Saturninus’s campaign for tribune had already set the tone for the coming year. With every indication that Saturninus planned to use his term to drive Metellus Numidicus into exile, the optimates backed a young ally named Nonius to run for tribune and stop him. When it appeared that Nonius might indeed win election, the radical populares did not even wait for the vote. An armed gang, most likely drawn from the more unscrupulous corners of Marius’s veterans, jumped the unfortunate Nonius and beat him to death. With the bonds of mos maiorum shredded, Saturninus paid no immediate price for this preemptive political assassination. After pushing Nonius’s body aside, Saturninus easily won election. All of this set the stage for the year 100—a year that very nearly saw the fall of the Republic.22
During this fateful year it becomes difficult to disentangle who was using whom—but it appears Saturninus was now pursuing a more overtly sinister version of Gaius Gracchus’s program. Saturninus, Glaucia, and their cronies—who still included the phony son of Tiberius Gracchus—tried to revive the old Gracchan coalition of plebs urbana, rural peasants, Equestrians, and populare nobles looking to stick it to their optimate rivals. But Saturninus’s coalition was also now joined by Marius’s veterans, who would provide much needed muscle. Where Gaius Gracchus had been pulled into violence against his will, Saturninus pursued it without compunction. Where Gaius sought to restore the balance of the Polybian constitution, Saturninus wanted to truly crush the Senate and use Marius’s veterans to rule the city with an iron fist.
ONCE SATURNINUS TOOK up the office of tribune, he pursued a dizzying slate of reforms aimed at overwhelming the power of the optimates in the Senate. The seeds of the new antisenatorial coalition had been sewn long before the fateful year of 100. At some point prior to taking up his praetorship—probably during an otherwise unrecorded term as tribune—Glaucia put forward a new law returning control of the Extortion Court to the Equestrians, reversing the temporary restoration of senatorial power engineered by the now exiled Caepio in 106. But Glaucia’s law not only returned the jury pool of the Extortion Court to the Equestrians, it also expanded the scope of the charges to include not just magistrates accused of extortion but also anyone who benefited from the crime, opening up literally any citizen to prosecution at the hands of the Equestrian jurors. Glaucia also curtailed an oft-used ploy of delaying trials with procedural tactics. Glaucia meant for the court to be a hammer against the nobility and he did not want the jurors to be able to avoid delivering a blow out of pity or empathy. This was no time for either.23
This pro-Equestrian measure already in place, Saturninus entered the tribunate of 100 and offered the plebs urbana an expanded grain dole. This was an especially provocative measure, since the Senate had recently decreed that given the chaos in Sicily, anyone proposing subsidized grain was acting against the public interest. Saturninus gleefully took up the challenge. One of his fellow tribunes vetoed the bill, but Saturninus simply ignored him. A veto had once been enough to grind the entire Republic to a halt; now it was simply wadded up and tossed aside. The provocative grain dole was especially offensive to young Quintus Caepio, whose father had been exiled by Saturninus’s gang three years earlier. As quaestor for 100, the younger Caepio had been the one to recommend to the Senate that the treasury could not afford further grain subsidies. With both his father’s honor and his own now spit upon by Saturninus, Caepio lost his temper and led a gang of his own to the Assembly. This mob destroyed the planks and urns used for voting, but the vandalism only delayed passage of the bill. The damage was repaired and the Assembly voted the unaffordable grain dole into law.24
With the Equestrians and plebs urbana placated, Saturninus moved on to the real meat of his program: an ambitious set of colonies and land grants for Marius’s Gallic veterans. Having already established land grants in Africa, Saturninus now proposed new plots elsewhere in the empire. He staked the people’s claim to all the territory the Cimbri had recently occupied and said the Assembly had the right to distribute it to the men who had fought for it. Saturninus also proposed land in southern Gaul and Sicily be distributed to Marius’s veterans. The rural poor—from whom Marius had recruited his soldiers—flooded into Rome to pass the bill overwhelmingly.25
