The Storm Before The Storm: Chapter 1- The Beasts of Italy

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Hello, and welcome to The Storm Before the Storm.

Chapter 1: The Beasts of Italy.

10 years ago today, I posted my first episode of The History of Rome.

I thought it would be a fun hobby that would last about 18 months, and then I would get on with my life.

Instead, the show ran for five successful years.

Then I took a gamble, let the history of Rome come to its natural conclusion, and moved on to Revolutions, not really knowing if my audience would follow me.

But you did.

And apparently I need not have worried about that, and I am coming up on my fourth anniversary at Revolutions.

Then two and a half years ago, I was offered the opportunity to go back to my roots and write a book about Roman history, which was a thrilling opportunity.

Not just because it would tick write a book off my life's to-do list, which is, you know, it's been there since I was about eight years old, it also gave me the opportunity to go back and see my old friends.

Because though I ended the history of Rome and went and made new friends in the world of modern revolutions, my love for Roman history has never subsided.

And it was great fun to go hang out with the old gang again.

So what you're about to hear is chapter one of the storm before the storm, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan, forthcoming October the 24th, 2017 from Public Affairs.

It is available for pre-order right now at your favorite local bookstore, or you can get it online at Amazon, Barnes ⁇ Noble, Powell's, Indiebound, Books a Million.

wherever.

If you like what you hear today, you can help me out a lot by going to pre-order it because we want to get to 5,000 pre-orders to put it on the bestseller list so that everyone lets me write another book.

You can also find more information about this at revolutionspodcast.com or the newly revamped, that is newly revamped as of today, thehistoryofroome.com.

That's just thehistoryofroome.com.

I finally secured the domain name and thehistoryofrome.com makes it very easy to navigate the archives of the history of Rome.

ThehistoryofRome.com is just probably what you always thought the history of Rome's website should have been, but never was, and now finally is.

I will also take this opportunity to definitively answer a hearty yes to the question, will there be an audiobook version?

You guys, of course there's going to be an audiobook version, and of course I will read it.

It would have taken a whole series of blunders to not release the book as an audiobook or even worse to have someone else read it.

Of course I'm going to read it.

I am working with the good people at hash it audio, and it will be there for you in October.

Don't worry, it will be my very great pleasure to read to you what I have written, just like I've always read to you what I have written, and like I am about to read to you what I have written right now.

That is the very heart of our relationship.

But you are going to want to get the physical copy too, right?

I mean, if nothing else, I think we can all agree that the book just looks really cool.

It's very aesthetically pleasing.

So even if you keep a highly curated library of physical books, I can't imagine you're not going to want to get The Storm Before the Storm, The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan and put it up there on the shelf.

Okay, so that's enough of that.

But just to set up what you were about to hear, there is a prologue in the book that covers the backstory of the Roman Republic from its founding in 509 BC through the great imperial triumphs of 146 BC.

That's when the Romans sacked both Carthage and Corinth in the same year and directly annexed Greece and North Africa into the empire.

The prologue focuses heavily on Scipio Aemilianus and talks about his relationship with the Greek philosopher Polybius, and then it explains Polybius' analysis of the Roman Constitution and explains the basic Republican institutions, and then it also introduces the concept of mos maeorum, which meant the way of the elders.

And as I say in the prologue, Even as political rivals competed for wealth and power, their shared respect for the strength of the client-patron relationship, the sovereignty of the assemblies, and the wisdom of the Senate kept the Romans from going too far.

When the Republic began to break down in the late 2nd century, it was not the letter of Roman law that eroded, but respect for the mutually accepted bonds of Mos Maeorum.

Then the prologue ends, as I just said, in 146 BC, with Aemilianus and Polybius watching Carthage burn.

In fact, the end of the prologue reads, But as he stood watching Carthage burn, Scipio Aemilianus reflected on the fate of this once great power.

Overcome with emotion, he cried.

His friend and mentor Polybius approached and asked why Aemilianus was crying.

What better outcome could any man hope for?

Aemilianus replied, A glorious moment, Polybius, but I have a dread foreboding that some day the same doom will be pronounced on my own country.

According to Roman tradition, Aemilianus then quoted a line from Homer, A day will come when when sacred Troy shall perish, and Priam and his people shall be slain.

Aemilianus knew that no power endures indefinitely, that all empires must fall, and that there is nothing mortals can do about it.

After that, you will turn the page and find yourself here.

CHAPTER I THE BEASTS OF ItALLY

Thieves of private property pass their lives in chains, thieves of public property in riches and luxury.

Cato the Elder

Tiberius Sympronius Gracchus was watching as Carthage burned.

In 146 BC, the teenager was on his first campaign and serving under the famous commander Scipio Aemilianus, a typical posting for the scion of an illustrious family.

And the Gracchi were an illustrious family.

First ennobled by Tiberius' great-grandfather, the family had risen in stature with each generation, culminating with Tiberius' father, whom Livy called, by far the ablest and most energetic young man of his time.

Over the course of his storied career, Gracchus the Elder served two consulships and was awarded two triumphs.

Though his father died when Tiberius was just ten years old, the boy knew his father's exploits well.

He knew he had much to live up to.

Tiberius's mother, Cornelia, was herself one of the most respected matrons in Roman history.

She was the daughter of Scipio Africanus and wielded enormous influence inside the extended Scipione clan.

After her husband, Gracchus the Elder, died in 154, Cornelia elected not to remarry, even turning down a marriage proposal from the king of Egypt, and instead dedicated herself to Tiberius and her other son, Gaius.

She cultivated their education and hired renowned Greek tutors to expose the boys to the most advanced theories of the age.

In an apocryphal but telling story, a wealthy noblewoman once showed off a set of beautiful jewels to Cornelia, who herself pointed to Tiberius and his younger brother Gaius and said, Those are my jewels.

As he grew to maturity, young Tiberius was admired for his intelligence and dignity.

He was possessed of, quote, brilliant intellect, of upright intentions, and the highest virtues of which a man is capable when favored by nature and by training.

A generous spirit and eloquent speaker, Tiberius was on track to meet the high standard set by his father and become the leading man of his time.

To keep the family fortunes under one house, Cornelia arranged for her daughter Sympronia to marry her adopted nephew Aemilianus, even though she did not like Aemilianus personally.

Cornelia found him pretentious and did not think him worthy of the honor of being head of the family.

In fact, much of Cornelia's focus on her children was an effort to keep Aemilianus from outshining her jewels.

She pushed her son's ambitions by reminding them that the Romans still called her the mother-in-law of Aemilianus, but not yet mother of the Gracchi.

Despite all this family drama, Aemilianus was obliged to bring his teenage brother-in-law Tiberius to the siege of Carthage.

In Africa, Tiberius was exposed to the basics of military life.

By all accounts, he performed well as a soldier, earned the respect of the men, and even won a coveted award for being the first man over an enemy wall.

When Carthage fell in 146, Tiberius Gracchus was there to watch the city burn.

After Tiberius returned from North Africa, Cornelia maneuvered him into a marriage with the daughter of Appius Claudius Pulcher.

Tiberius' new father-in-law came from one of the oldest patrician families in the Republic, and he had recently been named Princeps Senatus, a prestigious position that meant he was listed at the top of the senatorial role and was allowed to speak first in any debate.

But the marriage was not without complications.

Claudius was a bitter opponent of Scipio Aemilianus, and Tiberius was now caught in the middle of their rivalry.

But that said, by his early twenties, Tiberius was positioned to achieve a preeminence that might even surpass his father.

He was well-educated, well-connected, and already recognized as a man with, quote, great force of character, eloquence, and dignity.

But unlike most Romans, Tiberius would not win fame on the battlefield fighting a foreign enemy.

Instead, he would win fame in the forum, combating the domestic threat of skyrocketing economic inequality.

After the Second Punic War ended in 202 BC, the economy of Italy endured a massive upheaval.

The legions that conquered Spain, Greece, and North Africa returned home with riches on an unprecedented scale.

A proconsul returned from a campaign in the east bearing 137,420 pounds of raw silver, 600,000 silver pieces, and 140,000 gold pieces.

Tiberius' own father returned from a campaign in Spain with 40,000 pounds of raw silver.

This was an insane load of treasure that would have been unimaginable to the frugal and austere Romans of the early Republic.

But by the middle of the second century BC, Rome was rolling in the Mediterranean's dough.

The newly enriched Romans spent their money on a variety of luxuries, fine carpets, ornate silverware, embellished furniture, and jewelry made of gold, silver, and ivory.

The effects of this influx of wealth began to concern some alert senators.

As early as 195, Cato the Elder warned his colleagues, quote, We have crossed into Greece and Asia, places filled with all the allurements of vice, and we are handling the treasures of kings.

I fear that these things will capture us rather than we them.

Every few years the Senate would attempt to rein in ostentatious displays of wealth, but the resulting limitations inevitably went unheeded and unenforced.

Quote, by fatal coincidence, the Roman people, at the same moment, both acquired a taste for vice and obtained a license for gratifying it.

But this story of fabulous riches leading to moral decay only affected the small group of noble families who controlled the spoils of war.

For the majority of Roman citizens, the conquest of the Mediterranean meant privation, not prosperity.

In the early days of the Republic, service in the legions did not interfere with a citizen's ability to maintain his property.

Wars were always fought close to home and in rhythm with the agricultural seasons.

But when the Punic War spread the legions across the Mediterranean, citizens were conscripted to fighting campaigns that dragged on for years a thousand miles from home.

Thanks to these endless wars, lower-class families were, quote, burdened with military service and poverty.

and their property would fall into a state of terminal neglect.

Upon returning home, a discharged soldier was likely to find the time, effort, and resources required to restore his land to its former productivity beyond his means.

Wealthy noble families exacerbated the sharpening divide between rich and poor.

As they looked to invest their newly acquired riches, they found thousands of dilapidated plots just waiting to be scooped up.

Sometimes destitute families sold willingly, happy to get something for property they could no longer afford to work for themselves, but holdouts were often bullied into quitting their land.

As these newly acquired small plots combined into larger estates, the Roman agricultural landscape began to transform from small independent farms to large commercial operations dominated by a few families.

The plight of the dispossessed citizens might not have been so dire had they been allowed to transition into the labor force of the commercial estates.

But the continuous run of successful foreign wars brought slaves flooding into Italy by the hundreds of thousands.

The same wealthy nobles who bought up all the land also bought slaves to work their growing estates.

The demand for free labor plummeted just as Roman families were being pushed off their land.

As the historian Diodorus observed, quote, thus a few men became extremely rich, while the rest of the population of Italy grew weak under the oppressive weight of poverty, taxes, and military service.

Tiberius first confronted the new economic realities early in life.

According to a pamphlet written later by his brother, quote, Tiberius was passing through Tuscany and observed the dearth of inhabitants in the country, and that those who tilled its soil or tended its flocks were barbarian slaves.

According to Gaius, this was the moment Tiberius first seriously confronted the need for economic and social reform.

This apocryphal story is no doubt a fine piece of exaggerated propaganda, but it captures the essential dislocation of the poor families from their traditional way of life.

Some of those dislocated citizens migrated to the cities in search of wage labor, only to find that slaves monopolized work in the cities too.

So most remained in their rural homelands, forming a new class of landless peasants who would continue to work their land as mere tenants and sharecroppers rather than owners.

Their new landlords loved the arrangement.

Tenant farmers could be used to produce low-margin cereals, which would allow landlords to save their slaves for more lucrative crops like olives and grapes.

Politically-minded landlords had an added incentive to promote tenancy.

These peasants remained political clients whose votes could be counted on in the assembly.

This new breed of poor tenant farmers would be tied to their landlords forever, unless someone came along and offered them a way out.

Exacerbating this economic and social dislocation was the Spanish quagmire the Romans had gotten themselves stuck in.

When Carthage and Corinth fell in 146, Roman power seemed invincible, but Roman commanders in Spain had indulged in greedy atrocities that continued to provoke stiff resistance from the Spanish natives, so each year the Senate was obliged to raise new recruits and ship them off to the Iberian Peninsula to serve on campaigns of undefined length against an enemy who specialized in demoralizing skirmishes.

As a reward for their service, these conscripts would come home to find their farms ruined.

While the unpopularity of the Spanish wars grew, potential conscripts began to defy the consuls.

With no other recourse, they once again turned to the tribunes for protection.

The tribunes were the ancient guardians of the plebs, but over the past century they had been co-opted by the Senate.

With citizens once again suffering under the arbitrary whims of the nobility, the tribunes returned to their sacred mandate of protecting the people from abuse.

In both 151 and 138, aggressive conscription by the consuls climaxed with the tribunes placing the consuls under arrest until they backed off.

The tribunes had every right to throw the consuls in jail, but it was still a shocking challenge to noble authority.

The Senate attempted to mollify potential conscripts by making life in the army a little less harsh.

They capped service at six years and gave soldiers the right to appeal punishments handed down by their officers.

But ultimately, this did little to improve the morale of the legionaries in Spain.

In 140, veterans who had served six years were mustered out and replaced by raw recruits.

These soldiers were, quote, exposed to severe cold without shelter, and, unaccustomed to the water and climate of the country, fell sick with dysentery, and many died.

Not exactly something you can put on a recruitment poster.

As the tribunes watched their constituents driven off the land or hauled off to fight in the quagmire in Spain, they took their first steps towards curbing the power of the nobles.

For the entire history of the Republic, citizens had declared their vote out loud, making it easy for powerful patrons to ensure clients voted the way that they had been ordered to.

In 139, a tribune defiantly passed a law requiring secret ballots for elections.

Two years later, the secret ballot was extended to judicial assemblies.

It would take time for the effects of these reforms to be felt, but the introduction of the secret ballot would prove a hammer blow to the foundations of the senatorial oligarchy.

Surveying the state of Italy in the 130s, some among the nobility could see that there was a greater problem.

Conscripts still had to meet a minimum property requirement to be enrolled, but with the rich pushing the poor off the land, fewer citizens could meet the minimum requirement to be drafted.

The Romans had faced crises like this in the past and responded by lowering the property requirements to bring more men under arms, but by the mid-2nd century, many citizens could not even meet minimal standards of service.

The consuls were forced to rely on an ever-shrinking pool of men to fight wars and garrison the provinces.

With all these social and economic problems swirling, Tiberius Gracchus was elected quester for 137.

This was supposed to be the routine first step on his ascent up the cursus honorum, but instead it nearly ended Tiberius' public career before that career even began.

Attached to the command of Consul Gaius Hostilius Manchinus, Tiberius landed in Spain in the spring of 137 to continue the war against the Numantines, a Celtiberian tribe who had managed to resist all Roman attempts at pacification.

Upon arrival, Tiberius found himself caught up in one of the most embarrassing defeats the legions ever suffered.

The consul Manchinus was far more a scholar than a soldier.

and the experienced Numantine guerrillas ran circles around his clumsy maneuvers.

After a series of poorly executed skirmishes, Manchinus attempted a strategic retreat under cover of darkness, but discovered as the sun rose that his army was surrounded.

Having fallen prey to Roman treachery in the past, the Numentine leaders demanded that young Tiberius Gracchus be sent forward to negotiate.

While serving in Spain a generation earlier, Tiberius' father had brokered an equitable peace treaty with the Numantines, and they remembered the name Gracchi and trusted the son to play as fair as his father.

On his first campaign, and with as many as 30,000 lives on the line, Tiberius negotiated a treaty that allowed the legion safe passage out of the region in exchange for a pledge of future peace.

Though there was little else Tiberius could have done under the circumstances, when Rome heard about the surrender, senators tripped over themselves, bewailing the humiliating terms.

The Senate recalled Mankinus and his senior staff to Rome to explain their cowardly capitulation.

Though the embarrassed Mankinus attempted to justify his conduct, the Senate brutally smacked him down.

They stripped Mankinus of his consulship and ordered him deposited at the gates of Numantia in chains to signal Rome's rejection of the treaty.

The Numantines responded by sending Mankinus back to Rome with a message that, quote, a national breach of faith should not be atoned for by the blood of one man.

Tiberius and his fellow junior officers escaped official censure for their role in the scandal, but that did not spare them a severe tongue-lashing.

Tiberius can not have expected to return home to a hero's welcome, but the intensity of the invective the Senate laid on him seemed disproportionate to his crime.

All he had done was save tens of thousands of men from certain death.

Did the Senate really expect him to choose voluntary mass suicide?

But in contrast to the self-righteous fury of the old men in the Senate, when Tiberius emerged from the Senate House, he was greeted by cheers from the families of the men he had saved.

While Tiberius licked his political wounds, the road to redemption was already being paved by a group of senators intent on rebuilding the population of small citizen farmers.

These reformist senators were crafting a novel piece of legislation called the Lexagraria that would hopefully reverse the decades-long trend of growing economic inequality.

They believed they had hit upon an ingenious method of redistributing land from rich to poor without running afoul of the ironclad private property rights that defined Roman law.

They would focus exclusively on augur publicus, illegally occupied by wealthy squatters.

As you might have guessed from squinting at the Latin, augur publicus was publicly owned land.

As the Romans conquered Italy, they typically confiscated a third of a defeated enemy's territory and turned it into state-owned augur publicus.

In the early days of the Republic, this public land was converted into a Roman colony, but by Tiberius' day, it was usually leased to individual renters, who would work the land in exchange for a portion of the produce.

To prevent rich families from monopolizing the state lands, the assembly passed a law that no family was allowed to lease more than 500 uugera, about 300 acres, of public land.

But this prohibition was mostly ignored.

The magistrates tasked with enforcing the limits were themselves wealthy landowners occupying excessive public land, so everyone colluded to get away with it together.

The legal rationale of the Lexagrari was simple.

The 500 Jugera prohibition would be strictly enforced.

Anyone caught occupying ager publicus over the legal limit would be forced to relinquish the excess back to the state.

The excess could then be divided up into small, manageable plots and redistributed to landless citizens.

Since the whole point of the reform was to rebuild the class of smallholders, the bill stipulated that the newly created plots could not be broken up and sold.

The authors of the Lexagraria did not want to hand a plot of land to a poor man, just so he could turn around and sell it back to a rich man.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the senators crafting this piece of radical reform legislation were not backbench agitators, but rather some of the most powerful men in Rome.

The group was led by Tiberius' father-in-law, Appius Claudius Polcher, who was Princep Senatus.

Joining him were a prominent pair of brothers, the wealthy jurist and scholar, Publius Licinius Crassus Mucianus, and Publius Mucius Scavola, one of the most respected legal theorists of his generation.

There were other prominent senators and rising young nobles surrounding Claudius' group of reformers.

Among them was Tiberius Gracchus.

For historians, one of the most controversial aspects of the Lexagraria is whether the authors intended only Roman citizens to qualify for allotments, or whether the non-citizen Italian allies also qualified.

The Italians provided much of the manpower for the legions, and Tiberius himself was personally anxious about their plight, quote, lamenting that a people so valiant in war, and related in blood to the Romans, were decimated little by little into poverty and paucity of numbers without any hope of remedy.

But whatever the original intent, there is no evidence the Italians were ultimately included in the redistribution program.

It seems an obscure point, but the fight over the Lexigraria was an early test of Roman willingness to treat the Italians as equals.

It was a test they failed.

Historians also still argue about the motivations of the authors of the bill.

Maybe they were acting on high-minded principle and simply wanted to restore the citizen farmer and rebuild the manpower reserves of the legions.

But it could also be that the law was cynically designed to add thousands of new clients to the political networks of its authors.

Traditionally, the man tasked with distributing land absorbed the families that benefited onto his client roles.

And it is here that we might also detect the source of the intransigent opposition to the bill, because what the Lexagraria proposed to do was take all the miserable tenants attached by default to their landlords and transfer their political allegiance to the Claudian faction, an intolerable shift of senatorial power.

A piece of legislation this controversial and far-reaching was not drafted on a whim.

Claudius, Scavola, and Mucianus would have spent years carefully picking through Roman law, laying out how the survey process would work, and who would arbitrate contested claims.

But once the law was written, they simply had to wait for the right time and the right person to introduce the bill.

And for that, Claudius had his eye on his talented son-in-law Tiberius, who was now trying to recover from the shame of the Numantine affair.

While the authors of the Lexagraria waited for the right time to introduce their bill, the unpopular war in Spain continued.

After the Senate rejected Tiberius' treaty, two more years of inconclusive fighting followed.

More men dead, more farms ruined, more families dislocated, all for no discernible gain or purpose.

The people of Rome were getting fed up.

So just as they had done during the war against Carthage, they turned to Scipio Aemilianus to end the the war once and for all.

But they faced a similar problem they had faced back then.

Aemilianus was technically prohibited from running.

During the Carthaginian War 15 years earlier, the problem was that he was too young.

Now the problem was that a law had been passed barring a man from serving more than one consulship in his career.

But just as the assembly had voted an exemption that allowed Aemilianus to stand for the consulship of 147, they exempted Aemilianus from the prohibition of multiple consulships.

He was duly elected for the consulship of 134.

With his ability to secure special treatment from the assembly, the career of Aemilianus became a prototype for ambitious politicians in the years to come.

Aemilianus showed how easy it was to manipulate the mob to serve personal ambition, inducing them to suspend inconvenient rules.

But that was not the only dangerous example Aemilianus set.

During the campaign for the consulship of 134, he promised to raise new recruits from his own extensive client network.

The Scipione were a major center of political gravity in Rome, and many friends and allies readily agreed to accompany Aemilianus to Spain, among them Tiberius' younger brother Gaius.

Raising a personal legion of 4,000 men, Aemilianus was able to depart for Spain without the need for forced conscription.

This was, for the moment, a welcome answer to an emergency situation, but it also set the precedent of a powerful noble raising a personal army from his own client network, an army whose loyalty to the powerful noble might outweigh their loyalty to the Senate and people of Rome.

From the perspective of Claudius, though, all Aemilianus' departure from Spain meant was that a formidable political opponent would now be absent from Rome for at least a year.

With his biggest rival out of the way, Claudius wasted no time dispatching his son-in-law Tiberius Gracchus to ram through the Lexagraria before anyone could stop it.

Within months of Aemilianus' departure for Spain, Tiberius Gracchus stood for the tribunate.

The office was slightly beneath his standing, and had the Numantine affair not darkened his prospects, it is likely Tiberius would have moved right on to an aedile ship to set up his inevitable runs for praetor and consul.

But given that he had to overcome the shame of the debacle in Spain, he could use his year as tribune to boldly vault back to the forefront of Roman politics.

Before Tiberius took office, the Claudian reformers floated the contents of the lexicoria to their senatorial colleagues, but met with incredulous resistance.

After occupying the augur publicus for many years, these wealthy landowners had come to regard the public land as their personal property.

They had invested in it, improved it, used it as collateral for loans, given it away as dowries, and bequeathed it to their heirs.

The authors of the bill wrote a number of concessions to lessen opposition, offering compensation for the auger publicus seized, giving clear title to the 500 yagera that remained, making allowances for larger families to hold more land.

But even with these concessions, a large faction in the Senate planned to resist the bill no matter what.

To have their land confiscated and handed over to the shiftless rabble was simply out of the question.

With the majority of the Senate hostile, the Claudians elected to break with Mos Maeorum and have Tiberius present the bill directly to the Assembly without giving the Senate a chance to register their opinion.

There was no law stating that a bill must be presented to the Senate before it was introduced in the Assembly.

It was simply the way things had always been done.

Tiberius' provocative gambit set everyone on edge.

Shortly after taking office in December 134, Tiberius appeared before the Assembly and announced his intention to pass a a law redistributing auger publicus from the rich to the poor.

According to Roman law, after a bill was introduced, three market days had to pass before it could be voted on.

With market days occurring about once a week, the interval between the introduction and the vote could be anywhere from 18 to 24 calendar days.

This delay allowed time for voters to make their way to Rome for the vote.

Since Tiberius was tapping into real resentment, dispossessed citizens flooded into Rome over the next three weeks, quote, like rivers flowing into an all-receptive ocean.

Even non-voting Italians came in to support the bill.

Though they could not vote, they could still register their physical and psychological support for land redistribution.

During these weeks, Tiberius regularly addressed the citizens in the forum to harness and solidify their energy.

He planned to have a large and eager majority in the assembly when it came time to vote.

After three market days had passed, Tiberius convened the assembly on the Capitoline Hill to consider the Lexigraria.

The space would have been packed with voters, giving the area in front of the Temple of Jupiter, quote, the appearance of stormy waves on the sea.

Before the official presentation, Tiberius defended the Lexigraria with the speech of his life.

The Gracchi had been trained by the best orators in the Mediterranean, and Tiberius perfected an irresistibly calm and dignified presence on stage.

He did not pace the rostra or beat his chest.

He stood perfectly still and allowed the inherent force of his argument to hold the audience's rapt attention.

According to Plutarch, Tiberius composed himself in the center of the rostra and delivered an impassioned defense of the common citizens of Rome.

Quote, The wild beasts that roam over Italy have every one of them a cave or lair to work in, he said.

While, quote, the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common common air and light, but nothing else.

Houseless and homeless, they wander about with their wives and children.

Invoking the imagery of an Italian population dislocated by war and poverty, he said, quote, it is with lying lips that their commanders exhort the soldiers in their battles to protect sepulchres and shrines from the enemy, but they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury.

These ruinous wars had led to an unacceptable irony for the average Roman.

Quote, Quote, though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of earth that is their own.

After bringing the assembly to tears, Tiberius requested the clerk read the bill in preparation for the vote that he would surely win.

But as it turned out, senatorial opponents of the lexicraria had themselves been busy over the last three weeks.

Knowing they would lose the vote, they had recruited Marcus Octavius, one of Tiberius' fellow tribunes, to prevent the vote from even taking place.

One of the most powerful weapons a tribune wielded was the veto, which meant I forbid.

A tribune could veto anything, at any time for any reason, and not even another tribune could overturn it.

So when the clerk rose to formally read the Lexagraria, Marcus Octavius stepped forward and vetoed the reading of the bill.

Everything stopped.

The vote could not take place until the clerk read the bill.

So as long as Octavius maintained his veto, the bill could not be read, and the vote could not take place.

With the proceedings ground to a halt, Tiberius adjourned the assembly for the day.

After failing to avoid senatorial opposition with a generous bill, Tiberius and his Claudian backers decided the best play was to rally his popular base by making villains of the rich.

Tiberius stripped out the friendly concessions before the next vote, so that the lexagraria would be, quote, more agreeable to the multitude and more severe against the wrongdoers.

With luck, pressure from the populace would force Octavius to give up his veto and allow the bill to come to a vote, a vote they would most surely win.

In between sessions of the assembly, Tiberius and Octavius came every day to the forum to debate the merits of the lexigraria.

The forum is not a large area.

and like the stages at a music festival, there were few rostras available for speech-making, and their audiences often overlapped.

In such close quarters, Tiberius and Octavius often engaged each other directly in debate.

As Tiberius grew more and more exasperated, he promised to purchase all the auger publicus Octavius owned at a fair price, if Octavius would drop his opposition to the bill, hinting that Octavius's opposition was rooted in crass self-interest rather than high-minded public spirit.

But Octavius refused to give up.

With traditional debate and persuasion failing to break the deadlock, Tiberius turned to radical action.

Tiberius promised he would veto every piece of public business until Octavius relented.

Then he marched up to the Temple of Saturn and locked the state treasury with his personal seal so that, quote, none of the usual business was carried out in an orderly way.

The magistrates could not perform their accustomed duties.

Courts came to a stop, no contract was entered into, and other sorts of confusion and disorder were rife everywhere.

Tiberius then ratcheted up the dramatic atmosphere further.

Alluding to reports that his enemies planned to assassinate him, he now carried a concealed short sword in his cloak and surrounded himself at all times with thousands of dedicated followers.

But when the assembly once again convened to consider the lexicraria, Octavius remained intractable.

He vetoed the reading of the bill again and the session descended into a fiery storm of mutual denunciations.

Two senators then stepped forward and asked the deadlocked tribunes to put the matter before the Senate.

Tiberius still had some hope the Senate might help broker a deal.

There was no question that if the Lexigraria came to a vote, it would pass by an overwhelming margin.

When past tribunes had levied vetoes against popular bills, they withdrew it after expressing their symbolic disapproval.

But no one had ever permanently defied the people's will.

By the traditional force of mos maeorum, Octavius should have allowed the vote on the lexigraria to proceed.

Never before had a tribune so obstinately blocked the clear will of the people.

Surely the Senate would induce Octavius to withdraw his opposition.

But rather than mediating a fair compromise, the assembled senators took the opportunity to heap abuse on Tiberius, just as they had after the Numantine affair.

There is no record of who said what, but Appian reports that Tiberius was, quote, upbraided by the rich.

Not only did they fail to pressure Octavius into accepting a compromise, they actively joined in the attacks on Tiberius.

Senators opposed to the lexicraria no doubt railed against the contents of the bill, Tiberius' political tactics, and probably his personal character.

The meeting ended with no resolution to the dilemma, and Tiberius himself, angrier than ever.

Unable to make headway by traditional measures, Tiberius introduced an unprecedented bill at the next scheduled assembly.

Arguing that a tribune who defied the will of the people was no tribune at all, Tiberius moved that the assembly depose Octavius from office.

There was no law that said a tribune could not be deposed from office, but the proposal broke with all mos maeorum.

No tribune had ever induced the assembly to depose a colleague.

It was unheard of.

But Tiberius had once again packed the assembly with his supporters, who now ominously surrounded the rostra and dared anyone to stand in their leader's way.

Not wishing to spark a riot, Octavius settled on principled martyrdom rather than suicidal intransigence and did not veto the deposition bill.

The assembly was free to depose him if they wished, and Tiberius called on the voters to prepare to vote.

For the purposes of voting, the Romans were divided into 35 tribes that would each receive one collective vote.

Individual members of a tribe would file through the voting stalls and deposit their ballot in an urn.

When they were finished, the ballots would be tallied, with the majority opinion determining the single collective vote of the whole tribe.

Then the process would repeat for the next tribe until a majority of tribes was reached.

When the first tribe completed their balloting, the herald announced the result, one vote to depose.

Since Tiberius understood that he was suborning an unprecedented attack on a fellow tribune, he halted the proceedings after this first vote and begged Octavius to withdraw his veto.

But Octavius refused.

The next 16 tribes deposited their ballots and every single one voted in favor of deposition.

On the brink of victory, Tiberius again halted the proceedings and gave Octavius one last chance to stand down.

Octavius again refused.

The 18th tribe then cast their ballots.

When they were done, the herald announced that a majority had been reached.

Octavius was deposed from office.

Stripped of his tribunate, Octavius no longer enjoyed the protections of his office and found himself menaced by the looming mob.

He was only able to escape thanks to a group of friends who pushed their way through the crowd and escorted Octavius out of the assembly.

The deposition of Octavius was a decisive turning point in the battle over the Lexigraria.

Until Tiberius took this fateful step, he still enjoyed a great deal of support from his fellow tribunes and senatorial backers.

But this reckless assault on a fellow tribune made Tiberius toxic to the naturally conservative elite.

His father-in-law Claudius stuck with him, but many others who had supported the reform in theory were happy to lay the bill aside in the face of relentless opposition, let things cool off, and then try again a year or two later.

But Tiberius could not afford to lose.

His future career depended on passing the Lexigraria, so he was willing to go to any lengths to push it through.

And for the moment, it had worked.

Tiberius Gracchus won the battle.

With Octavius out of the way, the assembly overwhelmingly passed the Lexagraria.

The controversial land bill was now law.

The Lexigraria called for a panel of three commissioners to survey the augur publicus, determine ownership, and parcel out land.

To make sure the job was done properly, and to monopolize political credit for the distribution of land, Tiberius induced the assembly to elect Tiberius himself, his father-in-law Claudius, and his 21-year-old brother Gaius to serve as the first first three land commissioners.

So far, so good.

But Tiberius soon learned that passing the law and enforcing its provisions were two very different things.

Unable to prevent the bill from becoming law, conservatives in the Senate hit back with their own bag of tricks.

This opposition was now led by the Pontifex Maximus, Publius Scipio Nassica, who held from a more conservative branch of the Scipione clan.

Nassica personally possessed far more than 500 Ugera of Augur publicus, so he engineered an insulting blow to the new land commission.

It was the Senate's responsibility to appropriate funds to pay for the men and material necessary to complete the surveying work, which required a small army of secretaries, clerks, surveyors, architects, carts, and mules.

At Nassica's urging, the Senate voted a pittance to cover merely the daily expenses of the commissioners themselves.

This calculated stinginess left Tiberius the captain of a boat with no oars.

It was infuriating, but there was nothing he could do about it.

Shortly after being dealt this blow, one of Tiberius' closest supporters suddenly died, and foul play was suspected.

The increasingly paranoid Tiberius already kept his family surrounded by an informal group of friends and clients who acted as a permanent bodyguard, and this protection now seemed more necessary than ever.

Whether he was just playing to the crowd or genuinely afraid for his life, Tiberius donned mourning garb and brought his children to the assembly where he quote, begged the people to care for them and their mother, saying that he despaired of his own life.

But then fate intervened to alter the course of Roman history.

And as will so often be the case, domestic Roman politics were shaped by events far beyond the shores of Italy.

In this case, the far-off event was the death of King Ataulus III of Pergamum.

Pergamum was a Greek kingdom occupying what is today the Aegean coast of Turkey, and had been allies of Rome for close to a century.

Since King Ataulus III had no sons and believed his death would lead to a bitter power struggle among his potential heirs, he willed his entire kingdom and royal treasury to the people of Rome.

Rome learned about Ataulus' death shortly after the passage of the Lexigraria, and Tiberius himself was among the first to be told of the terms of the will.

Tiberius's father had once served on a senatorial embassy that confirmed the alliance between Rome and Pergamum, and when the envoy bearing King Ataulus' will arrived in Rome, he stayed in the Gracchi home.

One step ahead of his enemies, Tiberius convened the assembly and announced that because Ataulus' will said, quote, let the Roman people be heir to my estate, that both the disposal of the royal treasury and subsequent administration of the new province would be handled by the assembly.

Then Tiberius announced that a portion of King Atalus' royal treasury would be used to fund the work of the Land Commission and even provide startup capital for the new owners.

This bold gambit sent conservatives in the Senate through the roof.

By every right of custom, the Senate enjoyed full discretion over both state finances and foreign policy.

Polybius, a close student of the Republican Constitution, said the Senate, quote, has the control of the treasury, all revenue and expenditure being regulated by it,

and quote, it also occupies itself with the dispatch of all embassies sent to countries outside of Italy for the purpose of settling differences.

The people, he said, quote, have nothing to do with it.

By laying claim to Pergamum, Tiberius was attempting to wrestle both away at the same time.

The Senate met in a furious session to denounce Tiberius as a reckless demagogue aiming to make himself a tyrannical despot.

Soon after, either to retain the legal immunity his office provided or to protect the integrity of the land commission, or both, Tiberius made another shocking announcement.

He was going to run for re-election.

No law forbade a tribune from serving consecutive terms, but the overwhelming force of Mas Maeorum made his bid unprecedented.

To his political enemies, this was ironclad proof that Tiberius planned to make himself a tyrant.

If he controlled the state finances, distribution of property, foreign policy, and claimed the right to permanent re-election, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus would be the king of Rome in all but name.

Unfortunately for Tiberius, his political strength was at an all-time low as the summer elections approached in 133.

During the battles over the Lex Agraria, he had been able to count on a solid block of rural voters to stand with him.

Perhaps it was because harvest was then in full swing that Tiberius had difficulty remobilizing his supporters for another contentious vote.

Just as likely, however, is that conservatives now decided that Tiberius must be denied re-election at all cost.

If they let it be known that they no longer opposed the lexicraria and land redistribution would go forward whether Tiberius was tribune or not, the urgency of the coming election would be undercut, and many voters would stay home.

Without his usual base of supporters, Tiberius turned to the urban population for the votes he needed.

Land redistribution had never been of much interest to the urban plebs, so Tiberius broadened his platform to include further limits on military service, the right to appeal the verdicts of judges, and barring senators from serving on juries.

This last drew one of the great political battle lines of the late Republic, though for the moment, it was an empty suggestion not yet acted upon.

Ever dramatic, Tiberius donned black morning clothes in the lead-up to the election and again went round with his children securing pledges from his supporters to protect them if something were to happen.

The night before the final election, Tiberius slept surrounded by armed bodyguards.

Early the next morning, Tiberius' supporters packed the area near the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill to ensure they controlled the voting space.

Accompanied by bodyguards, Tiberius himself arrived and was greeted by cheers and applause from the crowd.

When opponents of Tiberius arrived, they found themselves unable to push through the pro-Gracon mob.

Prevented from accessing the voting stalls, when the anti-Gracon voters heard the call for the tribes to begin voting, scuffles erupted on the edge of the crowd as opponents tried to push their way in.

The fighting halted the voting.

Meanwhile, the Senate convened for a session in the Temple of Fides, located just around the corner on the capitol line.

Rumors swirled that Tiberius had deposed all the other tribunes and was preparing to assume regal powers.

The consul presiding over the Senate that morning was none other than Mucius Scavola, one of the authors of the Lexigraria.

Nasica and the hardliners in the Senate demanded Scavola do something, but the consul replied that, quote, he would resort to no violence and would put no citizen to death without a trial.

If, however, the people, under persuasion or compulsion from Tiberius, should vote anything that was unlawful, he he would not regard this vote as binding.

This was not good enough for the incensed Nasica, who rose in response and said, quote, let those who would save our country follow me.

Nasica then donned the formal attire of the Pontifex Maximus and put himself at the head of a mob of like-minded senators and clients.

Together they marched to the Temple of Jupiter.

As weapons were not permitted to be carried inside the Pomerium, the sacred city limits, Nasica and his followers armed themselves mostly with table legs and other bludgeons.

Though the coming attack was not premeditated, it was clear they were willing to use force to beat back the mob trying to make Tiberius Gracchus king of Rome.

Meanwhile, up on the rostra, Tiberius was warned about the approaching mob.

Tiberius's men turned and readied for battle, but hesitated when they saw the mob included senators and was led by the Pontifex Maximus himself.

Though the Gracchans started to give way, Nasica's men aggressively pushed and beat the crowd anyway.

Once the shoving and hitting began, Tiberius' supporters naturally fought back, leading to a line of clashes throughout the assembly.

The casualties and the resulting melee were entirely one-sided.

Tiberius' people were unarmed and made easy targets for Nasica's gang.

Trapped in the confined space in front of the Temple of Jupiter, many were trampled underfoot or fell to their deaths off the steep cliffs of the capitol line.

When the dust cleared, 300 people lay dead.

The principal target of the attack was of course Tiberius himself, and it didn't take long for the reactionary senators to locate their prey.

Near the entrance of the Temple of Jupiter, Tiberius tripped over the body of a man who had already fallen, and before he could get up, he was set upon by a fellow tribune and a senator.

Though he was a tribune and allegedly sacrosanct, these two men proceeded to beat Tiberius Gracchus to death with the legs of a bench.

As the historian Appian records, quote, so perished on the capital, and while still tribune, Gracchus, the son of that Gracchus who was twice consul, and of Cornelia, daughter of that Scipio who robbed Carthage of her supremacy.

He lost his life in consequence of a most excellent design too violently pursued, and this abominable crime, the first that was perpetrated in the public assembly, was seldom without parallels thereafter, thereafter, from time to time.

It was one of the bloodiest days in Roman political history, though Plutarch overstates things when he says, quote, this is said to have been the first sedition at Rome since the abolition of royal power to end in bloodshed and the death of citizens.

But at least in living memory, Roman politics had always been waged without resorting to violence.

Now, hundreds of citizens lay dead on the Capitoline Hill.

Whatever one felt about Tiberius Gracchus and his lexicraria, it must have been a shocking sight.

The principal cause of the crisis of 133 was a dangerous game of mutual brinksmanship.

Tiberius had bypassed the Senate, so Octavius vetoed the reading of the bill, so Tiberius shut down all public business.

When Octavius remained intractable, Tiberius deposed him from office, so the Senate denied the land commission money to operate.

So Tiberius seized on the bequeath from Pergamum and then ran for re-election.

All of this culminated with Nassica leading an armed mob to kill 300 people.

In just a few short months, a simple land redistribution bill had escalated to violent massacre.

The Senate made no apologies for the attack.

Tiberius and his dead supporters were denied traditional funeral arrangements and dumped en masse into the Tiber.

This was in itself a shocking affront to tradition.

The Gracchi were still a powerful noble family.

Denying their son a proper burial was fraught with religious and social implications.

But the story was now that Tiberius had been trying to make himself king, the most taboo of political offices, and the Senate determined that they could not afford a funeral becoming a venue for renewing violent revolution.

With all the taboos of Mos Maeorum now breaking down left and right, quote, This was the beginning in Rome of civil bloodshed and of the license of the sword.

The definitive triumph of force was a lesson no one could unlearn.

As the ancient Greek historian Valleus Petricullus later observed, quote: Precedents do not stop where they begin, but, however narrow the path upon which they enter, they create for themselves a highway whereon they may wander with the utmost latitude.

No one thinks a course is base for himself, which has proven profitable to others.

Okay, so that's the end of chapter one.

Then you would turn the page and go on to chapter two, the stepchildren of Rome.

It's pretty good so far.

You're hooked, right?

Well, if you are and would like to follow that new highway whereupon men like Gaius Gracchus, Gaius Marius, and Lucius Cornelius Sulla wandered with the utmost latitude, go to revolutionspodcast.com or the revamped historyofrome.com and find details about how to pre-order.

Recording and sharing this chapter with you all has been a wonderful way to celebrate my 10th anniversary, back among old friends, back where it all started.

Thanks to Public Affairs and HashIT for their amazing support, and hopefully when this book comes out, it will be a success and keep me on track for 10 more years of podcasts and books and whatever other new and interesting opportunities come along.

A few have popped up, some of them are very interesting, and I think you will enjoy them all.

So for God's sakes, pre-order the book.

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