were the optimates. Meaning literally “the best” or “the good,” the term invoked a variety of characteristics. But since Cicero is our main source, those characteristics tended to align with his own worldview. For Cicero, an optimate was a well-educated senator with an active interest in oratory, politics, and war, and skewing away from the severe Roman virtues in the mold of old Cato the Elder. An optimate senator was comfortable with exotic food and Greek ideas. These grandly sophisticated statesmen were the natural guardians of the Republic, standing as sentinels against enemies both foreign and domestic.

For the great historian Sallust—himself an active partisan in the politics of the Late Republic—the divide between populare and optimate meant that “the institution of parties and factions” had come to Rome. He felt both sides were to blame for the treacherous polarization because “the nobles began to abuse their position and the people their liberty… thus the community was split into two parties, and between these the state was torn to pieces.” But despite Sallust’s observation, the Romans did not have political parties in the modern sense. There was no “Populare Party” and “Optimate Party.” Tactics, strategies, and alliances were fluid to all factions. But though Cicero deplored the tribunes and the Assembly, his beloved optimate were just as adept at using the Assembly to get their way as the populare. In fact, most of the greatest popular orators of the coming generation spoke on behalf of the optimate rather than populare.⁶²