All of this seemed perfectly reasonable to the Romans, but it put in motion the wheels of the Social War. The group hardest hit by the purge and expulsion were men of Equestrian rank—men with financial means and business connections in Rome who nonetheless had not yet found their own path to citizenship. It would be this class of disgruntled Equestrians who would be the iron backbone of Italian rebellion. They returned home to their native cities, mingled with the veterans of the northern wars, and began to plot revolution.12
For the Senate, however, this was not simply a matter of keeping clean books. Maintaining a tight lock on citizenship meant keeping a tight lock on the Assembly. Above all, they feared that the Roman leader who finally delivered citizenship to the Italians would have client rolls that dwarfed his rivals, destabilizing the political balance in the Senate. This was the same threat once posed by the Gracchan land commission. The shortsighted obsession with the petty dynamic of electoral politics led to the most unnecessary war in Roman history.
BECAUSE HISTORY HAS a sense of humor, a completely unrelated conflict in Asia triggered the final showdown over Italian citizenship. The province of Asia had been at the forefront of Roman politics in the 130s and 120s and then, much like the Italian question, had gone dormant. After Asia was incorporated into the empire, Rome’s attention diverted to Africa and Gaul for the next twenty years. Asia had been left to just hum along. And there was no reason not to let it hum: it was generating the massive profits funding those wars in Africa and Gaul. Cicero later said, “Asia is so rich and so productive… it is greatly superior to all other countries.” Taxes that had once been owed to King Attalus now formed a steady stream of wealth that poured directly into the Temple of Saturn.13
But with just a handful of staff running the provincial government, the business of handling the Asian taxes fell into the unsupervised hands of the publicani, who routinely extorted more money than was owed. Since the men who owned the publicani companies sat in the jury pool of the Extortion Court, there was no one to complain to. Policing themselves, the publicani operated with impunity.
But now that peace had returned to the Republic, the Senate wanted to go back to running their empire rather than just saving it from ruin. After helping clean up the citizenship rolls in 95, Mucius Scaevola led an old-style senatorial embassy to Asia to investigate how the province was running and make any appropriate reforms. It had been twenty-five years since anyone had really checked to see how things were going. Accompanying Scaevola was another ex-consul, Publius Rutilius Rufus, the consul for 105 who had introduced new training teÚniques for the soldiers. Considered the preeminent stoic intellectual of his generation, Rutilius was an optimate of the first order and above reproach.14
When this embassy arrived, it turned out things were not going well at all. Everyone in Asia complained about publicani abuse, and the benevolent Scaevola doled out clemency left and right: “Whenever any who had been oppressed by those tax-gatherers appealed to him, he commissioned upright judges, by whom he condemned them in every case, and forced them to pay the penalty imposed upon them to the persons they had injured.” Scaevola stayed in the province about nine months arranging a revision of the provincial tax system. He then returned to Rome, leaving Rutilius in charge of settling the details. The reforms imposed in Asia were broadly popular, and it looked like Scaevola and Rutilius had settled Roman administration in Asia for a generation.15
Back in Rome, the publicani companies were not happy about any of this. When Rutilius returned in 92, he was indicted in the Extortion Court. The charges were ludicrous. Rutilius was a model of stoic probity and would later be cited by Cicero as the perfect model of a Roman administrator. In the face of this farce, Rutilius refused to even offer a defense so as not to acknowledge its legitimacy. He refused requests by both Crassus and Antonius to let them defend him. With the angry publicani controlling the jury, the outcome was in little doubt. Convicted of extortion, Rutilius thumbed his nose on the way out the door. He settled in the Asian city of Smyrna, to sit among the people who allegedly hated him, but who actually loved him.16
