The central paradox of Roman society – that savage divisions of class could coexist with an almost religious sense of community – had evolved through the course of its history. A revolution against the exactions of authority had, of course, inspired the Republic’s very foundation. Even so, following the expulsion of Tarquin and the monarchy, the plebeians had found themselves quite as tyrannised by the ancient aristocracy of Rome, the patricians, as they had ever been by the kings. There were no snobs like patrician snobs. They had the right to wear fancy shoes. They claimed to hobnob with gods. Some even claimed to be descended from gods. The Julian clan, for instance, traced its lineage all the way back to Aeneas, a prince of the Trojan royal house, who in turn had been the son of Venus herself. This was a class of pedigree bound to give one airs.
Indeed, in the early years of the Republic’s history, Roman society had come perilously close to ossifying altogether. The plebeians, however, refusing to accept they belonged to an inferior caste, had fought back in the only way they could – by going on strike. The site of their protests, inevitably, had been the Aventine.* Here they would periodically threaten to fulfil Remus’ original ambitions by founding an entirely new city. The patricians, left to stew in their own hauteur across the valley, would gracelessly grant a few concessions. Gradually, over the years, the class system had become ever more permeable. The old rigid polarisation between patrician and plebeian had begun to crack. ‘What sort of justice is it to preclude a native-born Roman from all hope of the consulship simply because he is of humble birth?’15 the plebeians had demanded. No justice at all, it had finally been agreed. In 367 BC a law had been passed that permitted any citizen to stand for election to the great offices of the state – previously a prerogative of the patricians alone. In acknowledgement of their traditional intimacy with the gods a few minor priesthoods had remained the patricians’ exclusive preserve. To the pure-bred families who had found themselves swamped by plebeian competition, this must have seemed small consolation indeed.
Over the centuries, many clans had faded away almost completely. The Julians, for instance, had found that descent from Venus did little to help them in reaching the consulship: only twice in two hundred years did they win the ultimate prize. Nor was it only their political stock that had gone down in the world. Far from the rarefied heights of the Palatine, stuck in one of the valleys where the poor seethed and stank, they had seen their neighbourhood gradually decline into a slum. What was once the small village of Subura had become the most notorious district in Rome. Like a stately ship taking in water, the lineaments of the Julian mansion had been submerged behind brothels, taverns and even – most shocking of all – a synagogue.
Privileges of birth, then, guaranteed nothing in Rome. The fact that the descendants of a goddess might find themselves living in a red-light district ensured that it was not only the very poor who dreaded the consequences of failure. At every social level the life of a citizen was a gruelling struggle to emulate – and, if possible, surpass – the achievements of his ancestors. In practice as well as principle the Republic was savagely meritocratic. Indeed, this, to the Romans, was what liberty meant. It appeared self-evident to them that the entire course of their history had been an evolution away from slavery, towards a freedom based on the dynamics of perpetual competition. The proof of the superiority of this model of society lay in its trouncing of every conceivable alternative. The Romans knew that had they remained the slaves of a monarch, or of a self-perpetuating clique of aristocrats, they would never have succeeded in conquering the world. ‘It is almost beyond belief how great the Republic’s achievements were once the people had gained their liberty, such was the longing for glory which it lit in every man’s heart.’16 Even the crustiest patrician had to acknowledge this. The upper classes may have sniffed at the plebs as an unwashed rabble, but it was still possible for them to idealise an abstract – and therefore safely odourless – Roman people.
Hypocrisy of this kind virtually defined the Republic – not a byproduct of the constitution but its very essence. The Romans judged their political system by asking not whether it made sense but whether it worked. Only if an aspect of their government had proven to be inefficient, or unjust, would they abolish it. Otherwise, they would no more have contemplated streamlining their constitution than they would have been prepared to flatten Rome and build her again from scratch. As a result, the Republic was as full of discrepancies and contradictions as the fabric of the city, a muddle of accretions patched together over many centuries. Just as the Roman streets formed a labyrinth, so the byways that a citizen had to negotiate throughout his public life were confusing, occluded and full of dead ends. Yet they had to be followed. For all the ruthlessness of competition in the Republic, it was structured by rules as complex and fluid as they were inviolable. To master them was a lifetime’s work. As well as talent and application, this required contacts, money and free time. The consequence was yet further paradox: meritocracy, real and relentless as it was, nevertheless served to perpetuate a society in which only the rich could afford to devote themselves to a political career. Individuals might rise to greatness, ancient families might decline, yet through it all the faith in hierarchy endured unchanging.
For those at the bottom of the heap, this resulted in painful ambivalences. Legally, the powers of the Roman people were almost limitless: through a variety of institutions they could vote for magistrates, promulgate laws, and commit Rome to war. Yet the constitution was a hall of mirrors. Alter the angle of inspection, and popular sovereignty might easily take on the appearance of something very different. Foreigners were not alone in being puzzled by this shape-shifting quality of the Republic: ‘the Romans themselves’, a Greek analyst observed, ‘find it impossible to state for sure whether the system is an aristocracy, a democracy, or a monarchy’.17
It was not that the people’s powers were illusory: even the grandest candidates for magistracies made efforts to court the voters and felt not the slightest embarrassment in doing so. Competitive elections were crucial to the self-image as well as the functioning of the Republic.
It is the privilege of a free people, and particularly of this great free people of Rome, whose conquests have established a world-wide empire, that it can give or withhold its vote for anyone, standing for any office. Those of us who are storm-tossed on the waves of popular opinion must devote ourselves to the will of the people, massage it, nurture it, try to keep it happy when it seems to turn against us. If we don’t care for the honours which the people have at their disposal, then obviously there is no need to put ourselves at the service of their interests – but if political rewards are indeed our goal, then we should never tire of courting the voters.18
The people mattered – and, what is more, they knew that they mattered. Just like any electorate, they delighted in making candidates for their favours sweat. In the Republic ‘there was nothing more fickle than the masses, nothing more impenetrable than the people’s wishes, nothing more likely to baffle expectation than the entire system of voting’.19 Yet if there was much that was unpredictable about Roman politics, there was more about it that was eminently predictable. Yes, the people had their votes, but only the rich had any hope of winning office,* and not even wealth on its own was necessarily sufficient to obtain success for a candidate. The Roman character had a strong streak of snobbery: effectively, citizens preferred to vote for families with strong brand recognition, electing son after father after grandfather to the great magistracies of state, indulging the nobility’s dynastic pretensions with a numbing regularity. Certainly, a Roman did not have to be a member of the ruling classes to share their prejudices. The aim of even the most poverty-stricken citizens was not to change society, but to do better out of it. Inequality was the price that citizens of the Republic willingly paid for their sense of community. The class-based agitation that had brought the plebeians their equality with the patricians was a thing of the long-vanished past – not merely impossible, but almost impossible to conceive.
That this was the case reflected an irony typical of the Republic. In the very hour of their triumph the plebeians had destroyed themselves as a revolutionary movement. In 367 BC, with the abolition of legal restrictions on their advancement, wealthy plebeianshad lost all incentive to side with the poor. High-achieving plebeian families had instead devoted themselves to more profitable activities, such as monopolising the consulship and buying up the Palatine. After two and a half centuries of power they had ended up like the pigs in Animal Farm, indistinguishable from their former oppressors. Indeed, in certain respects, they had come to hold the whiphand. Magistracies originally wrung from the patricians as fruits of the class war now served to boost the careers of ambitious plebeian noblemen. One office in particular, that of the tribunate, presented immense opportunities for grandstanding. Not only did tribunes have the celebrated ‘veto’ over bills they disliked, but they could convene public assemblies to pass bills of their own. Patricians, forbidden from running for plebeian offices, could only watch on in mingled resentment and distaste.
It could, of course, be dangerous for a tribune to overplay his hand. Like most magistracies in the Republic, his office presented him with pitfalls as well as opportunities. Even by the standards of Roman political life, however, the unwritten rules that helped to determine a tribune’s behaviour were strikingly paradoxical. An office that provided almost limitless opportunities for playing dirty was also hedged about by the sacred. As it had been since ancient times, the person of a tribune was inviolable, and anyone who ignored that sanction was considered to have laid his hands upon the gods themselves. In return for his sacrosanct status a tribune was obliged during his year of office never to leave Rome, and always to keep an open house. He had to pay close attention to the people’s hardships and complaints, to listen to them whenever they stopped him in the street, and to read the graffiti which they might scrawl on public monuments, encouraging him to pass or obstruct new measures. No matter how overweening his personal ambition, the aristocrat who chose to stand for election as a tribune could not afford to appear haughty. Sometimes he might even go so far as to affect the accent of a plebeian from the slums. ‘Populares’, the Romans called such men: politicians who relied on the common touch.
Yet at the same time as he upheld the interests of the people, a popularis also had to respect the sensibilities of his own class. It was a balancing act that required enormous skill. If the tribunate was always regarded with suspicion by the more conservative elements in the nobility, then that was in large part because of the unique temptations that it offered to its holders. There was always a risk that a tribune might end up going too far, succumbing to the lure of easy popularity with the mob, bribing them with radical, un-Roman reforms. And, of course, the more that the slums swelled to bursting point, and the more wretched the living conditions for the poor became, the greater that risk grew.
It was two brothers of impeccable breeding, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who finally made the fateful attempt. First Tiberius, in 133 BC, and then Gaius, ten years later, used their tribunates to push for reforms in favour of the poor. They proposed that publicly held land be divided into allotments and handed out to the masses; that corn be sold to them below the market rate; even, shockingly, that the Republic should provide its poorest soldiers with clothes. Radical measures indeed, and the aristocracy, unsurprisingly, was appalled. To most noblemen, there appeared something implacable and sinister about the devotion of the Gracchi to the people. True, Tiberius was not the first of his class to have concerned himself with land reform, but his paternalism, so far as his peers were concerned, went altogether too far and too fast. Gaius, even more alarmingly, had a consciously revolutionary vision, of a republic imbued with the values of Greek democracy, in which the balance of power between the classes would be utterly transformed, and the people, not the aristocracy, would serve as the arbiters of Rome. How, his peers wondered, could any nobleman argue for this, unless he aimed to establish himself as a tyrant? What struck them as particularly ominous was the fact that Tiberius, having finished his year of office, had immediately sought re-election, and that Gaius, in 122 BC, had actually succeeded in obtaining a second successive tribunate. Where might illegalities such as these not end? Sacred as the person of a tribune might be, it was not so sacred as the preservation of the Republic itself. Twice the cry went up to defend the constitution and twice it was answered. Twelve years after Tiberius was clubbed to death with a stool-leg in a violent brawl Gaius, in 121, was also killed by agents of the aristocracy. His corpse was decapitated, and lead poured into his skull. In the wake of his murder three thousand of his followers were executed without trial.
These eruptions of civil violence were the first to spill blood in the streets of Rome since the expulsion of the kings. Their grotesque quality vividly reflected the scale of aristocratic paranoia. Tyranny was not the only spectre that the Gracchi had raised from Rome’s ancient past. It was no coincidence, for instance, that Gaius died on the spot most sacred to the plebeian cause, the Aventine. By taking refuge there, he and his supporters had deliberately sought to identify their cause with that of the ancient strikers. Despite the fact that the poor failed to rise in his support, Gaius’ attempt to stir long-dormant class struggles struck most members of the nobility as a terrifying act of irresponsibility. Yet the reprisals too filled them with unease. Head-hunting was hardly the practice of a civilised people. In the lead-weighted skull of Gaius Gracchus an ominous glimpse could be caught of what might happen were the conventions of the Republic to be breached, and its foundations swept away. It was a warning that temperament more than fitted the Romans to heed. What was the Republic, after all, if not a community bound together by its shared assumptions, precedents and past? To jettison this inheritance was to stare into the abyss. Tyranny or barbarism – these would be the alternatives were the Republic to fall.
Here, then, was one final paradox. A system that encouraged a gnawing hunger for prestige in its citizens, that seethed with their vaunting rivalries, that generated a dynamism so aggressive that it had overwhelmed all who came against it, also bred paralysis. This was the true tragedy of the Gracchi. Yes, they had been concerned with their own glory – they were Roman, after all – but they had also been genuinely passionate in their desire to improve the lot of their fellow citizens. The careers of both brothers had been bold attempts to grapple with Rome’s manifold and glaring problems. To that extent, the Gracchi had died as martyrs to their ideals. Yet there were few of their fellow noblemen who would have found that a reassuring thought. In the Republic there was no distinguishing between political goals and personal ambitions. Influence came through power, power through influence. The fate of the Gracchi had conclusively proved that any attempt to impose root and branch reforms on the Republic would be interpreted as tyranny. Programmes of radical change, no matter how idealistic their inspiration, would inevitably disintegrate into internecine rivalries. By demonstrating this to the point of destruction, the Gracchi had ultimately stymied the very reforms for which they had died. The tribunes who followed them would be more careful in the causes they adopted. Social revolution would remain on permanent hold.
Like the city itself, the Republic always appeared on the point of bursting with the fissile tensions contained within it. Yet just as Rome not only endured but continued to swell, so the constitution appeared to emerge stronger from every crisis to which it was subjected. And why, after all, should the Romans not cling to an order that had brought them such success? Frustrating, multi-form and complex it may have been, yet these were precisely the qualities that enabled it to absorb shocks and digest upheavals, to renew itself after every disaster. The Romans, who had turned the world upside down, could be comforted by knowing that the form of their republic still endured unchanged. The same intimacies of community bonded its citizens, the same cycles of competition gave focus to its years, the same clutter of institutions structured its affairs.
And even blood spilled in the streets might easily be scrubbed clean.