Senators under fire

There were, however, more than purely humanitarian issues behind this compensation law. In line with much of the rest of his programme in the 120s BCE, Gaius was also attempting to police the activities of senators. His reform had as much to do with the internal politics of Rome as with the suffering of provincials abroad. According to the regulations, it was only senators and their sons who were liable for prosecution under the law, even though many other Romans overseas were in a position to enrich themselves at the expense of the locals. And the juries who tried them were to be drawn exclusively and specifically from a class of those who were not senators, from the ranks of the Roman ‘equestrians’, or ‘knights’ (equites).

This was a technical but crucial distinction. The equites stood at the top of the Roman hierarchy of wealth, substantial property owners on a scale that set them apart from the vast majority of ordinary citizens, and they were often closely connected with senators, socially, culturally and by birth. They were a much larger group than the senators, many thousands by the end of the second century BCE, as against a few hundred senators. In fact, in strictly legal terms, senators were simply that subgroup of knights who had been elected to political office and so had entered the senate. But the interests of the two did not always coincide, and the equestrians were a far more diverse category. Among them were many wealthy men from the towns of Italy – their number increasing dramatically after the Social War – who would never have dreamt of standing for election at Rome, or men like Cicero’s influential friend Atticus, who chose to stay on the sidelines of politics. There were also many who were involved in the kind of financial and commercial activities from which senators were formally debarred. Although there were, as usual, several ways to circumvent it, a law of the late third century BCE prohibited senators from owning large trading ships, defined as those that held more than 300 amphorae.

Some equestrians were involved in the potentially lucrative business of provincial taxation, thanks to another law of Gaius Gracchus. For it was he who first arranged that tax collecting in the new province of Asia should, like many other state responsibilities, be contracted out to private companies, often owned by equestrians. These contractors were known as publicani – ‘public service providers’ or ‘publicans’, as tax collectors are called in old translations of the New Testament, confusingly to modern readers. The system was simple, demanded little manpower on the part of the Roman state and provided a model for the tax arrangements in other provinces over the following decades (and was common in other early tax raising regimes). Periodic auctions of specific taxation rights in individual provinces took place at Rome. The company that bid the highest then collected the taxes, and anything it managed to rake in beyond the bid was its profit. To put it another way, the more the publicani could screw out of the provincials, the bigger their own take – and they were not liable to prosecution under Gaius’ compensation law. Romans had always made money out of their conquests and their empire, but increasingly there were explicitly, and even organised, commercial interests at stake.

The compensation law drove a wedge between senators and equites. The original initiative combined the protection of Rome’s subjects with the control of senatorial (mis)conduct. By specifying a wholly equestrian jury, it aimed to ensure that there was no collusion possible between a senatorial defendant and a jury of his friends, and – just to be on the safe side – equestrians with senators in their close family were also forbidden to participate in these trials. But the upshot was to bring senators and equites into conflict and sometimes to catch in the crossfire the very provincials whom the law had been passed to protect. It was often alleged, for example, that far from acting as impartial assessors of senatorial corruption, the equestrian jurors were such partisan supporters of the tax contractors that they would routinely return a guilty verdict on any innocent provincial governor who had tried to confront the contractors’ depredations. One notorious case concerned a senator, convicted of extortion by a biased equestrian jury, who was so confident of his honourable record, reputation and popularity that he went into exile in the very province that was supposedly the scene of his crimes. There is a whiff of senatorial special pleading here. But even so, such stories point to a long-running controversy about who could be trusted to sit in judgement on Roman behaviour abroad: senators or equites? Over the decades following the passage of Gaius’ law, reformers of different political persuasions reassigned the juries back and forth between the two groups.

This was still a live issue when Cicero prosecuted Verres in 70 BCE, and it gave that trial an extra political edge. Ten years earlier, Sulla, predictably, had handed over to senatorial jurors not only the compensation court but also a range of other criminal courts that had been established later to deal with such charges as treason, embezzlement and poisoning. By the time of the prosecution of Verres, the backlash against this was growing, and – in the written text at least – Cicero repeatedly urged the jury to convict the defendant partly to demonstrate that senators could be trusted with passing fair judgement on their peers. The plea came too late. Soon after the trial ended, new legislation, which set the pattern for the future, shared the juries between knights and senators. Verres’ trial was the last occasion in this extortion court when a jury of senators tried a fellow senator: another of its claims to fame.