Last time, we started our retrospective on the Gracchi looking at the elder brother Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and his term as tribune of the plebs in 133 BCE; this week, we’ll wrap up this look by discussing Tiberius’ younger brother Gaius Sempronius Gracchus and his terms as tribune of the plebs in 123 and 122 and then – spoilers – his death in 121.
As noted last time, this series is intended to offset the substantially rosy treatment the Gracchi often get in introductory courses, which for the point of brevity are often forced to omit a lot of the political details of their careers and present them far too simply as proto-progressive reformers. As a result, it is quite intentionally framed as an indictment of both figures, intended to explain why, despite their often postive modern portrayal, they were viewed more negatively at the time, particularly but not exclusively by the Roman elite.
In fact, as we noted last time, the Romans had plenty of reason to believe that Tiberius Gracchus’ reforms were a substantial danger to the political order in Rome. By attempting to hold the tribunate multiple times (a thing that was against custom and at least some of Tiberius Gracchus’ colleagues thought was illegal) and to wield the powers of the office in ways contrary to the mos maiorum (if not the law), that Tiberius threatened to become a sort of tyrant, wielding disproportionate power within Rome’s political system and subverting its nature as a republic into something rather more like a monarchy. It’s not at all clear from our evidence if that belief was correct – our sources cannot read Tiberius’ mind any better than we can – but my point was that it was reasonable to imagine Tiberius Gracchus’ actions aimed to upset the Roman political system and potentially establish a tyranny and he did little to diminish the perception. Finally, we noted that for all of this, Tiberius Gracchus appears to have misdiagnosed the very problem he was trying to solve, with the result that although he could not have known it, all of this political dislocation was unlikely to accomplish very much.
Except, of course, getting Tiberius Gracchus killed, which it did.
Now because of the way these brothers tend to get covered in survey courses – treated together and often at extreme brevity because in a big survey, who has the time? – there’s a tendency for Gaius Gracchus to just end up summarized as ‘second verse, same as the first:’ a good-for-the-poor reform program stymied by the conservative, hidebound and greedy Roman elite, culminating in Gaius’ death in 121. Tiberius Gracchus, as we noted last time, gets a remarkably favorable treatment from our two main sources, Appian and Plutarch, but these significant diverge with Gaius Gracchus. Plutarch remains broadly favorable to the point of appearing to substantially fudge some of the details of Gaius’ career to try to paper over the uncomfortable suggestion that Gaius was, in fact, merely an ambitious man carried away by his ambitions. Appian, by contrast, is far more willing to allow for a negative portrayal of Gaius, even though he clearly thinks Gaius’ ultimate goal of citizenship reform was wise. By contrast, our other sources – often summarized or fragmentary – are almost uniformly negative (e.g. Diod. Sic. 34.25; Livy Per. 60.7, 61.4; Vell. Pat. 2.6.2; Dio 25.85) and harshly so, suggesting that Gaius Gracchus’ perception, at least among Rome’s literate elite, was substantially darker than that of his brother: the dangerous radical to his brother’s well-intentioned but ill-fated reformer.
But if Appian’s verdict on Tiberius Gracchus was that he was killed “on account of an excellent proposal he pursued with violence” then the fact that even our favorable sources note that compared to Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius was prone to vehemence and anger (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 2.2-5) should warn us against minimizing Gaius’ own agency in producing the confrontation that is going to claim his life as well. The irony is that while unlike Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius seems to have correctly identified a problem that needed fixing, Gaius’ more vehement, uncompromising and frankly reckless approach often reads much worse than his brother’s more conciliatory style and Gaius’ role in producing the violent confrontation at the end of his life is far clearer, more intention and more direct.
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By the late second century, Campania was a mix of fully Roman territory (much of it seized from Campanian communities which joined Hannibal during the Second Punic War) and allied territory.
The Aftermath of 133
But before we can get to Gaius Gracchus we need to understand how the events of Tiberius Gracchus’ tribunate and its aftermath are going to set up Gaius Gracchus’ own turn in the spotlight a decade later. Gaius was, after all, ten years his brother’s junior and so there was a significant lag time between their two careers.
First off, it is striking that the response of the Senate after Tiberius Gracchus’ death was mixed. On the one hand, Tiberius Gracchus’ body was flung into the Tiber River as would have been done with infamous criminals (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 20.2; App. BCiv. 1.16) a shocking statement of the Senate’s hatred of the man at this point, though not an unreasonable thing to do if you did, in fact, think that Tiberius had been slain as part of a failed coup to make him king. Some of Tiberius Gracchus’ associates were also prosecuted and others, Plutarch tells us, were banished without trial (which may mean they fled before a trial could take place, a thing you could do in the Roman legal system). Though while Plutarch notes two associates of Tiberius convicted and executed (a Gaius Villius and Diophanes the Rhetorician)1 but equally Gaius Blossius, despite appearing quite unrepentant was apparently acquitted (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 20.4), though Plutarch notes this fellow then went to back an anti-Roman army in the East (Aristonicus’ rising in Asia) so perhaps they should have convicted him.
But what clearly doesn’t happen is an effort to pull out Tiberius Gracchus’ network by the root. Gaius Gracchus isn’t prosecuted and indeed remains one of the three commissioners on Tiberius Gracchus’ land commission. Indeed, as we’ll see, Gaius’ political career appears in no way hindered by Tiberius’ fall. Even more notably Tiberius Gracchus’ land commission is permitted to move forward. Meanwhile, P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio, the architect of the mob that killed Tiberius Gracchus is unceremoniously packed off as part of an embassy to Pergamon in a move that would have probably marked the end of his political career even if he didn’t die in 132 (but he does).
But of course the biggest thing here is that the land commission moves forward and equally it seems to have made something of a mess of things (despite being run by Gaius Gracchus and having political allies like Fulvius Flaccus on it). Appian – who you will recall clearly favors the measure and even fudges his description of it to make it sound more reasonable and traditional than it really was – is clear that the implementation makes a mess of things (App. BCiv. 1.18). It was often unclear who owned a given plot of land which lead to repeated lawsuits and further problems and it appears that the commissioners themselves almost immediately lost the reputation of being impartial adjudicators of these problems, leading to Scipio Aemilianus to suggest shifting the cases to the jurisdiction of the consul, who promptly went on campaign in Illyria to avoid the political problems that would come from actually deciding any of these cases (App. BCiv. 1.19) leading to further gridlock. Further complicating matters, the land had never evidently been fully surveyed, leading to problems assigning and redistributing land, with farmers assigned to unproductive land (or as Appian has it, swamps and ponds!).
More broadly, of course, for reasons we’ve already discussed, there was never going to be a huge amount of land to distribute in any case: the problem wasn’t a vanishing small farmer class, but a growing small farmer class leading to a degree of real land scarcity. Consequently, a land commission of the sort set up by the Lex Sempronia Agraria could only accomplish gains on the margins, even if it was well run which by Appian’s account, it wasn’t.
However the land commission did accomplish one thing: it shortchanged the allies (the socii). As Appian notes (BCiv. 1.19) while the socii weren’t valid recipients of ager publicus under the Lex Sempronia Agraria, they could have their land taken under it if they held more than the allotted amount of ager publicus. Which means that the communities of the socii experienced all of the downsides of the law, but none of the upsides. And while you may be thinking this would only bother the very rich socii, remember that a lot of farmers in the countryside likely got by in part through sharecropping or tenancy arrangements, so even a socius small farmer might find his work disrupted when the Big Man lost a chunk of his land – and yet that socius was not eligible to get any land himself. This was a substantial change in the ‘bargain’ of the Roman alliance system: before the socii had been, so far as we can tell, fully eligible for settlement in new colonial foundations.
That fits into a larger pattern where the socii‘s ‘bargain’ gets progressively worse as compared to citizens over the late second century. When Rome was expanding in Italy, the socii had gotten an equal share of loot and at least some access to the land taken (including ager publicus!) but by the 130s and 120s, Rome’s wars aren’t bringing in loot, they’re bringing in taxes. Recall, for instance, that Tiberius Gracchus was able to fund his land commission by annexing Pergamum (into the province of Asia) because the tax windfall could fund his effort. But whereas the loot of fresh conquests was shared out equally, the tax revenue of the provinces flowed to Rome alone. That problem had likely been building since 168, where the proceeds of the destruction of Antigonid Macedon had been sufficient to end the standard Roman land tax, tributum, permanently – but that may not have suspended the socii‘s own obligations in order to pay their own soldiers (after all, the socii got part of that big single loot infusion, but no residual tax revenue). Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform, creating a benefit for only Roman citizens, paid out out ager publicus which used to be used in common by Rome and the socii and out of tax revenue made this problem worse.
As a result by the 120s, the socii are clearly beginning to push for citizenship. This is actually a fairly big change: Roman citizenship to this point was not always even something the socii wanted – after all, they retained a lot more autonomy internally as allies being subject to their own laws, whereas as Roman citizens, they’d be subject to Roman law. Marcus Fulvius Flaccus (cos. 125) makes the first effort to get a citizenship bill passed, but is stymied by the Senate; Roman citizenship, as we’ve discussed, was radically expansionary compared to other ancient models of citizenship, but the Romans (both elite and the common folk) were evidently pretty skeptical about effectively tripling the size of the citizen body (which would, after all, massively dilute their votes and also substantially raise the competition for office in Rome as socii elites could begin running for high Roman offices).
So this is the context for the career of Gaius Gracchus: the land commission has happened, but didn’t accomplish much to solve the potentially fictive issue it was supposed to solve. Meanwhile, what it has done is exacerbate a new and very real problem in the Roman relationship with the socii which the Senate is loath to address in the way it effectively has to eventually be addressed, by extending the citizenship.
Plutarch and the Early Career of Gaius Gracchus
Gaius Gracchus spend the late 130s and early 120s in the army; he was with Scipio Aemilianus during the Numantine War in 134 and 133, possibly as a military tribune but equally he could have been in the cohors amicorum (‘the cohort of friends’), the gaggle of friends, retainers and associates a Roman general would bring with him on campaign to help him manage the army. He finishes his ten years of military service (required to run for high office; Polyb. 6.19.3) and runs for the quaestorship in 127 (for the year 126) and wins it – little surprise there as there were many quaestors and election for a man of such a distinguished family much has been effectively assured. Still a strong indication that there’s no real effort by the senatorial elite to shut down his career in revenge for Tiberius Gracchus or anything of the sort.
Quaestors, as you may recall, were assigned by lot, with two quaestores in Rome to manage the central treasury and the remaining six each paired off with a praetor or a consul being sent abroad to manage their supplies and finances. Gaius Gracchus was assigned to one of the consuls – a good turn, that, as it offered better chances than being paired with a praetor (and thus more evidence, I’d argue, that no one was trying to sabotage Gaius at this point) – Lucius Aurelius Orestes, who was assigned a command to suppress a rebellion in Sardinia. For 125, Orestes is ‘prorogued’ (his command is extended) and so, as would have likely been typical, Gaius Gracchus’ role as quaestor is also prorogued making him a pro-quaestor (pro quaestore, [acting] ‘for the quaestor,’ since a promagistrate’s power technically derived from their acting in place of the sitting magistrates for the year), still assisting Orestes. For 124, Orestes still isn’t quite done on Sardinia and so is extended yet again; Orestes wants to finish the job and get his triumph (which he celebrates in 122). So Gaius Gracchus is extended again, as would be typical (and not necessarily bad, since Orestes is headed for a triumph, the glory of which would have at least reflected on of Gaius).
And here we get to the first ‘fudge,’ I think, in Plutarch. Plutarch opens his life of Gaius Gracchus with a report from Cicero (Cic. Div. 1.26.56; note also Val. Max. 1.7.6) that good ‘ol Gaius Gracchus was preparing to decline all public offices and live the quiet life at home when the shade of his brother appeared and commanded him to go into public life. For one, I feel the need to note that Plutarch simply egregiously and almost certainly intentionally misquotes Cicero; Cicero simply reports that Gaius said his brother came to him in a dream saying ‘you must perish the same death that I did.’2 whereas Plutarch (C. Gracch. 1.6) embroiders by expanding this line to, “one life is fated for us both and one death in public office on behalf of the people.”3 It’s an amusing little snare, because anyone who knows anything about Cicero’s political views will guess that he does not regard the Gracchi as acting “on behalf of the people,” nor would he necessarily think that was a good thing as compared to acting on behalf of the res publica, the commonwealth. But in this case, we have the text of Cicero (and Plutarch is explicit that this is his reference) and indeed, he says no such thing, so we know that Plutarch here is embroidering a positive spin about championing the interests of the people.
But more broadly, the point of this is to deflect from the implication of what Gaius Gracchus is about to do. Because the actual Gaius Gracchus was clearly ambitious and eager to get his career moving fast: he wants to stand for election as a tribune for 123. But one must stand for election in person and Gaius is in Sardinia assisting Orestes as his pro-quaestor; so Gaius returns early – effectively abandoning Orestes and also his office – to stand for the election. It was a move that, as Plutarch admits, elicited not a little bit of censure in Rome (Plut. C. Gracch. 2.3) though Gaius Gracchus’ remarkable eloquence got him out of the political jam that resulted (including a reprimand from the censors, who were completing the census that year).
The problem Plutarch has, of course, is that Gaius Gracchus’ over-swift return to stand for election might imply a level of unseemly ambition and willingness to put his own career over the good of the state; that wouldn’t do for Plutarch’s literary aim, which demands that Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ careers parallel those of Agis IV and Cleomenes III of Sparta: well-meaning reformers who out of deep virtue and principle confronted the wealthy and complacent and were destroyed for it. Agis and Tiberius are paired because they’re the more conciliatory and caution ones, while Cleomenes and Gaius are paired as the more aggressive ones. But Plutarch’s comparison falls apart if Gaius Gracchus is, in fact, merely an ambitious politician looking to rise rapidly in Rome’s political order, because that can hardly be compared to Cleomenes III, a placed at the top of his society by birth (he’s a hereditary king, after all). So a suitable anecdote (the dream) is found and then carefully ‘reframed’4 to soften the impression that Gaius Gracchus might be a different sort of man than the virtuous if reckless and ill-fated reformer that Plutarch needs to sit oppose to his portrait of Cleomenes III.
Plutarch: never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Likewise, Plutarch presents Gaius Gracchus’ claim to have effectively been ‘stuck’ doing military service for an overlong time uncritically (Plut. C. Gracch. 2.5), but a bit of math suggests that Gaius’ career was moving plenty quickly. Gaius was born probably in 154, so he holds the quaestorship in 126 at the age of 28, two years earlier than what seems to have been the customary (but at this point not legally binding) age of 30. Spending three years in Sardinia would thus have just left him on basically the same political schedule as anyone whose quaestorship was held in suo anno (‘in their own year,’ a phrase meaning to hold an office at the earliest customary age to do so) at age 30. Slower than his brother, who held the quaestorship as the ripe age of 25 (the youngest person we know to have done so), but hardly slow! The customary age for the next major office, the praetorship, is 39, so Gaius Gracchus also hardly needs to rush to the intermediate offices of the tribunate or the aediles on that account. As we’re going to see, it is not at all clear Gaius Gracchus ever intended to cycle out of public office, which is itself a real problem as the Roman political system is predicated on the assumption that elected magistrates complete their year in office and then go back to being private citizens (who are also in the Senate).
In any case, Gaius Gracchus stands for and wins the tribunate for 123 and he comes in storming.
The Tribunates of Gaius Gracchus
And this is the point where things get complicated and hard for many students to keep a handle on, because whereas Tiberius Gracchus had one, relatively easy to explain reform, Gaius Gracchus has a slew of laws he wants to pass.5 The challenge in keeping track is that Gaius Gracchus is reported to have proposed or passed (it’s not always clear what laws he actually got through) a whole mess of changes, the list of which differs in many cases from one source to the next. Trying to figure out what was attempted in what year of his office (he’s tribune in 123 and in 122 and runs but is not elected for 121) is equally difficult.
The traditional way to understand these many, many laws is to frame them as an effort to build a political coalition with the aim of getting enough people – we might honestly stay ‘interest groups,’ given how the laws are set up – behind Gaius Gracchus to enable him to surge over the logjam and pass a citizenship bill. That framing itself owes a lot to how Appian presents Gaius’ proposals (just as he leads into Tiberius’ life by detailing the supposed land and manpower crisis, he leads into Gaius detailing the citizenship crisis); the sources certainly agree that the purpose of Gaius Gracchus’ laws was to break the power of the Senate; in some cases they suggest this was to enable a democracy (of the Greek sort), in others a monarchy, in others just out of spite (Plut. C. Gracch. 5.1; Diodorus 34-5.25; Livy Per. 60.7; Vell. Pat. 2.6.2; Dio 25.85; App. BCiv. 1.21).
The one thing Appian clearly notes was done in Gracchus’ first term was a law providing for the distribution of grain in the city of Rome, the annona which we’ve discussed before. Appian (BCiv 1.21) presents this as a distribution of free grain, but this is clearly an anachronism and our other sources (e.g. Plut. C. Gracch 5.2) correctly note that his law instead provided for the sale of grain at a fixed, below-market price in the city and Livy evidently recorded the precise figure which, though the Livy for this period is lost, survives in its summary, the Periochae: six and one-third asses (presumably per modius). It’s an oddly not-very-round-at-all figure but it comes to just a touch more than 2.5HS per modius, which would be a cheap but not absurdly cheap price. This was, as we’ve noted, a substantial systematization of something – the stabilization of grain prices – which the curule aediles had done earlier in the Republic (Livy 2.9.6, 2.34.2-7, 4.13-16, 10.11.9), but systematized on terms that were quite generous, funded through Rome’s tax revenue. Gaius also seems have advanced in his first year a second land bill like the earlier Lex Sempronia Agraria, trying to restart the distribution of ager publicus, though he will swiftly move to a new strategy.
Beyond these proposals, however, things get sticky. He seems to have at least proposed to have the state provide soldiers’ clothing at state expense (Plut. C. Gracch. 5.1, note also Diod. Sic. 34-5.25), though it’s not clear if this passed. If it did, it didn’t stick, as in the imperial period we continue to see deductions in Roman soldiers’ pay for replacement clothing. He also reportedly tried to expand the Senate by introducing three hundred equites (rich men who had not embarked on careers in public office; Plut. C. Gracch. 5.2-3) into its number (or 600 according to Livy Per. 60) but this seems not to have passed or been implemented.
He did, however, succeed at changing the composition of the juries for the quaestio de repetundis, the Roman court which judges accusations of corruption against Roman provincial governors, shifting the juries to consist of members of the equites rather than senators. That may seem like a ‘good government’ proposal – there’s obviously a problem with having senators judge each other’s corruption – but the problem is that the equites represented a lot of the business interests in the provinces, particularly the companies of tax farmers who were the people who would be bribing governors to do corrupt things, namely allowing the tax farmers themselves (the publicani or public contractors) to overtax the locals to reap higher profits. Giving the publicani that position is a huge favor to them but might not have really improved Roman provincial governance – indeed, Appian claims it had the opposite effect (App. BCiv. 1.22). In the same direction, Gaius Gracchus passed a law for the taxes from the new province of Asia (formerly Pergamum) to be farmed through public contracts leased by the censors (rather than, presumably, collected through the preexisting bureaucracy of the old kingdom). Pergamum/Asia was a remarkably wealthy region, so this created a massive new set of business opportunities for the equites involved in the leasing of public contracts, but once again was hardly a strike for good government.
Gaius also passed laws for the construction of roads and granaries, in part perhaps to facilitate the grain needed for his new distributions, but the sources (e.g. App. BCiv. 23) equally suggest this was in part to put both wealthy public contractors and regular workers under obligation to him. And this is a point that you need to keep in mind in Gaius Gracchus’ flurry of legislation, that the structure of Roman patronage (patrocinium or clientela) meant that each of these proposals in theory established something like a patronage bond between Gaius and the recipients, such that he might, in theory, be able to call on them to support him out of that obligation.
The other major activity Gaius gets up to is proposing and passing laws to found two new colonies in Italy. Another tribune proposes a jumbo-sized colony on the ruins of Carthage (destroyed in 146, you will recall; this is the first Roman colony outside of Italy), which – at least according to Appian – Gaius will enlarge even further beyond what the law originally proposed (App. BCiv. 1.24)
So we can stop for a moment and take stock of these proposals and their targeting, though here it is hard not to be loaded in our language: we could say these proposals were designed to help certain groups or equally that they were designed to curry favor with those groups; both angles may be correct. For the very poor, there was a renewed land commission, the distribution of cheap grain and new colonies (the colonists of which would obviously be drawn from the landless, who would get land allotments in the new settlements). For the assidui, the broad ‘middle’ of Roman society who served in the army, they got a reduction in the cost of service (with free clothing) and likely also benefited from the grain distributions on the margin. For the wealthy urban equites, they got to control the courts which prosecuted governors who enabled their graft, as well as new opportunities for graft in the East.
And the senatorial elite, of course, got worse than nothing. Their role in the courts was diminished. The role of the curule aediles or the Senate in providing food stabilization at Rome was removed. The Senate’s ability to assign specific provinces to specific magistrates was also removed by requiring the Senate to select the provinces prior to the elections.6
And this was all done in a way that undermined the power-sharing structure of the republic. One of the core functions of the republic was its rotation of power and authority between elite Roman politicians: in a society where one’s actions as a magistrate could create patronage bonds, it was important to make sure everyone was rotating in and out of those roles, so that credit and influence was diffused among a larger range of leaders, rather than congealing around just a handful of men or – worse yet – just one man.
But here note that it is Gaius that arranges the grain distributions and Gaius that builds the roads and the granaries and Gaius that founds the new colonies and Gaius that heads up the renewed land commission and Gaius that rearranges the juries. If the measured had passed, it would have been Gaius who minted new members for the Senate, Gaius who paid for soldier’s clothing. The only task in all of this new legislation that Gaius lets fall to anyone else is the leasing of the taxes for the province of Asia, presumably because the five-year structure of tax farming contracts was too inextricably linked to the censors to break. Indeed, Plutarch notes the almost frenetic action as Gaius Gracchus took basically all of these tasks in hand personally (Plut. C. Gracch. 6-7) which you can certainly present, as Plutarch does, as an example of Gaius’ virtue, industry and energy, but equally I think we can understand that approach as fundamentally destabilizing to the power-sharing system of the republic.
Things Fall Apart
Clearly there was going to be a reaction to all of this. But the nature of the reaction to Gaius Gracchus is one of those cases where the ‘second verse, same as the first’ simplification of these two men can be deeply deceptive, because Gaius’ behavior was much more provocative and the Senate’s reaction – at least initially – much more restrained.
Of the flurry of legislation above, probably only the renewed agrarian bill and the grain distribution happens in Gaius’ first tribunate in 123. Gaius opts to stand for the tribunate in 122, taking advantage of a bit of a loophole whereby if there weren’t enough candidates to fill every spot, citizens could ‘write in’ for the extra positions (thus avoiding the can-he-actually-run question that had tripped up Tiberius).7 This was, of course, an incendiary move, but the Senate does not leap to violence and instead lets it happen: Gaius wins another year as tribune and he is even popular enough to pull his preferred candidate for the consulship, Gaius Fannius, through alongside him along with another ally as one of the other tribunes (Marcus Fulvius Flaccus), giving him valuable allies as his flurry of legislation continued (Plut. C. Gracch. 8). Only ten years had passed since the death of Tiberius Gracchus, so many of the senators in 122 would have been senators (albeit far more junior ones) in 133. We’re not told they feared recreated the disaster of the murder of Tiberius Gracchus, but it does seem like not repeating the past is a factor.
It seems to be after this untraditional reelection that the flurry of smaller laws comes from Gaius Gracchus, with the aim being to curry favor with different key constituencies in the run-up to a big push for a law to expand citizenship to the allies.
Now we come to the problem of citizenship expansion. The yearning of the socii for citizenship in the face of the shifting bargain they had with Rome (discussed above) had been recognized as a problem for a few years at this point, but a few factors kept it logjammed and will keep it logjammed until the catastrophe of the Social War (91-87) unjams the issue. On the one hand, while you have at least some Roman politicians who see the danger, it’s clear that both in the Senate but also among the general citizenry, there was a strong constituency that opposed any dilution of their voting power or the privileges of Roman citizenship, which of course at this point including the increasingly large running river of tribute from Rome’s growing empire. At the same time, there was also a political concern: whoever actually did citizenship expansion would be more than doubling the size of the voting body, minting something like 400,000 new voters – new voters who, having received this remarkable favor (beneficium) would be bound by a tie of gratitude and even patronage to the man who made such a favor possible. Politically, even if you recognized that citizenship expansion was necessary, there was a danger to letting any particular influential politician take sole credit for doing it.
And it shouldn’t hard, in that context, to see the danger of letting Gaius Gracchus – who is already running much of the Roman state out of the tribunate – do this thing. We’ll talk about Gaius’ goals in a moment, but I think it has to be conceded that whatever he aimed to do, by the time the fellow was running Rome’s food policy, infrastructure policy, tax policy, jury selection, colonization efforts and finance policy all out of a single office he clearly intended to never give up (he’s going to run again for a third term) there is at least some reason to suspect there is a danger here that Gaius Gracchus aims at a kind of tyranny.
And here I want to stop and clarify how ancient tyranny worked: ancient tyrants did not demolish the apparatus of the state and declare themselves kings. Instead they subverted the state to run its affairs extra-constitutionally: the courts still functioned, the assemblies still met, councils still voted but one man controlled everything through a web of cronies, clients and the threat of force. The Greek world provided dozens of examples of this form of government, so the Romans were quite familiar with the way it functioned. Now Gaius Gracchus hadn’t assembled one of the key ingredients, a band of armed thugs to enforce his will – yet – but he has effectively begun the process of subverting state institutions by amassing extra-constitutional power to himself. He doesn’t need to declare himself a tyrant to be a tyrant; indeed, few tyrants do so declare themselves.
So it isn’t all that surprising that you have a significant body of Roman political elites who want to take the wind out of Gaius Gracchus’ sails before he’s amassed so much power that it becomes impossible.
Instead of violence, Gaius Gracchus’ political opponents decide to beat him at his own game. They pick their own tribune, Marcus Livius Drusus (cos. 112) and have him set out an even more generous version of Gaius Gracchus’ proposals. Where Gaius Gracchus wants to hand out ager publicus but have its holders pay a rent, Livius proposed to do so without even the rent. Gaius Gracchus proposed two new colonies; Livius proposed twelve. And whereas Gaius faced the resistance of the Senate, Livius of course had their support. Crucially, Livius’ proposals left the implementation of his proposals to other Romans, which as Plutarch notes, made him seem more honest and public-spirited than Gaius Gracchus, who insisted that he and he alone implement his proposals and reap all of the credit (Plut. C. Gracch. 10.1). Meanwhile, Livius starts blocking Gaius Gracchus’ less generous proposals.8
However, when Gaius Gracchus proposed to extend citizenship to the allies, Livius parried with a much more limited proposal, an extension of the Roman citizen’s symbolic immunity to being beaten or whipped in military service to the allies – Roman citizen-soldiers were instead struck with a flexible vinecord stick for minor infractions or instruction which became the centurion’s badge of office; the symbolic significance here is that whips and rods were a thing with which to beat slaves; this proposal may have passed, but it doesn’t seem like any of Livius’ other generous proposals are actually implemented. I think it is entirely fair to regard Livius’ tribunate as essentially one big political ‘dirty trick,’ albeit one well within the rules of the political system (and one which Gaius might have defused by simply backing Livius’ proposals, had he been willing to share the credit for basically anything).
Livius’ effort clearly worked, however, and the wind started to come out of Gaius’ sails. To make matters worse, he has quite a bit of bad luck: the new colony at Carthage already proposed needed to be set up and the tribunes drew lots to see who would go and see to it; Gaius drew the short straw and so at some point in 122 has to leave the city for seventy days to superintend the new colony (Appian represents this as an intentional decision of the Senate (App. BCiv 1.23, but Plutarch says it was by lot, C. Gracch. 10.2). Worse yet, the omens about this colony were bad: a storm scattered the new boundary markers and disrupted the sacrifices for the new foundation and there was a report that the markers themselves had been carried off by wolves (Plut. C. Gracch. 11; App. BCiv. 1.24). For the Romans, who believe their own religion, that sort of thing reflects badly on Gaius Gracchus and further dented his popularity.
Gaius Gracchus returns to Rome and our sources here are, to be frank, a bit confusing on the timeline of late 122 and early 121, which is annoying because the timeline really matters. Appian gives the impression that affairs moved very quickly, with Gaius returning to Rome straight into an assembly convened to decide if the colony at Carthage should go ahead (App. BCiv. 1.24-5), while Plutarch notes that the explosion is slower in coming: Gaius has time to return to Rome, stand for the tribunate of 121 and lose (Plut. C. Gracch. 12.4-5), for the consular elections to take place and for the new consuls, including Lucius Opimius to come into office; the Periochae seem to confirm Plutarch’s more expanded timeline (Livy Per. 61.4). That said, we might imagine this to have still proceeded pretty rapidly: the elections (in which Gaius Gracchus claimed fraud) in early winter and Opimius’ motions to repeal some of Gaius’ laws coming quick perhaps in January, which precipitates the explosion.
What is clear is that Gaius Gracchus’ popularity was waning. His citizenship expansion bill is defeated (either before he leaves for Carthage, while he was away or right when he came back) and when he ran for another term as tribune he lost (he claimed fraud, because of course he did, Plut. C. Gracch. 12.4, who avoids rendering a judgement). The new magistrates – notably Opimius – were evidently hostile to him, which I think ought to suggest Gaius may have actually lost and popular opinion really had turned against him.
Gaius responds by rallying his supporters and it is clear that some of them came surreptitiously armed; Plutarch uses συστασιάζω, “to band together seditiously”9 to describe participation (Plut. C. Gracch. 13.2) and it is worth remembering this is coming from sources that are generally favorable. At the gathering, Quintus Antyllius – for Plutarch, one of Opimius’ men making an insulting gesture, for Appian just a regular plebian who reaches out to give Gaius a comforting gesture that someone misread (Plut. C. Gracch. 13.3-4; App. BCiv 1.25)10 – is knifed to death by one of Gaius Gracchus’ supporters, reporting with a stylus converted into a concealed weapon, so as to sidestep Roman laws against bringing weapons into the sacred boundary of the city. Both sources agree that Gaius didn’t intend the killing and was distressed by it, though to be fair he did gather a surreptitiously armed mob in the city at a high state of fervor
Gaius Gracchus and Fulvius Flaccus initially try to win over the crowd in the forum, but this is unsuccessful – I mean, their partisans did just murder a man – and they instead head back to their homes with their supporters, the assembly itself having been broken up by rain. The following day, Opimius summons the Senate and the Senate calls both Gaius and Fulvius to attend and give an account of themselves. Instead, Fulvius arms his followers and seizes the Aventine; Appian represents this as Gaius and Fulvius together, Plutarch represents this as Fulvius the hothead leading and Gaius being pulled in his wake. I think here as elsewhere, we need to be wary of Plutarch’s embroidery, which is on fully display in this moment of high moral drama. The rest of our sources agree with Appian that Gaius Gracchus makes the decision here to attempt a coup: Diodorus (34.28a) speaks of deciding to overcome his opponents by force, the Periochae (61.4) gives no mention of Fulvius but says Gaius occupied the Aventine with an armed mob and while they don’t give us new details, the overall judgements of Dio (25.85) and Velleius Paterculus (2.6) are both harsh, treating Gaius as a seditious demagogue rather than a well-meaning but ill-fated reformer.
Plutarch thus portrays Gaius Gracchus in this moment as hesitating and conciliatory, but none of the other sources even remotely follow him on that point and frankly I think Plutarch is not to be trusted here. It is a better story of Gaius Gracchus is assailed by conscience and uncertainty in this moment – that’s surely how you’d write the HBO series – but that doesn’t mean it happened. According to Appian, Gaius and Fulvius Flaccus went up on the Aventine, fortified themselves in the Temple of Diana and only then – rather than coming themselves – sent Fulvius’ son Quintus as an ambassador to negotiate with the Senate, which insisted they lay down their arms and face an inquiry. They refuse.
And at this point, with an armed band having seized a large section of the city (the Aventine Hill), which it had fortified and from which it could menace the rest of the city, Opimius and the Senate now do exactly what you’d expect: they raise what military force they can and storm the hill.
It’s clear the bloodshed was considerable, both during what seems to have been a brief street battle – with real weapons this time. Afterwards, as Opimius offered a reward for both Gaius Gracchus and Fulvius Flaccus’ heads, but also captured and later executed many of their supporters. Gaius is able to flee and fight his way over the Tiber River, but unable to escape pursuit, he has one of his slaves, still with him, end his life. Plutarch claims some 3,000 Roman citizens were caught in the carnage (Plut. C. Gracch. 18.1), while Appian notes that after the killing a ritual purification – a lustration – had to be performed to cleanse the city (App. BCiv 26).
The Dust Settles
Needless to say, Opimius comes off of all of this, whatever one thinks of Gaius Gracchus, looking like a monster for all of the bloodshed and that seems to have been true at the time. He built a new temple to Concordia (Concord), ordered by the Senate, which was evidently not well recieved by the people (Plut. C. Gracch. 17.6). He was prosecuted the following year but successfully defended himself that he was merely following the Senate’s instructions. Opimius is packed off to Numidia in 116 to head a commission overseeing the inheritance of that kingdom and one cannot help but detect shades of Scipio Nasica being packed off out of Rome after Tiberius Gracchus death; in any case, Opimius’ managing of the commission was so corrupt (he was easily bribed by Jugurtha) that he was convicted and exiled (Plut. C. Gracch. 18.1) as a result.
The legacy of the Gracchi in Roman thought remained complex. As noted, our main sources are generally favorable, at least to their intent, though Appian disapproves of their methods. Plutarch is quite clearly and intentionally trying to spin a positive narrative of the two for the purpose of his biographies, which are about creating interesting comparisons of famous lives for the purpose of moral instruction. In at least certain quarters in Rome, the Gracchi received something approaching Greek-style hero cult (Plut. C. Gracch. 18.2), so they were clearly fondly remembered by someone, but it is striking that the verdicts of some of our other sources are so harsh on Gaius.
Even more than Tiberius Gracchus, the problem of Gaius Gracchus’ motives looms over how one thinks about his actions, but to be frank, I think the model of the honest reformer carried away by events fits Gaius even more poorly than it fits Tiberius. For one, breaking the power of the Senate and the traditional power-sharing structure of the Republic was clearly one of Gaius Gracchus’ goals and several of his proposals appear to have functionally no other purpose. Diodorus suggests that he may have intended to set up a democracy (Diod. Sic. 34.25), while Velleius explicitly raise the possibility that he aimed to set of a tyranny (Vel. Pat. 6.2). The fact that even Plutarch admits that the structure of Gaius Gracchus’ laws – wherein Gaius Gracchus got to spend all of the money, get all of the power and take all of the credit (Plut. C. Gracch. 10.1) – seemed dishonest at the time inclines me towards the latter.
And while the brothers are often treated together, it is striking that the sources are often much more forgiving of Tiberius than Gaius and it isn’t hard to see why: the violence of 133 can be understood as a moment of high political tensions gone wrong through misunderstanding and rushes to judgement. By contrast, Gaius Gracchus, when he had lost at the ballot box, gathered an armed mob and occupied part of the city. Perhaps he would have described this action as merely being one aimed at self-preservation (Julius Caesar would use the same excuse when he marched on Rome), but refusing to submit one’s self to a court of law or the broader political process is the act of a tyrant and while Opimius’ response went too far, it is striking that Opimius employs only votes – not violence – until Gaius and his supporters themselves take up arms and spill blood. The Senate, led by P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio initiated the violence of 133; the Gracchan supporters initiated the violence of 121.
Zooming out a little further, while the Gracchi emerge as folk heroes after their deaths (Plut. C. Gracch. 18.2) it’s not clear to me their reforms actually solved any problems in the long-term. As noted, the Gracchan land commissions were predicated on a fundamental, if honest, misunderstanding of the nature of the problem of land scarcity in Roman Italy and so despite vigorous application never seem to have accomplished very much. Instead, this problem will eventually be resolved, to the degree it is, in the first century and beyond, by the settlement of veterans outside of Italy. In that sense, the only guy who stumbles on a solid, long-term solution to anything in this entire mess is Gaius Rubrius (trib. 122) who proposes the colony at Carthage (which does, in the event, end up being permanent).
Gaius Gracchus had, of course, identified a real problem: the pressure building up behind the demand of the socii for citizenship. But Gaius Gracchus’ laws made this problem worse not better. For one, of course, the fact that the last guy who tried this ended up maybe doing an armed coup was hardly going to endear the Senate to the next attempt. But more critically, Gaius Gracchus’ laws further destabilized the bargain with the allies. Tiberius Gracchus’ land commission – which could seize land from socii but not give it to them – started this, but Gaius makes it worse. Now there was cheap grain, but only for citizens. Potentially new colonies, but now, it seems, only for citizens. Possibly free military clothing, but only for citizens. New opportunities for profit (and graft), but in contracts let out in the city of Rome, judged by juries of Romans. And all of this was paid for out of the expanding revenues of taxes from Rome’s provinces, a revenue stream that was as much the product of the valor of the socii as of the Romans, but in which the socii shared not at all. Moreover, in subsequent decades, Gaius’ programs will themselves make it harder to expand citizenship, because he’s created expensive new benefits for Roman citizens which the citizenry will be loath to share: if expanding the franchise means sharing the cheap grain or new lands with the socii, it might very well mean less for Roman citizens. Meanwhile, the Gracchan land reforms had deeply disadvantaged the allies and future efforts to buy in Rome’s lower classes with promises of land distribution will fuel the explosion of the Social War in 91.11
In a sense, Gaius Gracchus has recognized the time bomb ticking in Roman Italy and in an effort to defuse it, has instead accelerated its detonation.
Meanwhile, it is certainly the case that Gaius Gracchus’ example is a negative one for Rome. Weakening the Senate will not produce a democratic Rome, after all, but a monarchy under Julius Caesar and later Augustus. Tribunes acting in the same manner as Gaius Gracchus – Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Publius Sulpicius Rufus, in particular – continue to destabilize the republic in damaging ways.12 The Roman Republic functioned not based on a written constitution, but through the observance of the mos maiorum, a customary form of government which both Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus repeatedly ran roughshod over in the pursuit of their own ambition: even less scrupulous men would learn from their example. It is not an accident that when monarchy does finally return to Rome, the domestic powers of the emperor will be represented as tribunicia potestas – the powers of the tribune. Powers that the Gracchi effectively created in precedent by smashing the tribunate through all of its customary limits.
All of that said, we can dismiss the notion of the Gracchi as purely righteous reformers killed by a foolish, hidebound and greedy Roman Senate. Instead, while some of the Gracchi’s attempted reforms were well-meaning (if potentially misguided) and others clearly necessary, the impression of their contemporaries that they might be aiming for something like lawless tyranny was hardly unfounded. The extreme violent reaction of the Senate, I think, clearly made things worse in both cases and is well deserving of censure, but that shouldn’t entirely conceal the fact that the Gracchi really may have represented a threat to the stability of the Roman Republic. We cannot read the minds of the Gracchi and so we can never really know if they set out to try to use the tribunate to establish something like a back-door tyranny (or were just so spectacularly ambitious that they ended up on that path without fully knowing it was where their ambition was taking them), but we can know that the overweening ambition of the Gracchi provides the damaging template for what is to come and served to push the Roman Republic not further on the road to democracy, but down the road that will lead to a reborn Roman monarchy under the emperors.
Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus may not have known they were hammering the first nails into the Roman Republic’s coffin, but hammer them they did and the nails remain to caution us to swing our hammers more carefully at problems real or imagined.13
- The latter a Greek resident non-citizen and close friend of Tiberius Gracchus; his non-citizen status may explain the harsher treatment.
- quam vellet cunctaretur, tamen eodem sibi leto, quo ipse interesse esse pereundum, “However much he might wish to delay, nevertheless he [Gaius] must perish that same death that he [Tiberius] had.”
- οὐκ ἔστιν ἀπόδρασις, ἀλλ’ εἷς μὲν ἡμῖν ἀμφοτέροις βίος, εἷς δὲ θάνατος ὑπὲρ τοῦ δήμου πολιτευομένοις πέπρωται. “There is no escape, but one life is fated for us both and one death in public office on behalf of the people.”
- Read: Misquoted. Again, Plutarch almost certainly has and certainly can read Cicero’s original text, so this is hardly an accident.
- In truth, of course, in a classroom environment you are almost never going to get into the granularity of Gaius Gracchus’ time as a tribune. Even in my Rome survey which is just Rome and also about 70% focused on the Republic as compared to the Empire (we barely discuss Rome before 509), Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus together get one roughly hour long lecture. There is absolutely no time to get into these guys’ careers in that kind of detail, so I drop a note that both men were quite ambitious and move on to their years as tribunes. In my ancient Mediterranean World survey, the entire period from 146 to 79 is a single lecture so Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus must share the spotlight with Scipio Aemilianus, Gaius Marius and P. Cornelius Sulla. I really cannot stress enough how compressed any kind of introductory undergraduate survey has to be, by its very nature.
- Popular Roman politicians will subvert this by going to an assembly to get laws passed to assign their provinces.
- It was, I should note, at this point settled by the career of Scipio Aemilianus – twice elected consul and ineligible to run both times – that once the people had elected someone, it did not matter if they were a legal candidate or not, the vote of the assembly was sovereign and held.
- I find it striking that, at least in the sources, it never seems to have occurred to Gaius to back Livius’ proposals and then ensure they were actually implemented, which to me seems to suggest that by this point the goal is not actually achieving any particular political program, but building a movement – either to achieve citizenship extension or just for the greater glory of Gaius Gracchus.
- Literally “coming together for stasis.”
- Plutarch is anxious to blame Antyllius for his own death and to be frank I do not find that particularly compelling. Plutarch emphasizes this fellow as lowly and a mere servant – the sort of person who ought not upbraid a politician – but Rome is a republic at this point and even the plebs do, in fact, have the right to upbraid politicians.
- This argument in particular is made by H. Mouritsen, Italian Unification (1998).
- Which does not make Sulla’s response correct or reasonable. One of these days, we’re going to treat Sulla here too, but the short version is that Sulla is every bit the monster of his public reputation and his ‘reforms’ were both radical in nature rather than restorative and at the same time poorly thought out and implemented, doing even more damage on top of all of the murder Sulla did.
- To be entirely fair, P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus could well be argued to have driven the first nail himself, only slightly earlier than they.
Because I haven’t done this in my decades of interneting: first! I hope I’m first anyway. And no, this isn’t because I’ve been salivating for the continuation of this series and have been refreshing the website all day….
While I have this platform: is anyone else struggling with liking comments? Mine very rarely of the time, and often come with a popup window that briefly appears and then closes itself. (I’m using Opera if that’s part of it.)
Back when I first started following OGP, I could like posts, though it always took two click, the first producing a brief popup window as you describe. But the second click worked. But perhaps a year or so ago this stopped working. The brief popup still shows up on the first click, but the second click does nothing, nor does a third or fourth click.
Firefox on Win10 here.
In my case the popup window only appears on the first time I like a comment and it afterwards mentions ‘Liked by you’ behind the star.
However, I don’t know whether those likes ‘stick’, a few times I had the impression they were gone when I had visited the page a second time.
Fascinating. I didn’t know much about the Gracchi outside of like a line in high school, and to be honest didn’t have a huge amount of interest, but this was fascinating. Don’t really have much to say, other than I absorbed a lot here.
Since I’m here early, starting a typo thread!
Couple of uses of “diffuse” as a verb where “defuse” is probably intended (including an explicit bomb metaphor)
Extraneous “both”: “It’s clear the bloodshed was considerable, both during what seems to have been a brief street battle – with real weapons this time.”
Both “as” and “but” in this sentence don’t clearly refer to anything: “Afterwards, as Opimius offered a reward for both Gaius Gracchus and Fulvius Flaccus’ heads, but also captured and later executed many of their supporters.”
“we might honestly stay ‘interest groups,’”
ITYM “say”
“We’re not told they feared recreated the disaster of the murder of Tiberius Gracchus”
ITYM “recreating”
All the other typos I managed to spot throughout the post.
“despite their often postive modern portrayal” – positive.
“By attempting to hold the tribunate multiple times…, that Tiberius threatened to become a sort of tyrant” – is “that” actually doing anything in this sentence?
“but these significant diverge” – significantly diverge, I presume?
“more intention and more direct.” – more intentional.
“leading to Scipio Aemilianus to suggest” – the first “to” appears unnecessary.
“who promptly went on campaign in Illyria” (a campaign? Not 100% certain here.)
“For 124, Orestes still isn’t quite done on Sardinia” – in Sardinia?
“would have at least reflected on of Gaius” – not sure about this “on of”.
“because they’re the more conciliatory and caution ones” – cautious ones.
“can hardly be compared to Cleomenes III, a placed at the top of his society” – what is this “a” doing here?
“that Plutarch needs to sit oppose to his portrait of Cleomenes III.” – sit opposite to?
“who held the quaestorship as the ripe age of 25” – at the.
“If the measured had passed” – the measures.
“Gaius who paid for soldier’s clothing.” – soldiers’.
“was too inextricably linked to the censors to break. ” – for the censors?
“there was a danger to letting any particular influential politician” – in letting?
“which of course at this point including the increasingly large running river of tribute” – included the.
“And it shouldn’t hard” – shouldn’t be hard.
“reporting with a stylus converted into a concealed weapon” – retorting?
“at a high state of fervor” – no period.
“which is on fully display” – which is fully on display
“It is a better story of Gaius Gracchus is assailed” – story if?
“evidently not well recieved by the people: – received
“after Tiberius Gracchus death” – probably Gracchus’ death?
“while Velleius explicitly raise the possibility” – raises the possibility?
The use of “on campaign” is a normal jargon construction, but “on a campaign” would mean the same thing in this context.
I would say “idiom” rather than “jargon.” “On campaign” is one of a small set of English phrases utilizing the preposition plus noun without article structure, like “at home,” “in jail,” “on call” etc. “On a campaign,” “at a home,” “in a jail” etc. would in each case mean something slightly different. These small linguistic idiosyncrasies are what makes it difficult to speak other languages really fluently.
Yeah there’s almost something like an additional state of active ‘being’ when you compare ‘on X’ to ‘on an X’, or perhaps an additional connotation of ownership maybe?
‘In jail’ implies you are incarcerated. ‘In a jail’ implies you are visiting but free to leave. ‘At home’ implies it is your home. ‘At a home’ implies it isn’t your home. ‘On campaign’ implies to me that campaigning is something you envisage as part of who you are, moreso than ‘on a campaign’. Sort of like ‘he be walking round the block’ in African-American Vernacular English implies a habitual element compared to ‘he’s walking round the block’.
Huh, or does it just imply that you have no intention (or capability) to leave it? If you’re ‘in jail’ you cannot leave. I would say I’m ‘at home’ in the context of letting someone know that I’m informing someone where I’ll be for a while. Would ‘on campaign’ imply that he has no intention of stopping campaigning in the foreseeable future.
Isn’t linguistics fun 😉
One more typo I did not spot earlier:
> Gaius Gracchus spend the late 130s and early 120s in the army; he was with Scipio Aemilianus during the Numantine War in 134 and 133 – should be spent.
To add something extra to this comment – I think everyone reading this would find it worth knowing that, in a welcome change from this period of history being generally unrepresented in fiction, there actually IS a video game devoted to that exact war, called Songs of Steel: Hispania!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_zdlRGuOAw
It’s been out for nearly a year now. Haven’t played it myself (yet), but the (rather small) number of people who did seem to like it, according to user reviews.
“election for a man of such a distinguished family much has been effectively assured”
-> must have been
Are you planning a series on the fall of the Roman Republic, and the “fall” of the Empire? Because this series on the Gracchi shows a very different reaction than we saw with Marius, Sulla, the two triumvirates and finally Augustus. While there was very clearly violent reactions against some of the Roman Big Men of the first century BC, the reaction doesn’t appear to be nearly as systemic as that against the Gracchi. Was that because the institutions themselves were fracturing, the Big Men were behaving differently such that they weren’t unifying virtually everyone against them, or some combination of Roman mores growing accustomed to single man rule?
I remember Prof. Devereaux saying, in one of his earlier blogs about the fall of the Republic, something which I think provides at least part of the reason you are looking for. Namely that, after decades of civil war and bloodshed, the Roman people were just *tired* and willing to accept anything so long as it made the killing stop. Which makes sense to me. Very few people are going to choose idealism about their preferred government over the cold hard reality of “please no more dying”, if it comes down to it.
Ironically enough, this post, like the last, also supports what Aristotle said
since he’s tackling a problem caused by too much peace: lack of loot to give to allies.
So a lack of external enemies gave them civil war and then they were so tired of the war that came home that they gave up their government to stop it.
The Seleucid/Parthian/Sassanid empire was always there to be fought and looted. Though I suspect this may have required (or at least greatly benefited from) a change to Roman doctrine, namely the ability to assign multiple magistrates (and hence field armies) to a single provincia. (Or some approximation to this, e.g. preemptively dividing the empire into multiple provincia i.e. operational theaters, where each can have one army assigned.)
Perhaps less interesting an option, but bullying the barbarians to the north, sweeping out their existing Big Men and — accounting for the lesser agricultural productivity — setting up Roman colonists as moderate-scale Sizeable Men was also available.
Much less probable expansion, but Herodotus wrote that a pharaoh (Necho II) sent some phoenicians down the Red Sea and they returned via the Pillars of Heracles, so in principle some Romans could have made an attempt to establish Colonia Libya Antipoda.
Of course, Rome wouldn’t have had a workable answer to the question of how to govern an empire extending from the Straits of Denmark to the Straits of Hormuz, never mind any exclaves thrown beyond the borders of the Ecumene.
I suspect it was already out to its limit as it was.
And a foe you can’t incorporate is not much good because the foe will not be able to build up as much loot between campaigns.
I think the biggest distinction is that Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Crassus and Caesar were consuls with armies, not tribunes with mobs. While they took some pages out of the Gracchi’s playbook, they possessed not just military power, but also the political legitimacy that the Gracchi had lacked.
In particular, the First Triumvirate could (somewhat) plausibly claim the sanction of mos maiorum. Having a handful of distinguished consulares guiding the Senate and People was very traditional after all, and while they exercised predominant power, it wasn’t absolute; their opponents continued to thwart some legislation and win some consular elections.
Oh brother do I have some bad news for you about Tribunes with mobs….Clodius and Milo took it further than the Gracchi, if such a thing even seems possible giving Bret’s framing.
By the time we get to people marching on Rome the consequences for failure in elections (or *success* in elections, or just showing up for election) were already just shy of death, if that. Although Sulla and Marius do deserve “credit” for really entrenching that particular step. Caesar and his fellow Triumvirs was actually extremely tame in comparison to Sulla, quite clearly as a stratagem. The second Triumvirate would not be nearly as tame, and from there it rapidly spiraled into monarchy.
I think there’s also something to be said for how none of them seemed to have proposed anything as radical as what the Gracchi brothers were trying to do (either because they didn’t focus their agendas through such popular concessions or because some of the norms had shifted in the intervening decades to make certain proposals of land distribution less radical in context).
It’s funny to me that the kind of prorogued office that Gaius seems to have complained about will also prove to be a major part of what allows several of these to accrue the kind of military power that they’ll use to enforce their will over the Republic. Of course, his own office was not nearly so powerful as a proconsul or propraetor, and the context for how and why that is done is still different enough to not make it as much an opportunity to build authority. Still, there’s a comparison between the principle of him not liking it because it keeps him away from political opportunities and then for later ones it lets them become so independently powerful that they can essentially just bulldoze those opportunities.
I suppose that found its logical conclusion in Augustus, able to use his inherited auctoritas over Caesar’s followers and the crisis created by Mark Antony’s attempt to pull some of what had become a few standard strongman moves (as well as an apparent severe miscalculation by Cicero) to basically destroy any pretence of following the mos maiorum and just skip the line direct to consul through naked use of force. And then leverage that and an astute common cause with Antony against the mutual threat of Caesar’s killers, to provide himself with the breathing room to create the network of cronies that would so embed his brand of tyranny that he became de facto monarch.
Heh, looking at it now, it’s funny how Augustus and Antony contrasts with Marius and Sulla. The latter had Marius fiercely try to keep Sulla from campaigning in the east, with the wealth, glory, and power that would entail, and so invited back the destruction of his followers. Whereas Octavian might be proposed to have allowed Antony to have at it against eastern enemies he could not win, allowing him to be his own worst enemy while the future emperor stays home to administer problems and build popularity and develop a war of words to cast his opponent’s eastern ventures in the worst light possible.
And so Augustus gets to make Antony out to be such a subversive and deviant that defeating him makes the guy the saviour of Rome (facilitated by popular exhaustion with the infighting), and his tyranny can depart a bit from something like what Gaius Gracchus attempted with a veneer of righteousness and salvation.
Another point is Gaius seems to have been fairly impatient- trying to push his agenda through as a Tribune- while the Triumvirate were of course Consuls, so their actions were less of a threat to the other established politicians because the Triumvirates were already at the stage that’s traditionally the culmination of a successful political career in Ancient Rome. Meaning that Ceaser et al would have had much more auctoritas to persuade people to go along with them. (And the Senate was at a low ebb of it’s own auctoritas too, after a few too many bungled decisions, which wouldn’t have helped.)
I think it’s a pretty common thing in political systems for the reaction to norms-breaking to taper off with multiple attempts. The outrage and investment in preventing this from happening again is strongest the first time round, and then with every further attempt, it becomes harder to rally people around the idea of “This should not be happening”. The US political system with its strong federalism provides loads of examples of this – the first state to pass some horrific law gets massive attention and all the lawsuits. But once it’s ten states doing it, they barely even get headlines in the newspapers any more.
And the unwritten mos maiorum of the Roman Republic is even more vulnerable to this. Once such tradition-breaks have happened a few times, they have become tradition and business as usual themselves in the public perception.
Well the Marian/Sullan war was absolutely as bad as anything happening to the Gracchi, and they fully and gleefully purged their enemies when possible on both sides. Thousands of citizens were murdered, and the Sullan purges were a psychological scar that shows up throughout the rest of the Republic. There was absolutely a systemic reaction.
However Caesar in particular successfully cultivated a “vibe” of being magnanimous in victory, which helped simmer down tensions at the end of his civil war…with some exceptions. The fact he didn’t purge his enemies was a stratagem that very nearly worked, and did work to give him both legitimacy, popular, and military support. Ultimately his senatorial enemies (and allies!) killed him, but it was a near thing. Not that he was purely benevolent or conciliatory or anything-he held a triumph all but explicitly declared over his fellow Romans after all! Multiple times!-but he really did refrain from purging his enemies.
The later triumvirs went back to Sulla style mass purges. The violence and devastation of the civil war after Caesar’s death really dwarfs anything else-somewhere between 30-40 legions met at Philippi, and the battle was not decided by careful maneuver but by basically smashing the two fronts into each other until one broke. The casualties were horrific. Even Pharsalus, the final battle between Caesar and Pompey, only involved maybe 16 legions, many at less than half strength, and it’s highly probable that the deaths were much lighter relative to the size of the armies too.
It neatly ties into the thesis that we see a cycle or two of mass violence, a specific reaction against it, even worse mass violence, and finally the system breaking under the horrific strain as people just give up if it means peace.
I think it’s rather telling that the best interpretation of Gaius Sempronius Gracchus is that he so utterly lost control over his followers that they committed treason on mass rather than accept he’d lost. He was what, 32, 33? Even if you accept some tenuous logic that he needed to be the one to pass the reforms, he had decades of service to do so under the normal senatorial tract.
I also wonder that there wasn’t a political solution to the issue of citizenship expansion giving whomever actually proposed it too much power. Couldn’t the senate have just, I don’t know, carted out some ancient and venerable senator who was at the end of his life to act as a safe figurehead? If the guys gonna keel over in a few years it’s not exactly a threat to let him receive credit as a capstone to a life of service. It’s like how modern parties will do the reverse and let some soon to be retiree vote against the party line when they want to appear to be for something but don’t actually want to win.
Best as in most favorable to him, to be clear.
I’ve thought something similar when mentioned in earlier posts on this blog. Or, if there are worries about a family benefiting, maybe find some way to split the citizenship up into several laws that can be passed by several different people, to dilute the benefits and/or make clear it is a collective thing.
It eventually did get broken up into multiple parts by virtue of the social war causing citizenship to be rolled out in 2-3 parts (2 major legislative movements with many political points of clarification). But waiting until the last minute meant that the people who got credit were military strongmen, who had armies and were young enough to use them; I elaborate elsewhere, but basically every major Roman political figure who later matched on Rome was in some way a beneficiary of that political windfall.
Dividing the credit in less forced circumstances might still have worked, though. Things were already pretty far gone by the social war, and settling problems peacefully has a momentum just as using violence does.
Yeah, it seems to me that the obvious situation to this problem is to do citizenship expansion piecemeal: have a number of praetors and consuls over several years each put forward a bill to extend citizenship to some specific tribe or city of socii, with a network of “I back your citizenship bill this year and you back mine next year” deals to provide the necessary political backing to get the individual bills through the assemblies. Since each individual politician is only minting a few thousand new voters, the political windfall gets spread out over a bunch of different figures who can all balance each other out to a degree. And as an added bonus, doing citizenship expansion in small bits might make it easier to get the individual bills through the assemblies.
The Romans were not stupid, so very likely there is some reason I am not seeing why this wouldn’t have worked, but it seems like it would have resolved the problem handily.
Even if you formally divided it up or gave a retiree the credit, everyone will know who was the de facto mover behind it. This is a problem of social prestige and standing, you can’t get around with legalistic technicalities.
Almost all the changes in the way the Roman republic worked were made by very progressive, often accidental, steps inevitably framed as a return to an older tradition. An indisputably new, abrupt, and major change to the system was simply not something that Roman politics, with its highly ambitious and competitive elite, was equipped to do. If there was a simple solution that appealed to the mores of the time, they’d have done it.
If it’s a decision many people in the political system came to over time, then the “de facto mover” is a cluster of people, and the resulting benefit is spread around.
“Person who formally passes the law gets the rewards” is clearly an actual problem, because otherwise credit could be spread around if people knew how discussions, debate, etc. were going.
Political dirty tricks like passing a competing, better, bill also wouldn’t work if passing legislation wasn’t a key part of receiving credit.
Also the Senate did eventually pass the bill, they just waited long enough that the eventual passage was forced, political messy, and destroyed the Republic anyway. They let a bunch of strongmen and villains get their signature on the bills involved whilst also getting military accolades, and dividing credit did worse than nothing due to how utterly chaotic the situation was.
Basically every major figure who eventually contributed to the death of the Republic got their career started in the social war or got credit somehow for the citizenship bill; a Caesar was consul during the first step of the reform process giving citizenship to loyal italians, Carbo, one of the key Marian opponents of Sulla got to actually propose the legislation extending citizenship to the rebels, Sulla was consul when that legislation passed and his faction was responsible for implementing it, and Strabo, Pompey Magnus”s father, was a key figure along with Pompey himself.
The political favor these figures acquired there was key to them being able to march on the Republic, which basically everyone who eventually got their name associated with the citizenship reform package basically did.
So split it up by having the citizenship extended to, say, 5% of the Socii one year, then the next year another 5% get citizenship, rinse and repeat until all the Socii get citizenship in 20 years. Thus expanding the pool of people who get to pass the legislation.
It’s tempting to think of the Senate as one, singular, thing. But it’s really hundreds of powerbrokers with individual agency. Large groups of people (like hundreds of senators) don’t spontaneously do things, even when they mostly agree and do so for a long time. Every project needs to have a leader(s) that drives it forward, gets others on board, hammers out the details, works out the kinks, and takes responsibility for keeping the whole thing moving. Otherwise nothing actually happens. Action, even by a committee, is never truly collective and without leadership. Anyone who’s ever worked on a group project with as few as a dozen people will know this from personal experience; I imagine it’s far worse when scaled up and filled with self-important grandees in a political climate that is all about personal auctoritas and dignitas.
It’s this work of turning notional agreement into concrete proposals passed by formal votes that gives a politician kudos, not merely having their name attached to the law. The inevitability of their being a prime-mover in getting stuff done means it’s inevitable that this person will get more of the credit than others.
I suppose it’s possible that the Senate could work on a major law like this while keeping secret who the main actors involved were, and instead present a united front in order for no one to get too much credit. Whether that’s practical in a society where personal relationships is the currency of politics (and trickles down via patronage relations) is one thing, but it’s anyway so far against the mind set of the Roman elite as to be unimaginable to them.
I’ve worked in groups, and also followed current politics. Distributed involvement/distributed credit happens routinely.
Best example is in current politics. Congress/parliament/legislature passes a law. How often is the law credited to one specific legislator in widespread knowledge? How many such laws can be named off the top of your head? Typically, if one person was the person proposing something, they have to announce this information and push it, otherwise the default is to credit a president/prime minister (as a visible figure) or the party or even entire legislature in general. And many proposed laws have support from lots of members of the group at once.
So yes, if the big guys in the Roman political system wanted to pass citizenship without setting up a patron-client power problem, they had ways to do it.
@Dillon Saxe
The analogy with modern current politics has an extra layer you’ve missed out though, because we have political parties. Even in parliamentary systems with many parties and coalitions, it’s always very clear which party pushes for which laws. Within parties politicians might just toe the party line, or keep the horse-trading behind the scene. So while the credit might be shared equally within the party (or, more often, ascribed to the party leadership or the party itself), but we very very rarely see credit evenly distributed between parties – even in a coalition. But the Romans didn’t anything resembling parties. Or, if we really must stretch the analogy, every Senator (or every family of nobiles) was it’s own party, and – like in the modern analogy – legislation is strongly associated with one party above the others.
More generally I’d warn that approaching history with the attitude that you have a simple solution to a problem that the people then could have implemented but were too stupid / ignorant / foolish / selfish / etc to is not a great one. It’s more productive to try and understand why the structures and the norms of the time meant that they couldn’t (in practice, if not in theory) do something. Maybe my hypothesis for why credit-sharing for expanding the citizenship didn’t happen in the late republic is wrong. But the simple fact that credit-sharing for legislation never really happened in the Republic on any topic is pretty strong evidence that it wasn’t something that could happen in the Republic.
“More generally I’d warn that approaching history with the attitude that you have a simple solution to a problem that the people then could have implemented but were too stupid / ignorant / foolish / selfish / etc to is not a great one.”
I actually strongly disagree. If you go down that route you’re going to vastly overestimate the intelligence of historical figures. It’s just as big of a cognitive flaw to refuse to judge someone as it is to judge them wrongly. The powerful can be stupid, petty, and evil, modern politics proves this neatly, and history was no different.
We see here that being able to correctly identify a problem doesn’t mean you’re equipped to deal with it, and also that actual solutions become side-notes to the ambitions of the men running the political theatre. They *came up with the right political solution*, send veterans to colonies outside Italy, and yet the people who got their names in the histories were better known for a bunch of distractions.
That’s remarkably in-line with modern political theatre, political parties or no-and to be honest, Roman politics *had* parties, and they weren’t just camps of related families. Those familial camps existed and the parties were based around those camps, but Roman senators could and did make alliances of ideology and convenience outside of their family. These parties had identifiable leaders, platforms, and collaborated to both pass legislation and even primitive propaganda aimed at emphasizing who passed it and why. It was less sophisticated, less institutionalized, and the parties were smaller and more personalized-but they existed.
My point is that it’s entirely possible for a society or political entity to stupid its way into a situation that we can see obvious, easy solutions to, and reflexively avoiding that judgement means you’re training yourself to be needlessly tentative, not wisely discrete. The better question is often why these solutions weren’t implemented, not why they wouldn’t work.
“[V]ery progressive, often accidental, steps inevitably framed as a return to an older tradition” are hardly unique to the Roman system. The Parliamentarians of the 17th century framed their fight against royal absolutism as a recovery of a rather fictive ancestral Anglo-Saxon liberty.
Interesting, I didn’t know that example! It seems that pre-modern societies were highly conservative, and the idea that the future might not only be substantially different but also better than the past seems to be an Enlightenment one.
It seems that at least early Christianity is a counterexample.
Even then, though, note Jesus’s claim to not be here to abolish the Law, but fulfill the Law, and the constant positive references to the Torah and the prophets throughout the New Testament.
At this point I think of The Ministerial Broadcast, in which the PM James Hacker is advised that the more radical the policy he is announcing, the more traditional, reassuring and old fashioned his broadcast should look.
@Mateusz Early Christianity (and Christianity in general in small individual cases that don’t appear in history courses) isn’t a political or social movement though, or even a religious movement in the sense they’re commonly known. It’s not liberal-like or conservative-like or any other secular term we could put on it. There’s a prominent theme of constant struggle against regressing there. Where such secular comparisons are appropriate, they’re already a sign of human failure.
I still feel like this is a solvable problem. You have Senator A give citizenship to the of city 1, B city 2. You don’t necessarily even need to do it all at once. It does take some coordination, but it doesn’t feel like an impossible bargain. Surely there had to be a group of consulars who realized that they could greatly enhance their prestige and that of their families by working out some sort of deal amongst themselves. Would that our sources for this period were better…
The big pitfall of teaching people that modern racism doesn’t map back to Roman understandings is this: the place was still stuffed to the gills with bigots, just bigotry on lines we don’t naturally grasp. But even if you don’t accept the simple answer of bigotry, there’s the political problem that we still deal with today…it’s not enough to divide the formal glory, you have to get everyone voting on it to believe that the formal division of glory will actually stick, will actually be believed by the populace and the historians. That’s an especially hard sell when the only people in the Senate are either Famous Individuals or known social dependents of Famous Individuals.
This is entirely dependent on people keeping the deal. And people may fail merely by dying before it could be completed.
sure, but that’s true of almost any deal. And a relatively closed cabal of consulars would have the ability to sandbag and punish defectors.
Maybe the solution would be to have the Senate direct a consul to propose the law? Admittedly this has the logistical problem that a magistrate has to convene the Senate, but if they then direct a different magistrate to propose the law that would have the effect of dispersing credit and make it seem to be the collective will of the Senate rather than the work of a particular person. Particularly if several different ex-consuls give full speeches in the Senate.
The problem with doing this in practice is that it would take agreement among the Senate’s leadership that expanding citizenship is something they wanted to do, which I doubt was there.
It did that 200 years later – after the assassination of Domitian, the Senate picked a venerable senator without natural children to be emperor in Nerva. But that was in a constitutional system in which the formal powers of the emperor mattered; as it is, Nerva did not enjoy the total legitimacy that many other emperors in that era did, and probably would not have been able to be the public face of a reform in an informal system like that of the Late Republic.
If there was broad enough political will, I am sure there would have been a way.
A plausible option I can think about is to have the law set up a large commission, lets say 100 people, and assign them socii communities by lot. They then go to those communities and enroll them in the citizen lists. That should spread the patronage out enough. (We could call this commission centumviri pro censore.)
Even more plausible: As I understand it, Rome had before extended citizenship to entire communities on occassion, incorporating them as municipia. If it became common for magistrates to propose extending citizenship to a few new municipia during their term, citizenship could be extended over time while proposals that included too many new municipia could be blocked.
The Roman Senate was, even at its best times, often a bit too conservative to make the best decision. After a lot of Senators were killed at Cannae (possibly 1/3 of the Senate), they still rejected enrolling senators from their Latin allies, which were even closer to them than the other Socii. One senator is said to even have threatened to personally kill every Latin he saw in the senate. (Livy 23.22) This attitude leads to problems accumulating over time until they boil over or get solved by a particularly powerful individual who then gains a lot of auctoritas from this.
sure, but that iron will to live up to the example of their fathers is also why they didn’t knuckle under and seek terms after cannae. it cuts both ways
Yes. The point is that this is a case where they were so committed to the mos maiorum that it meant they missed what would have been a much more minor violation that would have fixed the larger problem, causing the problem to get worse until it ended up solved by a much larger, much more dangerous violation of the mos maiorum that ended up accelerating the already arguably underway breakdown of the Roman Republic.
I look forwards to your essay about Sulla. Dare we hope for similar about Gaius Marius as well?
Here is a question for the assembled classicists. In my reading, not at all comprehensive, alas, I have concluded that the most interesting and admirable commander from the 2nd. Punic War is neither Scipio Africanus nor Hannibal Barca, but the African, Prince, later King, Massinissa. I would like to read your well-informed opinions on that point.
Can’t wait for that series on Sulla – don’t know much about that guy.
I heard that Sulla guy was a bit of a jerk
Jerk? No. Monster? YES!
“Both sources agree that Gaius didn’t intend the killing and was distressed by it, though to be fair he did gather a surreptitiously armed mob in the city at a high state of fervor”
Well, this is hitting awfully close to home…
Talking about something by not directly talking about it is a longstanding rhetorical technique.
And not really subtle in this case.
This isn’t talking about that. There wasn’t distress in the more modern example.
Trump was not shocked or contrite about the violence he incited.
Not did anybody express regret over the Floyd riots. Far from it
One funny thing I noticed is that the kind of person who likes to mention “the Floyd riots”, particularly when January 6 is brought up, NEVER appears to be willing to extend the logic and talk about the “Canadian trucker riots”, “gilet jeunes riots” or the “Hong Kong riots” in the same breath. I wonder why? Certainly can’t be due to the destructiveness – the latter three have all caused orders of magnitude more damage.
You seem to have found a story that everyone missed. Whom did the Canadian trucker riots kill?
One notes that the Floyd riots stopped killing people not when the government cracked down on their murders, but when someone they tried to kill resorted to self-defense.
Besides basically every politician and most activists?
There was significant consternation that the protests became violent *when* they became violent. Where there’s pushback is on the movement by corporate/government media to use those incidents to dismiss the motives of the protestors. Besides the obvious fallacies it’s an irrational argument to begin with because the best way to stop oppressed peoples from rioting is to stop oppressing them, and the protests themselves were valid with real grievances.
We were there, Dan. There’s no point in lying. We clearly heard politicians praising the riots after they had turned murderous.
” the best way to stop oppressed peoples from rioting is to stop oppressing them,”
Non-sequitur. The rioters were clearly bursting with entitlement and regarded all other people as butts of their right to oppress at whim.
There’s a claim in here about things ‘clearly heard’ which surely requires evidence.
Often these sorts of unproductive arguments can be rendered productive if connected to an effort to, in fact, establish who said what when. So the question then is which politicians said that after which events ‘turned murderous?’
Interesting that you do not say to Dan that his claim “surely requires evidence.”
Is it clear yet that Mary has no intention of ever complying with your calls for reasoned discussion, Bret?
And off to ad hominem. Again.
“Often these sorts of unproductive arguments can be rendered productive if connected to an effort to, in fact, establish who said what when.”
It’s pointless Bret. They’re trolling. They don’t want productive discussions and hence we’ll never have one. Just silence them and move on.
There’s a new definition of trolling: refusing to ignore the evidence of my own eyes.
You do remember that Kamala Harris openly gave to bail funds and urged others to do the same so that arsonists and other criminals would get out quickly as possible?
“They’re trolling [..] just silence them and move on” works great as a conciliatory statement. Many people on both sides of the aisle agree with this approach, though the target may vary.
Bret, this isn’t a hard question. Wikipedia says that the George Floyd protests turned violent on May 26. (The AP says May 27, so whatever.) According to Reuters, Kamala Harris (she surely qualifies as a politician) appeared on the Colbert show in June and expressed her continuing support for the demonstrations. https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-kamala-harris-said-she-supports-protests-not-riots-in-late-show-idUSKBN27E34M/
Wikipedia’s comprehensive list of killings indicates that (i) the number of people killed in connection with the George Floyd protests was not large and (ii) it was at least an order of magnitude larger than the number killed by Canadian truckers and Hong Kong protesters combined. (I don’t recall anyone’s being killed in the gilets jaunes–note the correct spelling and grammar–protests, but maybe I missed it.) So evidence-based evaluations of both relative levels of violence and political timing are actually pretty easy. But I strongly doubt that your or anyone else’s mind will be changed by such analysis.
Hmm, interesting it had mentioned that:
I wonder how that those numbers compare with those of the original Civil-Rights Movement back in the Cold War era. Then there also had been protests which had turned violent, but somehow the Civil-Rights Movement’s protests are less ‘controversial’ amongst ‘certain groups of people’ than the BLM protests.
Ey, the George Floyd protests aren’t a singular event. The reason that will never convince anyone and the reason it’s not an answer to Bret is that the entire game here is conflating the movement with each incident of violence and hence every message of support for the cause with each death.
What Bret was trying to say is that you need to be specific and precise, but what he fails to realize is that Mary is trolling and uninterested in being specific or precise. They just want someone to call them racist so they can get positive affirmation for their racism when conservatives circle the wagon around them. They’ll gleefully abandon any position and refuse to take any that can be disproven, *and* refuse to concede if they are somehow nailed to an actual statement of fact that can be proven, because they aren’t playing a game where being correct can ever matter.
This leads to an incredibly predictable post pattern, and it never ends with new information given or received. They’re worthless.
But to address the logical point, it is trivially easy to find clips of Harris condemning the violence even as she supports the protests, or condemning the violence in one instance then supporting nonviolent protests elsewhere by name.
The claim is that they (liberals) don’t care about violence in protests and the only way to support that claim is to find incidents of them celebrating it *directly*, and you really just won’t find liberals doing that.
Because all protests are prone to violence-as all politics is-you can play the game where you use someone’s rhetorical support for a movement to conflate it with support for the violence. If the rhetoric was applied evenly pro veteran marches would be calls for extermination of all non veterans-the violence that has occurred throughout every such protest dwarfs all others… because there are so many of them. Someone stubbing a toe at each march might be more absolute suffering when multiplied.
The distinction is if the movement is inherently violent, like January sixth, or if the politician is openly authoritarian enough to *directly say he supports violent protestors*, like Trump did when he *fucking pardoned them*. He demonstrably doesn’t care how many people his supporters kill and never will. It’s why this entire thread is a fallacy.
Omitting the ad hominem, one notices that the claim “we only support the non-violent demonstrations, not the violence they attract” was very frequent at the time, and obviously false at the time, because the demonstrators protested they had nothing to do with the violence and yet never, ever helped the police capture the violent thugs who were, according to them. leeches on their demonstrations, smearing their good names.
And if it were true, the demonstrators would have been solidly behind Rittenhouse because he had been attacked by those violent leeches. Instead we got hysterical melodramatics about how his self-defense would prevent their demonstrations.
Man, this is why nobody bothers with “being specific or precise”. The initial claim was that politicians “kept praising the riots even after they had turned murderous”. You should not have required evidence for this, presumably you are not a goldfish. Someone did the legwork and got you a link anyway. Didn’t matter, new objections sprout forth including “protests aren’t a singular event” (so its meaningless to talk about them as a whole, lets put in even more effort to be REAL specific).
I think you and I and all of us have seen this play out multiple times, just escalating isolated demands for rigor until the interlocutor gives up or is revealed to be a professional willing to do this 40 hours/week with curated archives of evidence. It’s why it’s pointless to respond to isolated demands for rigor. I guess we’ll never know if any politicians kept praising the protests after they had turned murderous.
P.S. if you disagree with Bret that evidence is required, because you True Objection is unrelated to the question at hand (e.g. “it’s fallacious to conflate praise for the protests with support for the violence”), the gracious thing would’ve been to step in after Bret’s distracting ask and preempt anyone from following up on it.
People who complain about “isolated demands for rigor” are just showing they are way too online, thinking “sides” matter on the great circus that is internet arguments and referring to another too-online guru who posts way too much and is famous for having had nervous breakdowns from his posting.
In normal productive discussions between good faith human beings it is normal to have high standards of rigor instead of just waving random knee-jerking statements around, and it is also a mark of respect to accede to each other’s standards. If somehow you doubt that your discussions are leaning this way you should question the time spent engaging them and do something nice or productive instead, like drinking a glass of water or having a walk in the park. Just my two sesterces
What argument are you trying to advance here?
a. “Both Jan 6th and the Floyd protests should be condemned”
b. “Neither Jan 6th nor the Floyd protests should be condemned”
c. “Jan 6th was not worthy of condemnation, but the Floyd protests are?”
I would like to reaffirm that when I made the comparison in an earlier comment, I specifically wrote of “destructiveness” and “damage” – not deaths alone. In terms of economic impact, all of those have cost billions.
Floyd “unrest” (to use a term without political connotations) – ~$2 billion property damage. No impact on the stock market’s upwards trend.
Hong Kong “unrest” – literally sent the economy into a recession. Although the impact got dwarved by Covid literally next year, a 0.6% fall in GDP on year-to-year basis (and ~3% during the peak of “unrest”) is >$3 billion USD when Hong Kong’s total GDP exceeds $500 billion. HK stock market also suffered great losses (though they were again dwarved in the subsequent years.)
Canadian trucker “unrest” – bridge blockade alone cost between $3 and $6 billion, and the impacts in other areas were also not-insignificant.
Gilets jaunes – ~€2 billion in trade losses by the end of that year (since euro was worth about 15% more than the dollar back then, this was a larger figure). In fact, that December “Francois Asselin, head of the confederation of small and medium-sized businesses, told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper (in French) that overall the protests could cost his members €10bn.” (You can look up that quote yourself.)
And if anyone wants to argue along the lines of “only the loss of lives matters”….well, that was the exact argument behind the “Covid zero” approach, and I strongly doubt anybody who brings up “the Floyd riots” in this context would happen to be in favour of that. Even so, while Mary is right that no-one had directly died during the Canadian unrest (I was under the impression a woman was fatally trampled by a police horse, but it seems she lived), the death toll associated with gilet jaunes is around 12 people – while even the Fox News below lists 17 for Floyd unrest.
https://www.fox6now.com/news/deadly-unrest-here-are-the-people-who-have-died-amid-george-floyd-protests-across-us
I would like to reaffirm that when I made the comparison in an earlier comment, I specifically wrote of “destructiveness” and “damage” – not deaths alone.
Dead bodies trump money. Especially since the Floyd riots have been the gift that keeps on giving. By making it politically perilous to enforce the law, by driving police to quit, and many more things, the Floyd riots are killing people to this day through the increased murder rate. (Then, racist knaves like Dan like it because most of the murder victims are black and therefore useful rhetorically.)
And when the Floyd riots’ destructiveness did include looting of luxury stores, it also included things like burning down the only grocery store in a poor black neighborhood, Black residents openly declared they did not know how they were going to get food.
Hon, Mary moved the goalposts and I’m being disingenuous for saying
Notice how safely vacuous this ad hominem is.
“The initial claim was that politicians “kept praising the riots even after they had turned murderous”. You should not have required evidence for this, presumably you are not a goldfish.”
Except the actual initial claim was “Not did anybody express regret over the Floyd riots. Far from it”.
To which I said “There was significant consternation that the protests became violent *when* they became violent.”
So in fact it was Mary who moved the goalposts and created a different claim.
Not that I’d respond to that troll.
Mary’s nonsense being irrelevant is their problem, it doesn’t supercede my claim, nor does it somehow *negate* my claim. I responded to ey who posted about the timeline of Harris’s comments, but the timeline, as I explained, isn’t *enough*. Hell, I couched the *original reply* in careful enough language that even if ey thinks it is irrespective of Mary I’m not even introducing a *new* arguement to point out that it’s not relevant!
This is all a deeply sad attempt to circle the wagons around a troll, and an excellent reason to *get rid of them*. If they hadn’t distracted the conversation we could be actually talking about something, but their attack on the logical framework here, even when ignored, *still* derails it. It’s not like they’ll comply with Bret when asked!
The politicians who supported the violence won. Black people are being murdered in the street to this day because of their actions to facilitate crime.
Furthermore, these milquetoast, vague, often insincere and entirely ineffectual statements did nothing to oppose it. Indeed, claims to oppose the violence often facilitated it, including after it was clear that it was facilitating it. Both demonstrators and politicians would insist on demonstrations that they knew would cause violence.
People remember the meaning of things. Those who express regret over violence in such a way as to facilitate more of it have no ground for complaints that people remember their facilitating violence.
Huh, wonder why that happened.
Also hon there’s a limit on how granular this can get, one that supports my thesis but not yours. If you can find Harris supporting s specific act of violence, even saying that a protest at which someone died was good, my argument is wrong. I really cannot continue defending the ground in that case, a major politician defended the roots as they were threatening someone’s life, that’s broadly equivalent to the violence we see referenced above.
In contrast Incan go as granular as Trump defending a *specific rioter* on Jan 6, because he’s both praised that lunatic who died trying to breach the secure barrier *and* pardoned rioters who violently attacked police. You can’t get more supportive or specific than that.
My argument is better so it’s served by precision, but that’s a consequence of having the correct conclusion, not logical trickery.
“If you can find Harris supporting s specific act of violence, even saying that a protest at which someone died was good, my argument is wrong.”
That she supported the acts of violence in general means she supported many in particular. Just as someone who condemns Harris’s fighting to keep men in prison so the government could exploit them as slave labor condemns every single instance of it.
“‘[J]ust silence them and move on’ works great as a conciliatory statement. Many people on both sides of the aisle agree with this approach, though the target may vary.”
Yes, many leftist supporters of the Palestinians have discovered to their dismay that they can be canceled, deplatformed, silenced, fired, disciplined, and expelled. They thought those tactics were meant for MAGA yahoos, not for themselves. I just laugh to see the hypocrisy of academics explode in their faces.
@Roxana,
Myriad people have expressed regrets over the various events surrounding the murder of George Floyd by a decorated police officer, including condemnations of violence and property damage. Don’t pretend you’re dumber than we all know you are just to try to make a point.
@Mary,
By definition, bail funds in the US don’t go to criminals. They go to people accused of crimes, and being accused of a crime at some point is just a normal part of life for most Americans.
@ey91
Deliberately collapsing the distinction between non-violent protest and violence that happens around protest is a well-studied tactic with ancient roots that was systematized in by Interwar European authoritarians, so it’s not surprising to see it deployed in an argument on the internet, but equally it’s not really persuasive to thinking people.
On the contrary, most Americans have not been arrested.
“Yes, many leftist supporters of the Palestinians have discovered to their dismay that they can be canceled, deplatformed, silenced, fired, disciplined, and expelled. They thought those tactics were meant for MAGA yahoos, not for themselves. I just laugh to see the hypocrisy of academics explode in their faces.”
You evil racist scum. You really think you can just wipe out 24 years of government suppression of anti-war voices in the middle east by claiming suppression of voices against genocide is new and a reaction to some transgression by the protestors? The right has been abusing government and corporate power to manufacture consent for war against the middle east since 2001. Or do you just not remember how expressing skepticism of the Iraq war got people blacklisted?
No-you know and don’t care, you neither value free speech nor peace, you just want to see more semetic people murdered.
This is why I say that antisemitism is perfectly socially acceptable, it’s just aimed at Arabs instead of jews. In a sane world supporting the suppression of anti war protests would be disqualifying from participating in these discussions. Why should even the veneer of unmolested participation be given to people who want the government to suppress *ur-example* of free speech, protesting war?
Hmm, I’ll be interested to see if “evil, racist scum” is within the bounds of what Bret considers acceptable discourse.
@YARD,
One funny thing I noticed is that the kind of person who likes to mention “the Floyd riots”, particularly when January 6 is brought up, NEVER appears to be willing to extend the logic and talk about the “Canadian trucker riots”, “gilet jeunes riots” or the “Hong Kong riots” in the same breath.
I wouldn’t refer to them as the George FLoyd riots (George Floyd had been killed when they happened, and doesn’t deserve to be blamed for what other people did in his name), but I was highly critical of all of those things you mention. Particularly because, as you correctly point out, stuff like the Canadian trucker riots caused massive economic disruption.
” stuff like the Canadian trucker riots caused massive economic disruption.”
Ah, but more or less than the things they protested against?
Loved this series. I was quite sad last week when we got the gap week.
During my own latin lessons the Gracchi were presented as heroic failures trying to share the wealth of the Romans their vast conquests with the people. Apart from the obvious issue (there was land scarcity through population growth, not through because a few absorbed a ton of land and used the newly acquired slaves to work the land) I think a modern reader cannot easily appreciate the mos maiorum. Someone running for election again is quite normal in our modern era. And promising to bring home a bill you couldnt pass last time isn’t that strange. But in Roman context that is strange and seems forceful.
I’m surprised though the senate did not figure out sooner to start overseas colonies. Didn’t Greek poleis also use a similar system for their non-citizen overpopulation? If the Romans were familiar with the Greeks to the degree they recognized the formation of a tyranny, maybe they should also have recognized the need to plant colonies in their new territories.
Well, part of the problem is that they’re looking at the same census information that was discussed in the article on Tiberius Gracchus, which says that Rome’s (the state, not the city) population was shrinking, not growing. So the need to plant colonies wasn’t obvious.
Plus there were all sorts of political reasons that the senatorial class wasn’t as politically served by colonies outside Italy as it was by citizens inside Italy. And the reformers were, in the end, still members of that class.
I think that there are quite a few mores maiorum which you don’t notice until people start breaking them. For a few random, bipartisan examples, there was once a norm that presidential Supreme Court nominations were confirmed absent credible allegations of moral turpitude or gross lack of intellectual qualifications. There was a norm that the congressional (and vice-presidential) role in certifying presidential elections was purely formal and ministerial (and people were unhappy when the rule was challenged and it was discovered that said norm was nowhere written down). As I have mentioned before, there was a norm that no one served more than two terms as president. The list goes on.
Similarly, I have seen educated European people who are completely surprised that the US Presidents are able to appointed their cabinet members. For them, it would seem clear that the Senate majority would be able to force the president into compliance by deciding to confirm anyone from the opposing party and by refusing funding if the president doesn’t budge. (After all, this is how many European countries ended up with parliamentary or semi-parliamentary systems.) The convention that US Senate is expected to confirm the candidates that the president puts forward seems absurd, seen from here.
Interesting tactic. Hopefully I’m old enough, as my nym reveals, that I don’t live to see that one deployed in the US.
I think a budget shutdown over the President not providing nominees of the Senate’s party would lead to voters severely punishing the Senate in the midterms. They’re really unpopular. Just embargoing the nominees wouldn’t be a great plan either, since the President gets to appoint members of the department as acting heads.
Mind, the other side of the norm that the Senate confirms appointees so long as they are not insane choices is the norm that the President does not make insane nominations. The latter norm seems to be shot.
The current president is already implementing an unprecedented shutdown of ALL federal services and he seems to have retained plenty of popular support for that.
Did the Romans ever consider writing down and making official the mos maiorum? It might have reduced the amount of “gaming the system” going on.
Isn’t this more-or-less what Sulla did, or thought he was doing? (Tho not correctly, & w/ hella violence, which is probably the more relevant factor in why it didn’t work)
Yes and yes. No matter what Sulla thought he was doing killing thousands of citizens in a political purge ensured that the process was going to be incredibly damaging. Going back to business as usual in any sense was never possible, and that he didn’t seem to understand that makes the entire thing unforgivably stupid. But Bret’ll get there.
One cannot help but wonder if perhaps Sulla knew that things could not go back to normal, and didn’t really care, because he thought that “putting things in order” was all that really mattered, no matter how much short-term damage he was doing.
Sometimes you get people who are so convinced that the existing order is intrinsically corrupt and bad, so deviant from their idea of how things ought to work, that they stop even thinking or caring about potential consequences of blowing the existing order up.
I don’t think he did-but it’s a great question.
Even before Sulla, it’s something they often did as-and-when needed, in an ad-hoc rather than codified way. The minimum age and gap between holding the same office is one such example. Cicero’s philosophical writings could also could in this regard and, on a more ground-to-earth-level, the opinions of jurors on many aspects of public law.
I suspect that, for the most part, it was more a “you only notice it once it’s broken” kind of thing. Possibly why most of the examples mentioned of this happening take place in the late 2nd and 1st century BC.
Yeah I think this sounds like a natural approach to have evolved. It’s not altogether dissimilar from British parliamentary conduct, which is primarily based on social mores rather than codified (for instance, we have no written constitution).
I’m assuming the US doesn’t have a codified rule that ‘presidential candidates shall not throw overripe tomatoes at their opposition during presidential debates’. You don’t need one, it’s just that no-one does it because it’s not appropriate behaviour.
If one group started doing it regularly, you’d probably find it codified fairly quickly.
They did, yes. Didn’t actually help because one of the norms was that if you were appointed as a magistrate despite being ineligible, it still counted, so the codified mos maiorum still got ignored.
Absolutely loved this series and would love to eventually see it woven into a longer thread about the sequence of events that ended the Republic, as you interpret them (if that’s something you’d want to do someday).
I’m curious how far your interpretation is from “Polity runs relatively smoothly on a set of unwritten norms for 300 years, until one ambitious politician figures out you can break all the norms if you have a sufficiently loyal base; once that genie is out of the bottle, there’s no way back.”
I think norms are a big part of it, but it’s not one person’s decision – there are many decision-points. Equally, there are structural factors: the republic was simply not made for the kind of empire the Romans had built and the vast flows of wealth and power that created. But the Romans almost never thought of change in truly institutional terms.
I wonder if the two are related: norms being broken isn’t a fundamental cause, but itself the consequence of the norms no longer being fit for a changing situation.
Applied to the Roman situation, it would be that the norms to keep the competition between the aristocracy “gentlemanly” were followed because the difference between the winners and losers were mild and would average out. But the drastically increased stakes for the upper echelons of that competition in the Late Republic meant that failure could lead to crippling election debt while success could produce a fortune that would last generations. It’s unsurprising people are less willing to stay honest and polite when the pressure is increased so much.
There’s an easy check to that-was retiring from public life and going to your estates to live in idle wealth an option for Gracchus (either one) if it came to that. And the answer seems to be yes. The rewards may have been extreme but there weren’t similar consequences. Ultimately that frames the entire thing as simple pride and greed. The wealthy destroying society in their games for ultimately trivial rewards isn’t precisely new, but it does beg the question of why it took so long.
Ultimately the easy answer is that the senate and people just had things on lock during the early to middle Republic, because knowledge, engagement, and cooperation were possible when the system was smaller. Tellingly compromises that led to new offices for plebs and new policy for the poor happened despite the reluctance of the senate, but weren’t abused for tyrannical power. What broke isn’t the material incentives of the senate, but the social order of Rome, at least *first*.
For the Grachhi, yes, I’d agree with you. What I was writing was more with Sulla and those that followed him in mind.
Oh aye, by then losing meant you and your family were probably dead.
There’s also, as one of the comments in the Tiberius post argued, reduced consequences in that the city was under less threat late in the Republic. If Sulla in the 200s BC or earlier is angry he din’t get one of the commands and marches on Rome, there’s a Hannibal or Samnite alliance or Veii who will be pleased with the situation and is capable of removing any worries about getting any commands in the future.
So, increased rewards from winning a political competition, decreased threat by messing up the politics, could plausibly contribute to issues of late Republic.
For sure, a common enemy certainly helps to keep a group of people together. It’s notable that when such threats did arise in the late republic (the Teutones/Cimbri, or the Social War, or Mithridates) the Senate mostly closed ranks and worked together well. It’s noteworthy that as soon as the threat from Mithridates went from severe to mild, they immediately started to act for personal advantage again.
Which I think is all another example that changing circumstances leads to norms that are no longer fit for purpose (or are toothless), which in turn leads to the norms being violated and eventually destroyed.
You see that a lot in the narrative of early roman history (shoutout to the Partial Historians!) where there’s definitely a trope that internal political issues gets pushed away to deal with external threats…. Which of course can help avoid an internal clash but also means those issues aren’t *solved*.
I feel like this view removes agency from the popular assemblies; they might have limited decision points but they can refuse to elect norm-breakers or vote down their laws, and they’ve bucked even the full Senate before. I suspect a Tiberius a century earlier would find the assembly wasn’t willing to vote to strip a tribune (who they elected that very year, remember) of their office, or pass a law the Senate opposed.
I think the reason Tiberius was able to break the norms was that the people felt the land crisis was acute and the Senate was blocking action to continue illegitimately using public land for their own benefit, so drastic action was called for. Of course, the average voter would have even less idea than Tiberius of how much land would actually be freed up by this.
If there is a price to be paid for breaking norms, people will try to avoid being seen to break them. If there is not, they won’t.
> others, Plutarch tells us, were banished without trial (which may mean they fled before a trial could take place, a thing you could do in the Roman legal system).
It seems to me that you can do this in any legal system. In what way was the Roman system different?
No extradition, or even attempt at extradition or stopping you from fleeing. It’s more like pleading guilty and having exile as a default punishment than running from the cops. Verres going into exile in Massilia (firmly a Roman dependency at the time) mid trial against Cicero is the first example that comes to mind.
I would like to know more about Massilia. Any recommendations?
Do you mean the Verres case or just the city? I’m sure there are lots of books about Marseilles out there generally: it’s a big city with a strong cultural identity and 3000 years of history.
As for the Verres case, wikipedia is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Verrem#:~:text=of%20his%20injuries.-,Outcome%20of%20the%20speeches,-%5Bedit%5D. Any thing that talks about Cicero, late-republic law, or provincial administration (Verres’ trial was about his rampant corruption while governor of Sicily) should discuss it. If you want something specific, Kathryn Tempest’s “Cicero” (Bloomsbury 2014) covers it pp. 42-60 and is very readable.
I meant the city.
A little tangential, but not irrelevant, to Massilia–you’ll see what I mean if you read it–is Barry Cunliffe, The Extraordinary of Pytheas the Greek. There is a statue of Pytheas in Marseille today.
Is it just me or is the name ‘Fulvius Flaccus’ kinda giving ‘Biggus Dickie’ vibes?
Not really. “Fulvius” is from fulvus “tawny, light brown” (i.e. it’s a hair-colour name, in line with Flavius “blond, yellow” or Rufus “red”) while flaccus means “flabby”, in line with the typical Roman thing of cognomina being jocularly disparaging—a vernacular translation might be “Big-Ears”.
Can someone explain why the Gracchus brothers get a favorable(ish) views from Plutarch, Appian etc and why were these the ones that survived into the 21st century? Were Plutarch/Appian proto-progressives which is why they liked the Gracchi? And why did the negative sources not survive in full into our times? Surely some scribe in say 9th century Constantinople/Baghdad/Paris was not subscribing to pro-progressive interpretation of the Gracchi which is why they only copied the positive sources and not the negative ones?
I’d hazard a guess that one reason is that Caesar, Augustus, and hence all the later emperors are (loosely-speaking) in their political lineage. It’s the optimates vs populares conflict about where political authority ought to lie: in the senate or the assemblies? The Gracchi used the assemblies to trump the Senate, and so did Caesar, most notably in his first consulship. The Emperors ended up subsuming both sources of authority, but they stressed holding the tribunicia potestas over the consulship. So attacking the Gracchi too strongly might be seen as an attack on the Principate. Perhaps fear of censorship was an issue, but I think it’s more likely that people broadly assume that their current regime is a “good” one, and therefore that the roots of origin must also be “good”. One possible factor amongst many, anyway.
I just
I just printed this out, because it is a bit long to read on a screen. It is 13 8.5×11 pages of single spaced 11 pt type. I am not complaining. I am in awe of how much Bret can write in a few days. I am a patreon member and in cents per word, this is a bargain. Thanks.
I’ve thought this too. Writing 8500 words (very nearly) every week is no small task. Not even accounting for the fact that it’s on top of the day job, and is well considered, researched and referenced.
That’s something I’d personally struggle to keep up with as a monthly commitment! We’re all very lucky indeed.
I wonder if there was also a reduction of the difference in social status between farmers and the urban poor that contributed to resolving this problem. With the army professionalizing the Roman farmers lost their ability to participate in war and gain glory and loot. With selection of magistrates being handed to the Senate and Emperor they didn’t have more votes in the Centuriate Assembly anymore – farmers and urban poor’s votes now counted the same: nothing. And it was common for a new emperor to give a donation to the urban poor in addition to the donation to soldiers and Praetorian Guard. So I wonder if a peasant son of the second century CE would consider it as much of a downward move to go to the city as his second century BCE counterpart would. (Might be an interesting topic for a cultural historian to look into. Might even have already been looked into.)
I want to note that Publius Cornelius Scipio (the one who would later defeat Hannibal at Zama and gain the title Africanus) held the even higher office of aedile at the age of 23 – he just, it seems, skipped the quaestorship.
So, if I understand correctly, Gaius, and maybe Tiberius, were reformers who attempted to use their own reforms to radically centralize power in their own office. What I do not see is any indication that either brother presented themselves as representatives of the people against the Roman elite. So, not “populists” in the modern sense of that term, but authoritarian political organizers/activists.
Or is this proto-populism? Is this the origin of what would later evolve into our modern political movement? Or were they proto-democrats, seeking to expand the rights and privileges of the underclass, albeit by playing hardball? Why is it so hard to tell the difference?
In fact, what were their espoused values? Do we know what they believed in, or at least said they believed? Didn’t T have a reputation as an orator? What did he say? Were the two brothers consistent in their views? Do we know?
This seems like one of those cases where modern politics doesn’t exactly match politics in the past, so answer could plausibly be “mix of everything.” From what I’ve seen, figures like Pericles and Kleisthenes, among other political reformers, get the same range of hard to narrow down options (Pericles just power hungry? Kleisthenes stumbling onto reforms while simply trying to reduce power struggles? Or boost his family in comparison to some others?) Even political reforms close to modern times or in different countries don’t cleanly match modern U.S. and Europe categories.
Not to mention the issues of relying on what a few guys chose to write down as our only sources of information. Means a lot of details are missing, so a lot of plausible interpretations of behavior, even if we do have speeches (“were they just rousing crowds or saying what they really thought”)
Being hard to tell the difference between “carrying out reforms” and “boosting their own power” is a common thing when looking at history, though. So it isn’t surprising that the Gracchi would end up in this bin.
“Even political reforms close to modern times or in different countries don’t cleanly match modern U.S. and Europe categories.”
I’d argue that even the shared political categories between the US and Europe differ significantly enough that they should be treated differently. Even at the most basic level of investigation, US politics appears to be significantly shifted ‘right’ from a European perspective (or, perhaps, entirely missing the leftward side of mainstream politics).
That’s before you even start delving into just what Americans mean when they’re talking about Republican vs Democrat values compared to, say, British Conservative vs Labour ones. There’s overlap sure (we’re both facing a number of similar challenges), and a fair amount of cross-pollination, but what’s actually included in these broad camps differs significantly.
“Even at the most basic level of investigation, US politics appears to be significantly shifted ‘right’ from a European perspective (or, perhaps, entirely missing the leftward side of mainstream politics).”
I agree with your general point, and I’d actually argue it’s even more complicated, in that even the topics aren’t the same, and the positions on them even less so.
Very broadly speaking, I’d say that, on social issues, Europe is much more centrist (although it is moving to the right probably), while the US politics on this are much more polarized. For example, (AFAIK) the abortion laws of most European countries are more conservative than Roe vs Wade was, but considerably more liberal than what some republican-run states now have.
Where the statement that “US politics appears to be significantly shifted ‘right’ from a European perspective” is more true IMO is the economic aspect. From the perspective of a European leftie, when talking about economic issues like welfare, tax, government spending etc, the only options that seem present in the US are centre-right and far-right, while OTOH a lot of European “right wing” parties are less economically right than a good chunk of the Democratic party.
…and all of that is not to mention that “Europe” is not a monolith when it comes to politics itself anyway.
Yep, astute on all points as far as I’m concerned. Though I’ll caveat that I’m from the UK, so my perspectives of the US and the majority of Europe comes from a place that seems to be in an odd middle-ground between the two, and with its own weird baggage (that thing about Europe not being a monolith again…).
Definitely agreed that the topics differ significantly as well. We simply don’t have an abortion debate here in the UK. There’s perhaps a bit of a ‘trans’ debate, but that feels very much like a bleedover from the US that doesn’t fit locally (much like the ‘generational conflict’ BS that regrettably seems to have had more traction). The US doesn’t seem to have a debate about the legacy of colonialism, but does about their role as ‘world police’. There is no gun control debate in Europe.
There’s also topics that differ over whether they’re economic or social. I’m primarily thinking healthcare, where the US debate appears to be a social ‘is it morally right to offer state-subsidised healthcare to everyone’, whereas broadly in Europe that’s been settled as a ‘yes’ and the debate is more around the method of delivering that (an economic argument).
I suppose we could sit here all day pulling out differences, or pulling out similarities if we wanted to make that argument instead. Whether those differences amount to something fundamental, or is simply a matter of degrees on the same spectrum, isn’t 100% clear. I know where I stand on it, but I don’t think there’s a concensus.
They were tribunes of the pleb, as I understand it that made them by definition “representatives of the people against the Roman elite” (the senate).
this is a profoundly aristocratic society. not technically an aristocracy of birth, but still a society where there really is a widespread belief that the nobilis were fundamentally better in real ways. explicitly campaigning on behalf of the rabble would be like running for office in the US on behalf of the british monarchy.
There are no reified political parties in the Roman Senate; every organized faction is a personal faction, and even when families act to ‘pass on’ Senate position to sons there is no inheritance of loyalty, just structured opportunities for sons to cheaply earn loyalty from those who are loyal to the father.
What they are all trying to do, *any* senator who is active in debates, is best understood as attempting to create a vibe that they have the solutions generally. One way to give people that sense is to have specific solutions, and that is the way the Gracchii liked, but they were conversant in the other ways.
Thanks everyone.
Great post! I must say, it does leave me with ~~a few~~ (more like A LOT of!) questions. Granted, some of them might be obvious to longtime readers or observers of Roman history, but not to a relative newcomer to the blog like me. I am not sure how often there are post-publication edits beyond typo-fixing, but a few might be helpful here.
* “Some of Tiberius Gracchus’ associates were also prosecuted and others, Plutarch tells us, were banished without trial (which may mean they fled before a trial could take place, a thing you could do in the Roman legal system). Though while Plutarch notes two associates of Tiberius convicted and executed (a Gaius Villius and Diophanes the Rhetorician)”….so, if those associates COULD have fled and lived without anyone even trying to come after them (at least, not legally) why didn’t they? Did they get arrested before they could have even attempted it (i.e. captured by the mob during the same showdown which killed Tiberius), did they think they have done nothing wrong and would have been acquitted, or something else in between? Another footnote at least would be nice.
* “Meanwhile, P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio, the architect of the mob that killed Tiberius Gracchus is unceremoniously packed off as part of an embassy to Pergamon in a move that would have probably marked the end of his political career even if he didn’t die in 132 (but he does).” So, that is literally one year later. To a reader just following along, this three-word note in the parenthesis seems a bit sudden. I.e. do we know what he actually died of, for one thing? Even Wikipedia simply notes “he died” with no elaboration – but at least it does allow you to see he died at 50 (neither post here gives an idea of his age.) While certainly above the average life expectancy at the time, I am not sure if 50 would have actually been old enough for his death to be written off as “old age” – after all, many emperors lived to their 60s (Septimius Severus still led his army on the march in Britain when he died at 65) or 70s (Octavian made it to 75 and Tiberius to 77). Do we have any indication that being sent to Pergamom caused him to catch a fatal disease or hastened his death in some other way?
** For that matter, were there any known preceding examples of a pontifex maximus being punished in such a manner (if not worse)?
* “But whereas the loot of fresh conquests was shared out equally, the tax revenue of the provinces flowed to Rome alone.” – This made me wonder if we have any historical record of anyone proposing that the Italian socii get a share of tax revenue from further-flung revenue, as a kind of compromise between the unacceptable status quo and giving them full citizenship and thus opening Romans up to more competition.
* “He seems to have at least proposed to have the state provide soldiers’ clothing at state expense (Plut. C. Gracch. 5.1, note also Diod. Sic. 34-5.25), though it’s not clear if this passed. If it did, it didn’t stick, as in the imperial period we continue to see deductions in Roman soldiers’ pay for replacement clothing.” So….literally clothing specifically? Armour is not included? I do recall earlier posts mentioning both the cost of armour, and how expensive good cloth actually was – this might be a good place to link them. And perhaps one out of nine “Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph” posts did mention outright the full inventory of a legionary and how much its constituent parts would have cost (at least, relative to each other.) If so, again, a good place to link such a post. If not, a footnote briefly stating how much of their pay legionaries could have been expected to spend on clothing (and for that matter, how much the state would have had to spend if it did take on that burden) would be greatly appreciated!
* “He also reportedly tried to expand the Senate by introducing three hundred equites (rich men who had not embarked on careers in public office; Plut. C. Gracch. 5.2-3) into its number (or 600 according to Livy Per. 60) but this seems not to have passed or been implemented.” This would be more meaningful with a reminder of how large the Roman Senate actually was at the time, so that it would be clearer just what kind of a percentage increase either 300 or 600 would have been.
* “Gaius also passed laws for the construction of roads and granaries, in part perhaps to facilitate the grain needed for his new distributions, but the sources (e.g. App. BCiv. 23) equally suggest this was in part to put both wealthy public contractors and regular workers under obligation to him.” This seems needlessly brushed over for what certainly sounds like a direct, tangible measure to improve people’s lives. Do we know how many granaries actually got built? Are there any notable Roman roads whose foundation could be traced to Gaius? Is there really a way to argue that it was not a good proposal on its merits, taken in isolation from its originator’s career?
* “….it doesn’t seem like any of Livius’ other generous proposals are actually implemented. I think it is entirely fair to regard Livius’ tribunate as essentially one big political ‘dirty trick,’ albeit one well within the rules of the political system (and one which Gaius might have diffused by simply backing Livius’ proposals, had he been willing to share the credit for basically anything).” ….The way this is phrased in the post leaves a MASSIVE elephant in the room. IF Livius’ role was to be the “dirty trickster” of the Senate (arguably comparable to the “controlled opposition” parties of, say, Baathist Syria or Putinist Russia), isn’t it also logical to assume that most of his proposals were generous precisely because they were intended to be implemented and they really COULDN’T have been practically implemented? I.e. what would have been the fiscal implications of Livius’ version of Land Reform II relative to Gaius’? (And wouldn’t it have arguably fed even more into socii’s resentment?) Is there ANY reason to believe that the Roman Republic at the time could have had supported anything even close to twelve new colonies? Etc., etc.
* “And at this point, with an armed band having seized a large section of the city (the Aventine Hill), which it had fortified…” What kind of “fortifications” could Gaius’ supporters, no matter how numerous, have managed to construct in a day or so? Clearly not good ones, or else the street battle they lost wouldn’t have been described as “brief”, so this entire point seems a little strange, to the point it might be better off being omitted if it wouldn’t get elaborated on.
* Lastly, the juxtaposition of “Opimius and the Senate now do exactly what you’d expect” with “Needless to say, Opimius comes off of all of this, whatever one thinks of Gaius Gracchus, looking like a monster” is somewhat surprising. As in, was it plausible to put down a literal insurrection with less bloodshed in an era before reduced-lethality crowd control equipment? Would it have been kinder for the Senate to attempt to starve out the Gracchi mob (and every citizen who would have effectively been their hostage on Aventine hill in that case), assuming they even had the opportunity? And wouldn’t meaningful negotiations with Gaius and Flavus have risked enforcing the idea that anyone so inclined could squeeze “Danegeld” (to use an anachronistic term) out of the Republic by participating in the elections, crying fraud and whipping up a mob? Or are we meant to think the military response itself was reasonable and specifically the post-victory executions only?
A couple of miscellaneous comments:
* As always, there’s the traditional “Matres et Patres Conscripti” note near the start of the post, and as usual, there’s the more recent disclaimer “I am probably more active these days on Bluesky than Twitter.” Yet, “Questions? Requests?” in the sidebar still concludes with “The best place to find me is on twitter….Following me on Twitter is the best way to be informed of new posts as they appear.” Seems like the latter is in need of an update?
* To me, the remarkable thing about that Campanian vase is just how surprisingly poor the hands and feet are. Most of this impression is in the crudely drawn fingers and toes, yet there is also something like the truly dubious palm of the woman on the left. It’s particularly striking at a time we are used to look at the quality of hands and fingers as a quick (if imperfect) shorthand to tell apart AI-generated “photos” and drawings.
* Finally, someone commented on the Tiberius post that this story deserves a proper adaptation, and I have to agree. Today, I checked the list of films and TV series below, and it’s remarkable (if dispiriting) just how often the same few paths (Caesar, Cleopatra, Nero, Spartacus) have been trodden time and time and TIME again, and so little attention had been paid elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_set_in_ancient_Rome
There’s a list of written fiction on Wikipedia too, but it doesn’t appear to be much better. Though, I guess readers deserve to know that the briefly mentioned Gaius Blossius actually DID get a significant plotline in “Roma: The Novel of Ancient Rome”, apparently. Deservedly, too: while the article had to be brief, here’s a remarkable quote from Plutarch, according to Wikipedia.
> After the death of Tiberius Gracchus, Blossius was interrogated by the consuls on the matter. Blossius freely admitted that he had done anything Tiberius had asked. The consuls asked “What? What would you do if Tiberius ordered you to burn the Capitol?” He answered that Tiberius would never have given such an order. Being pressed on the point, though, Blossius eventually stated that Tiberius would only have ordered such a thing, if it were in the true interests of the Roman people. After that, he was released. Blossius went to the province of Asia, where he took part in Aristonicus’ popular uprising against Rome, aiding in the organization of the Heliopolis state. When the uprising was ultimately defeated, he killed himself.
It’s fairly standard in mob uprisings to assemble barricades out of furniture and lengths of wood to provide defensive positions on streets or block off entrances to buildings. You can see it in e.g. videos of the 2014 Ukrainian riots. It doesn’t take much time at all to have a basic barricade set up, and given time they can reinforce it. It’s relevant in that it indicates a plan to hold out for an extended conflict in part of the city, even if it’s not a major military fortification.
That’s a good guess, but no – it seems like there is no evidence of barricade construction prior to 16th century France. In fact, even there, they don’t really come into their own until the 19th century – many of the paintings of French Revolution’s barricades were apparently 19th century artists projecting what they saw with their own eyes onto the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barricade
And if that sounds surprising, it shouldn’t be. A barricade can only be built with sufficient concentration of furniture in the vicinity, which requires people to live in high-density housing. Simply being able to reliably build multi-story houses for the commoners requires certain advancements in architecture. Then, in Roman times, you could only fit so many people around communal latrines before the waiting lines would become intolerable. Medieval cities infamously didn’t even bother and their dwellers emptied their chamber pots into the street (if no-one was willing to collect the contents for fertilizer) – not something the Romans would have put up with in their holy city.
Thus, the invention of the water closet was another step which supercharged high-density housing, and with that the amount of furniture which could be collected from a single street to block it. The middle of 19th century was when it really began to be rapidly adopted in individual homes – and so the barricades follow. Modern cities have yet another factor which raises density and makes barricade construction even easier (for those sufficiently committed to the cause) then ever before – the kind of tower blocks which were impossible before the invention of the elevator.
The dates don´t fit the “density” explanation.
“A barricade can only be built with sufficient concentration of furniture in the vicinity, which requires people to live in high-density housing. Simply being able to reliably build multi-story houses for the commoners requires certain advancements in architecture.”
Which Romans had.
French are first attested as using barricades in 1569, and made widespread use of them in 1588. Little use in 1789, but widespread use from 1830.
Outside France, barricades only are said to spread in 1848.
Can anyone comment on the tactics of urban riots in Europe outside France before 1848?
Like, Naples 1647, or Madrid 1808?
Dense multistorey buildings were present in Renaissance Florence, or 17th century Naples. We see clear evidence of multistorey residences in Roman Ostia, and 146 BC Carthage.
We hear of people throwing tiles from roofs. Pyrrhos was killed by such in Argos, and Romans threw tiles on Sulla.
Romans definitely had some wooden furniture. Senate had wooden benches which they broke to attack Tiberius, he was killed by broken off bench legs. Could the Senate have built a barricade if they had been under attack?
But maybe it was tied to abundance and material of wooden furniture?
“Barricade” derives from “barrel”. Romans did not have wooden barrels before 1st century AD. Till them, and to a large extent afterwards, storage vessels in Mediterranean were pottery amphorae.
A pottery amphora is heavier to carry to a barricade than a wooden barrel, and easier to break.
Could Pompeiians have built barricades if they tried?
Barricade does not need furniture. You only need a narrow street between buildings and a single horse drawn carriage you turn over. Or any other suitable size object. Maybe there are tables of street merchants, or there is a five meter tall statue of Jupiter you can topple across the street.
In this case it would have been a wooden statue to Diana, given the main building they seized. Also that would be an incredible act of sacrilege, so probably didn’t happen. It’s also plausible there might have been trees around, given Diana’s portfolio included woodlands (and/or tamed countryside).
I believe Bret mentioned at some point that due to the absence of pivoting front axles, large horse-drawn carts or carriages were very uncommon in the ancient Mediterranean. Pack animals and an occasional small single-axle cart were the primary means of transport.
These are, lest we forget, still Romans. They probably dug a ditch. Or, if the hill where they were was still wooded, something which is actually possible given that they occupied a temple to *Diana*, they might have just cut down trees and constructed something exceedingly basic.
“Murum fossamque ducit,” a staple phrase of my early education.
I doubt anyone would have cut down the Goddess’ trees. High sacrilege, and bad luck to boot.
The lack of historical mentions of street barriers is interesting though. How common was it to occupy streets as a form of protest in ancient times?
Arguably occupying the sanctuary in arms was sacrilege, but degrees do matter. I’m not familiar enough with the cult of Diana to know how sacred certain aspects of the temple would be, besides that futzing with the statue was absolutely unacceptable.
We have repeated accounts of street violence, in conjunction with occasional brawls in the forum. We also do know that Romans did create improvised barriers in some capacity during sieges, we have written accounts of buildings and I believe streets being barred during the Senones sacked Rome. It’s just not clear with what or how, although I am skeptical of claims they lacked the means to construct furniture barricades because of economics.
Fun note, we also get mention of some form of wheeled transportation during this sack, there’s a noted story in one of the sources of a man giving his vehicle over to…I can’t remember what, maybe a priest?…out of patriotism. Doesn’t mean such things were common, though.
I thought that was a myth?
I had looked it up to be sure and according to the answers on r/AskHistorians* there usually at least were laws forbidding refuse from being tossed into the street at any time, and such things, indicating that Medieval cities at least tried to be clean.
* Like those here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zob493/so_how_was_it_really_with_uhh_waste_in_medieval/ or https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1p44gi/why_did_medieval_people_put_up_with_so_much_filth/
Great pair of articles. There’s one thing that isn’t clear to me: did Gaius push all these laws with the same disregard for political norms as Tiberius before him, and it just wasn’t as shocking the second time around? Or was he more careful about toeing the line of acceptability even as he gathered power for himself?
Also, given what you explain of how patronage bonds could be created by a magistrate’s actions and the consequences of that, would you say that Rome’s patronage culture made it uniquely susceptible to demagogy?
to be perfectly fair to Gaius Gracchus
from his perspective this is the Senate that Murdered his brother, so you know. Not alot of Trust to be had.
Yeah, I wonder if this is something we have any clue about, if Gaius ever mentioned his brother or how he felt about him having being killed.
Really enjoyed this series! I definitely got the super brief, very positive view of the Gracchi brothers, and it was good to get a broader view of the two of them. I am eagerly awaiting your take on Sulla.
When I was in college, I was very fortunate to be in the class of Prof. Thomas J. Figueira (for those who don’t know, he was a big name in Classic Studies, and sometimes shows up in our host’s footnotes). He taught about the rise of the Roman Republic at the time, and in the last lecture of the semester, he briefly touched upon the fall of the Republic.
Prof. Figueira essentially argued that the fall of the Republic initially lies in people’s mindset: The Romans began to give a pass to influential people who broke the mos maiorum, and gradually, the holes became larger and much easier to exploit. We can already see the beginnings of the breakdown with Scipio Africanus, who got high offices despite being underage, just because people supported him and voted him in. Then, the Gracchi broke the unwritten rule in one way or another – Gaius also took a page of Scipio Africanus’ playbook and got reelected despite being ineligible to run – and gained tractions and supporters along the way, who clearly didn’t mind their patron breaking those rules. The slippery slope continued, and Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and Publius Sulpicius Rufus would again repeat the situation, resulted in Sulla who turned the Republic upside-down.
I remember this lecture vividly (it also happens that, around the same time, the usual, customary political rules in my country were falling apart, but not many people were raising serious questions, just because the man was very popular at the time), and it is still very impactful to hear the story of the Gracchi once again.
sure, but why? why did they give scipio a pass and no one before him? and why did they give more passes to sulla/marius/pompey/caesar? something must have changed.
Random factoids I’ve picked up here are:
* The senate was discredited during the Second Punic War. As a group of accomplished generals, the senate can normally rein in any single powerful man. But during the Second Punic war you have 10+ years where these elites repeatedly step up to fight Hannibal and get thousands or tens of thousands of Romans killed. If Scipio Africanus wants to be consul for one more year, it’s the guy who saved Rome vs the losers who almost got Rome destroyed.
* The big men before Marius had an armies assigned to them by the Senate. In Marius’ time it became the norm for generals to be responsible for soldiers’ pay. So suddenly any dangerously ambitious politician also has an army which needs him to do well to get paid. I wonder if this applied to Scipio too – wikipedia says that the Senate did not give him an army and he had to raise volunteers, which he then paid with the loot from Carthage.
I think trying to paint “The Senate” vs. “The generals” is a failure: They are *the same people* just at different stages in their career.
Good Blog is there anything that could have been done to save the Late Republic becuase it seems as if the Senate quickly began to lose political power the moment they had to give generals command over armies for long periods.
What reforms could have been made to save the republic from turning into the Empire.
How long a time frame do you have to work with? Because by the time of the Gracchi, I suspect, No. Their system was too dependent on having wars, which brought in loot. Further back in time, earlier reforms might have done something. Maybe.
you need to create systems that keep people from running the table, or at least made it harder. I’m not sure that’s possible, given basic roman political attitudes. they mean that any sort of federal or representative system is right out. the only way i think is to empower the senate relative to the other actors in the system but that’s not easy. Sulla tried it, and almost everything he did made things worse.
I can think of a lot of little things, but the big one I think is regularizing the system to eliminate the need/desire for special commands. something everyone who becomes consul automatically becomes a pro-consul for a few years after, then can’t be re-elected. that gives guys like pompey and Caesar a mechanism for getting their turn in the sun that doesn’t require constant constitutional contortions. And a stronger senate to make them stick to the actual rules. But that’s easier said than done.
The biggest issue preventing necessary reforms in the Late Republic seems is in my estimate that too many offices can veto each other, so whenever there are different opinions by important factions, it turns into a gridlock almost impossible to resolve. The easiest way around this would be a tradition for the consuls to appoint a dictator whenever such a gridlock happens. Dictators had been appointed for solving internal matters before, so it wouldn’t be completely without precedence. The dictator would then have six months to solve the issue and if he doesn’t manage it, someone else get’s appointed dictator.
With that change alone, I think the chances of the Republic implementing reforms that allow it to survive are reasonably high. So my way to save the Republic is basically: instead of having an emperor all of the time, only have an emperor when necessary.
The problem with that is that the consuls were generally among the factions. This would be regarded as a way for them to cheat and win.
True, but the ability to win within the system makes people less likely to try to win outside of it. Now, winning in such a way that the losing side accepts your victory needs wisdom and willingness to compromise. So one would still need a bit of luck to get the right dictator for the job, but I’d say the chances are better than with all the veto powers.
Thrown into the river after being killed leading a coup to make himself king? Gosh, what could we have learned from ancient Rome in january 2021? Flumen Potomac Capitola promixa? (bad Latin!)
What I’m getting from this is that while Tiberius Gracchus genuinely wanted to help the poor – while also being an ambitious rich-kid -his younger brother Gaius was basically a social-fascist/imperialist who made the exploitation of the provincial poor worse in order to get the money to buy the votes of the Roman poor.
I’m not sure I buy that Tiberius cared about the plight of almost anybody whose name wasn’t Sempronius Gracchus (that might just be my cynicism about politicians) but he does come across as someone who constructed a tyranny without realising that was what he was doing—he needed a big break to get his career back on the rails, thought he’d found it in something that also happened to win him a decent amount of popular support in Rome, and stood on the mos maiorum in the process.
Gaius, by contrast, comes off as brazenly ambitious with a shortage of regard for the mos maiorum in the first place—if he blamed it for the death of his brother then I can’t exactly fault him for that, but the damage was still done.
Here, it ought to be acknowledged that politicians who intend to support the poor with their actions but in practice have a specific subset of those poor in mind is quite a common story. I.e. you can use very similar terms – “made the exploitation of the provincial poor worse in order to get the money to buy the votes of the [city] poor” – in order to describe the New Deal introducing Social Security and unemployment benefits in 1935, yet excluding agricultural workers and domestic servants from both of those. (A decision which many have connected to the majority of those workers at the time being Black.) Yet, I don’t think many modern observers would describe FDR as a “social-fascist/imperialist” (as opposed to the contemporary opponents of the New Deal, who did in fact employ such rhetoric, at times in connection with the “America First Movement”.)
(For that matter, the fact you could draw these parallels between Gaius Gracchus and FDR seems to provide one hint as to why post-WWII historians rarely tended to describe the Gracchi in negative terms.)
More recently, Bernie Sanders’ 2016 bid was criticized in some quarters for his then-unwillingness to loosen border enforcement (“Open borders?” he interjected. “No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.”) and for his opposition to TPP deal as prioritizing American poor (who are, generally speaking, still almost always in the top half or even quarter of the global income distribution) over the far more deprived global poor who would have benefited from such policies.
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/29/9048401/bernie-sanders-open-borders
Yet, I don’t think many modern observers would describe FDR as a “social-fascist/imperialist”
So much the worse for modern observers. FDR’s side of the political divide sneered at the conservatives’ attachment to the old-fashioned Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and bragged that if we didn’t get on the bandwagon of the great Leninist/Fascist experiment from Europe, we would be trampled by history. (This was before Stalin made supporting him/opposing him the great left-wing/right-wing divide, so yes, they regarded them as a singular experiment.)
FDR was openly admiring of mussolini and the new deal was very much patterned on what he did in italy. Everyone likes to forget how wildly popular mussolini was before he got up to his colonialist adventures.
FDR was absolutely a social-fascist imperialist though.
“Fascist” is so loosely used (and in so many conflicting senses) that it’s almost become meaningless, so I’m not going to take a position on whether FDR was a “social fascist” (although if you go by the criterion of “fascists believe in national regeneration through conflict”, then no, he definitely wasn’t one).
I will say that FDR was definitely not an *imperialist* though, one of his signature foreign policy positions was to roll back US influence in Latin America, for example.
When people on your side openly say that you’re emulating the great Leninist/Fascist experiment in Europe, and your political opponents must get on the bandwagon or be trampled by History — there are more grounds to call you fascist than there are for most people.
When people on your side openly say that you’re emulating the great Leninist/Fascist experiment in Europe, and your political opponents must get on the bandwagon or be trampled by History
FDR wasn’t really “on my side”, though i think he was certainly better than his Republican opponents. But, I would say that Leninism and fascism are very different things, and FDR’s policies were very different from either of them (though you’re certainly free to disagree with all three), so if anyone conflates the three, it throws their judgment and reliability into question.
And?
FDR’s people and allies said that. They were on his side.
And everyone knew that Leninism and Fascism were takes on the same thing until Stalin decided that support for him was what made you left-winger, and all sorts of left-wingers fell in line.
Maybe there were such people in the USA, that thought such things, I don’t know that much about interwar US politics.
However, in Europe from the very start the Fascists and the Leninists mutually saw each other as terrible opponents, with people who thought them alike hating both. The Italian Fascists were anti-Communist from the beginning; being a group joined/supported by all kinds of people, from republicans to monarchists, from Catholics to Freemasons, whose main commonality was being anti-socialists. And the Communists likewise saw the Fascists as their primary enemy from then on, with Stalin even justifying his policy, in 1928-33, of attacking social democrats as much as fascists by claiming that the social democrats actually were ‘social fascists’ or the ‘moderate wing of fascism’.
And the relation between Communism and Nazism or Franco’s National-Catholicism was comparable, well except for that period between 1939 and 1941.
That they were fighting so much was exactly because they were fighting over the same turf, and the same people. Someone who wasn’t willing to be a Communist wouldn’t be willing to be a Fascist, either.
In general that was false.
I’m sure you can find some some radicals looking for a cause they can commit violence for which had been willing to switch between Fascism and Communism, but those people clearly were the exceptions, not the rule.
For example, as Pseudoerasmus had noted in this blog post (here: https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/05/06/fascists-part-2/):
As you can see in Germany the Nazis had mostly not grown by taking over the Communists turf; but instead other turfs like the traditional middle class.
Am I misunderstanding your claim or are you implying that all those rich industrialists who supported the Fascist thugs beating up trade unionists would have been willing to be Communist in other circumstances?
On the contrary, we have lots of testimony about people who did exactly switch.
As for “rich industrialists” you are reading too much Communist propaganda and taking it too seriously.
Hmm, I had already expected that you would not let such things as facts get in the way of your world view.
However, nonetheless I was surprised by you:
In internet arguments I have encountered plenty of ideologues proving their ignorance of me by throwing accusations towards me: from ‘conservative’, through ‘religious’, to ‘dog of the USA’, from ‘being blinded by my privilege*’, to ‘Monsanto shill’. However, ‘I have read too much Communist propaganda’, that is a new one, I’ll place it on my list.
Which is rather ironical, as I had referenced Pseudoerasmus who himself has a low opinion of Leninism.
* The person who said that was a ‘the US’ middle-class has it objectively bad and worse than in previous decades’-type I had been arguing with. I wondered if even I, out of all people, am already privileged, then what is the US’ middle-class then? Decadent?
I notice you do not deny it.
Says the one who had not denied my claim of ‘not letting such things as facts get in the way of her world view’…
Anyway, I think I will stop replying from now on as I am getting tired of this ‘debate’.
Both men were self interested but both also identified a problem that needed solving, or thought they had. I imagine self interest and genuine concern for the issues both played their part. The tragedy is that two young men positioned for brilliant careers were so damn impatient.
“In a sense, Gaius Gracchus has recognized the time bomb ticking in Roman Italy and in an effort to diffuse it, has instead accelerated its detonation.”
This should read ‘defuse’ not ‘diffuse’. One does not typically render a bomb harmless by moving it to a location with a low concentration of bombs. Although, come to think of it, if you have a lot of bombs, that might actually be an effective tactic.
Fixed
I’m curious: was it possible for someone to be a client to multiple patrons at once? Or did a new patron-client relationship effectively erase the old one? Presumably, a lot of the people helped by Gaius’ proposals would’ve already had patrons; was he basically “stealing” their clients, or was he just another patron that those clients now had to take into account?
Now I’m wondering if there were any situations like in a feudal/vassalage system, where a voter was client to 2 different patrons who were running against each other…
Sorry, this was supposed to be a standalone comment.
And now it is!
I am a non-classicist who sometimes is assigned to teach Western Civ on which the Gracchi get about half a slide, and this has caused me to rewrite that half slide!
Sometimes I wonder if it’s better to not teach something, than to teach it in such a perfunctory way that you give people (at best) the illusion of knowing something but without any actual understanding of it.
No, it’s always better to teach something.
Teaching that being taught can always give you an illusion of knowing something without any actual understanding of it, is its own discipline. It’s why serious institutions and serious people have lib ed requirements.
I’m curious: was it possible for someone to be a client to multiple patrons at once? Or did a new patron-client relationship effectively erase the old one? Presumably, a lot of the people helped by Gaius’ proposals would’ve already had patrons; was he basically “stealing” their clients, or was he just another patron that those clients now had to take into account?
Now I’m wondering if there were any situations like in a feudal/vassalage system, where a voter was client to 2 different patrons who were running against each other…
You could absolutely have multiple patrons and yes it would mean your loyalties would sometimes clash
I have to say that I am positively surprised by the quality of the comments’ sections of this two-parter.
Usually, posts on this blog end up having all kinds of crazy debates in their comments’ sections*; however, that seems to have been mostly avoided here despite the subject being a lot more political than average.
* Some of those crazy debates are still funny to me many months later, like ‘Was Genghis Khan woke for integrating Turkish steppe nomads as equals of the Mongols in his armies?’ or ‘Was the USA supporting Egypt during the Suez-crisis an act of imperialism against Great Britain?’ (because obviously using the threat of sanctions to get a state to back off from invading another country for nationalising your canal is imperialism. /s).
Hmm, considering what arrived in my email inbox after having posted that, my comment aged like milk.
Maybe I should try to reply to less of Bret’s blog posts, as then I will be exposed to less ‘comments section debate craziness’ when checking my emails to see if anybody had replied to me?
“six and one-third asses … [is] an oddly not-very-round-at-all figure”
I would think that six and one-third asses would make for a *very* round figure.
A question for Bret and the commenters here.
Footnote 5 got me thinking. I majored in STEM (Computer Science) in university. Whatever tidbits I got about the history of Rome come from public blog articles and Youtube videos. Our host has quite fervently complained about the misinformation and lack of quality in the latter, as well as in Twitter threads. I’d say that my best understanding of history up to date has actually come from this blog.
Now, here’s the thing – this series on the Gracchi brothers has been written as an attempt to push back on the popular, surface-level portrayal of the brothers in undergraduate Roman history survey courses. Is there any such course or equivalent available for free on the internet? Such that a layman like myself could get a basic run-down of the main historical events that happened in Rome that everyone should know about?
The three Roman history surveys I have, as to which Bret or anyone else could weigh in with additions or deletions, are Boak & Sinnigen, A History of Rome to A.D. 565 (from my college days, I don’t if it has been updated or kept in print), which devotes 11 pages to the Graccchi, Beard, SPQR, A History of Ancient Rome, which devotes 12 pages, and Boatwright et al., The Romans, From Village to Empire, which devotes 9 pages. I haven’t bothered to re-read them to compare to Bret’s presentation here, but maybe I will.
> What is clear is that Gaius Gracchus’ popularity was waning. His citizenship expansion bill is defeated (either before he leaves for Carthage, while he was away or right when he came back) and when he ran for another term as tribune he lost (he claimed fraud, because of course he did, Plut. C. Gracch. 12.4, who avoids rendering a judgement). The new magistrates – notably Opimius – were evidently hostile to him, which I think ought to suggest Gaius may have actually lost and popular opinion really had turned against him.
It’s nearly time for another post and I see that this point appears to have gone unremarked upon. Have there actually been cases in the Roman Republic where it is now considered more likely or not that meaningful voter fraud did happen – as opposed to the losing candidate wishing that’s what happened?
Well, I read Gracchi Part I, then got the newly printed “Violence in the Forum” by Natale Barca. I finished that a couple days ago, and then came here to read Gracchi Part II. Barca’s book is pretty much ‘conventional wisdom’ in its coverage. It does emphasize the character flaws in Gaius Graccus, as well as the unprecedented set of laws Gaius tried to pass and their impact. (I thought that book failed to discuss the rise of Marius, which is unfortunate.)
So back here… There’s always the challenge for any reformer who gets stymied either by political opposition or by the tyranny of time (‘can’t get it done in a year.’) This is more of an issue in Roman (and US) systems because of the periodic nature/time limits of office. The absence of political parties exacerbate this in Roman times, parties provide continuing context and presumably consistent policies between elections.
What I found most interesting here (besides the core argument that both Gracchi were radical in their attacks on the Senate and mos maiorum) is how their reforms focused on real problems, but fundamentally wouldn’t solve those problems, even if implemented.
I’m particularly looking forward to the discussion of Sulla. The Colleen McCullough books treated Sulla quite sympathetically, I thought. And since Prof Devereaux is writing ‘contrarian history’, can he (or anyone else here) find anything good to say about Saturninus? (I’m not arguing that Saturninus was a good guy, but the treatment of Saturninus in everything I’ve read is uniformly negative, so I’m wondering what the other side could be to that story.
Sulla may be portrayed as a sympathetic villain but he’s still an unapologetic villain. We just see his pov