The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic - Arthur Gilman (top 20 books to read txt) 📗

For years the tranquillity of Spain, which lasted from 179 to 153, had been disturbed by wars, and it was not until Scipio was sent thither that peace was restored. That warrior first put his forces into an effective condition, and then laid siege to the city of Numantia, situated on an elevation and well fortified. The citizens defended themselves with the greatest bravery, and showed wonderful endurance, but were at last obliged to surrender, and the town was levelled to the ground, most of the inhabitants being sold as slaves.

The great increase in slaves, and the devastation caused by long and exhaustive wars, had brought about in Sicily a servile insurrection, before the Numantians had been conquered. It is said that the number of those combined against their Roman masters reached the sum of two hundred thousand. In 132, the strongholds of the insurgents were captured by a consular army, and peace restored. The barbarism of Roman slavery had nowhere reached such extremes as in Sicily. Freedmen who had cultivated the fields were there replaced by slaves, who were ill-fed and poorly cared for. Some worked in chains, and all were treated with indescribable brutality. They finally became bandits in despair, and efforts at repression of their disorders led to the open and fearful war. The same year that this war ended, the last king of Pergamos died, leaving his kingdom and treasures to the Roman people, as he had no children, and Pergamos became the “province” of Asia.

Besides this, Rome had the provinces of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, Spain, Gallia Cisalpina, Macedonia, Illyricum, Southern Greece (Achæa), and Africa, to which was soon to be added the southern portion of Gaul over the Alps, between those mountains and the Pyrenees called Provincia Gallia (Provence).

XII.

A FUTILE EFFORT AT REFORM.

One day when the conqueror of Carthage, Scipio Africanus, was feasting with other senators at the Capitol, the veteran patrician was asked by the friends about him to give his daughter Cornelia to a young man of the plebeian family of Sempronia, Tiberius Gracchus by name. This young man was then about twenty-five years old; he had travelled and fought in different parts of the world, and had obtained a high reputation for manliness. Just at this time he had put Africanus under obligations to him by defending him from attacks in public life, and the old commander readily agreed to the request of his friends. When he returned to his home and told his wife that he had given away their daughter, she upbraided him for his rashness; but when she heard the name of the fortunate man, she said that Gracchus was the only person worthy of the gift. The mother’s opinion proved to be correct. The young people lived together in happiness, and Cornelia became the mother of three children, who carried down the good traits of their parents. One of these was a daughter named, like her mother, Cornelia, who became the wife of Scipio Africanus the younger, and the others were her two brothers. Tiberius and Caius, who are known as the Gracchi. Tiberius Gracchus lived to be over fifty years old, and won still greater laurels in war and peace at home and in foreign lands. Cicero says that he did a great service to the state by gathering together on the Esquiline the freedmen who had spread themselves throughout the tribes, and restricting their franchise (B.C. 169). Thus, Cicero thought, he succeeded for a time in checking the ruin of the republic.

[Footnote: The freedmen had been confined to the four city tribes in 220 B.C.]

There was sad need of some movement to correct abuses that had grown up in Rome, and the men destined to stand forth as reformers were the two Gracchi, sons of Cornelia and Tiberius. Their father did not live to complete their education, but their mother, though courted by great men, and by at least one king, refused to marry again, and gave up her time to educating her sons, whom she proudly called her “jewels” when the Roman matrons, relieved from the restrictions of the Oppian law, boastfully showed her the rich ornaments of gold and precious stones that they adorned themselves with. The brothers had eminent Greeks to give them instruction, and grew up wise, able and eloquent, though each exhibited his wisdom and ability in a different way.

Tiberius, who was nine years older than his brother, came first into public life. He went to Africa with his brother-in-law, when the younger Africanus completed the destruction of Carthage, and afterward he took part in the wars in Spain. It is said that, as he went through Etruria on his way to Spain, he noticed that the fields were cultivated by foreign slaves, working in clanking chains, instead of by freemen; and that because the rich had taken possession of great ranges of territory, the poor Romans had not even a clod to call their own, though they had fought the battles by which the land had been made secure. The sight of so much distress in a fertile country lying waste affected Tiberius very deeply, and when he returned to Rome, he bethought himself that it was in opposition to law that the rich controlled such vast estates. He remembered that the Licinian Rogation, which became a law more than two hundred years before this time, forbade any man having such large tracts in his possession, and thought that so beneficent a law should continue to be respected. He told the people of Rome that the wild beasts had their dens and caves, while the men who had fought and exposed their lives for Italy enjoyed in it nothing more than light and air, and were obliged to wander about with their wives and little ones, their commanders mocking them by calling upon them to fight “for their tombs and the temples of their gods,”—

things that they never possessed nor could hope to have any interest in. “Not one among many, many Romans,” said he, “has a family altar or an ancestral tomb. They have fought to maintain the luxury of the great, and they are called in bitter irony the ‘masters of the world’

while they do not possess a clod of earth that they may call their own!”

It was a noble patriotism that filled the heart of Tiberius, but it was not easy to carry out a reform like the one he contemplated. It may not have appeared difficult to re-enact the old law, but we must remember that, during two centuries of its neglect, generations of men had peaceably possessed the great estates, of which its enforcement would deprive them all at once. Was it to be supposed that they would quietly permit this to be done? Was it just to deprive men of possessions that they had received from their parents and grandparents without protest on the part of the nation? Cornelia urged Tiberius to do some great work for the state, telling him that she was called the “daughter of Scipio,” while she wished to be known as the “mother of the Gracchi.”

The war in Sicily emphasized the troubles that Tiberius wished to put an end to, and in the midst of it he was elected one of the tribunes, the people hoping something from him, and putting up placards all over the city calling upon him to take their part.

The people seemed to feel sure that Gracchus was intending to do something for them, and they eagerly came together and voted for him, and when he was elected, they crowded into the city from all the regions about to vote in favor of the re-establishment of the Licinian laws, with some alterations. They were successful; much to the disgust of the aristocrats, [Footnote: Aristocrat is a word of Greek origin, and means one of a governing body composed of the best men (_aristos_, best) in the state. The aristocrats came to be called also optimatos, from optimus, the corresponding Latin word for best.] who hated Gracchus, and thenceforth plotted to overthrow him and his power. For a while, the lands that had been wrongfully occupied by the rich were taken by a commission and returned to the government.

When Attalus, the erratic king of Pergamus, left his estates to Rome, Gracchus had an opportunity to perform an act of justice, by refunding to the rich the outlays they had made on the lands of which they had been deprived. This would have been politic as well as just, but Gracchus did not see his opportunity. He proposed, on the other hand, to divide the new wealth among the plebeians, to enable them to buy implements and cattle for the estates they had acquired.

It was easy at that excited time to make false accusations against public men, and to cause the populace to act upon them, and, accordingly, the aristocrats now stirred up the people to believe that Gracchus was aspiring to the power of king, which, they were reminded, had been forever abolished ages before. No opportunity was given him to explain his intentions. A great mob was raised and a street fight precipitated, in the midst of which three hundred persons were killed with sticks and stones and pieces of benches. Among them was Gracchus himself, who thus died a martyr to his patriotic plans for the Roman republic. [Footnote: The course of Gracchus was not understood at the time by all good citizens; and even for ages after he was considered a designing demagogue. It was not until the great Niebuhr, to whom we owe so much in Roman history, explained fully the nature of the agrarian laws which Gracchus passed, that the world accepted him for the hero and honest patriot that he was.]

Caius Gracchus was in Spain at the time of his brother’s murder, and Scipio, his brother-in-law, was there also. So little did Scipio understand Tiberius, that when he heard of his death he quoted the words of Minerva to Mercury, which he remembered to have read in his Homer, “So perish he who doth the same again!” The next year brother and brother-in-law returned from Spain, but Caius did not seem to care to enter political life, and as he lived in quiet for some years, it was thought that he disapproved his brother’s laws. Little did the public dream of what was to come.

Meantime Scipio became the acknowledged leader of the optimates, and in order to keep the obnoxious law from being enforced, proposed to take it out of the hands of the commission and give it to the senate. His proposition was vigorously opposed in the forum, and when he retired to his home to prepare a speech to be delivered on the subject, a number of friends thought it necessary to accompany him as protectors. The next morning the city was startled by the news that he was dead. His speech was never even composed. No effort was made to discover his murderer, though one Caius Papirius Carbo, a tribune, leader of the opposing party, was generally thought to have been the guilty one.

The eloquence of young Gracchus proved greater than that of any other citizen, and by it he ingratiated himself with the people to such an extent, that in the year 123 B.C. they elected him one of their tribunes. Though the aristocrats managed to have his name placed fourth on the list, his force and eloquence made him really first in all public labors, and he proceeded to use his influence to further his brother’s favorite projects. He was impetuous in his oratory. As he spoke, he walked from side to side of the rostra, and pulled