"Agrarian reform" just doesn't resonate with an American audience. It's kind of like soccer that way – no matter how many Peles or Manchester Poshes the people trying to sell it bring in to dress it up, it still seems kinda plodding, boring, and...well, just something that gets talked about in other parts of the world, but not here. Similarly, "wealth redistribution" sounds almost quaint, like it belongs in the eras of Mao hats and goateed Russians – besides, certainly no American political leader ever seriously entertained such anti-free-market notions as capping inheritances, guaranteeing citizen incomes and pensions, and limiting work hours to improve quality of life.
Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight your resident historiorantologist will be taking another look at demagogues – only this evening's doomed saviors are decidedly more secular in nature than last week's. They also illustrate a weird parallel between the Late Roman Republic and Louisiana during the Great Depression.
Historiorant: During the discussion phase of last week's bloviation on Demagogues, two of my favorite diarists/commenters brought up a couple of widely divergent points. rserven noted that a diary on demagogues should make more than a passing mention of Huey Long, while melvin asked about a long-ago request for a moonbatification of the Gracchus brothers. Here's my attempt to mollify them both by way of tortured analogy, along with a note to Land of Enchantment that "Populism on the Plains" (or something like that) will be coming up in a couple of weeks. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention that EmperorHadrian took a look at the Gracchi in Hadrian's Forum: Gracchus; Subverting Rome's Constitution, Part 1 back on June 9th.
UPDATE: This diary got so long that I had to split it in two – the Kingfish will have to get served up in a new Part in what's become a mini-series on demagogues. – u.m.
A Tribune of One's Own
The Roman Republic was much better than our own at acknowledging the differences and disparities between the classes - whereas we tend to try to bury our de facto sociopolitical hierarchy beneath platitudes and divisive legislation, the Romans actually wrote a caste system into their earliest laws. The organization of the Republic allowed for varying rights and representation, with class, ancestry, and income serving to assign citizens to various assemblies. The Senate, the assembly of the patrician class, was one such law-making body; the Concilium Plebis, or Plebian Council, was another – and at its zenith, it and the officials it selected as Tribune held legislative and veto powers over even the most powerful patricians. Perhaps this goes back to the early years of their respective foundings: the U.S. managed to rationalize the tandem existence of self-evident truths and slavery for 80 years, then codified racial segregation for another hundred after that; in the village of Rome, the oppressed masses forcibly asserted their rights within two decades of the establishment of the Republic in 509 BCE.
The story goes that in 494 BCE, the common people had grown a bit disillusioned after the results of Rome's revolt against monarchy a quarter-century earlier became clear: they had simply exchanged oppression by a single tyrant for oppression by a small body of rich people. Motivated by an early stirring of what American patriots would later term "no taxation without representation," the plebs organized, thought up the concept of the general strike, and removed themselves from the city, moving en masse outside the walls, most likely to the Aventine Hill. They left the patricians to rule over a ghost town complete with every means of agricultural and economic production on hand, but for the most important one: labor.
- Weird Historical Sidenote: In Italy in 1924, a movement calling itself the Aventine Secession coalesced around opposition to a Fascist-backed law that said that the largest party that gained 25% of the vote for parliament would be awarded 2/3s of the seats (who says Republicobstructionist cloture votes are anything new?). The idea was for the left to go on strike against parliament by denying the political process the benefit of its legislators' presence, and so motivate King Victor Emmanuel II to remove Mussolini as prime minister, but it backfired when the King appeased the bully and the Aventines found themselves isolated and conveniently grouped together for fascist torment. According to the Wikipedia article,
The Secession served only to aid Mussolini in his consolidation of power, as it eliminated all parliamentary opposition, and deprived the King of any excuse to dismiss him. From this position, Mussolini faced only the obstruction of the King in the fortification of his role as the sole leader of Italy.
Realizing that their pampered lifestyles did indeed ultimately derive from the sweat and blood of the underclass, the patricians were forced to concede a great deal of political power to get the common folk to come back to work. They allowed for the establishment of an office of Tribune of the Plebs, or
tribunus plebes, the accumulated powers of which eventually came to rival those of the most powerful Senators (the actual installation of the first People's Tribune could have been as late as 471 BCE):
- intercessio - the ability to "veto" acts of magistrates, the senate, or assemblies
- sancrosanctitas - personal inviolability that prevented a tribune’s life being threatened or his actions being hindered
- ius auxilii - the right to assist a distressed plebeian
- ius agendi cum plebe - the authority to call the plebeians together into their own "assembly"
The Struggle of the Orders (pdf), via byu.edu/faculty/Huntsman
Tribunes got other super-powers, too: he could inflict capital punishment in the course of the performance of his duties – a favorite tribunal threat was to have his enemies cast from the Tarpeian Rock, a cliff overlooking the Forum – and his sacrosanctity was so great that the plebs took an oath to kill anyone who harmed a tribune during his term of office. The Plebian Assembly, too, assumed ever-greater powers over the course of a couple of centuries of intrigues with the Senate, culminating with its legal status as the only body which could pass plebiscites, or laws binding upon the entire Republic. A tribune's position of leadership over such an assembly (there were upwards of ten tribunes at a time, but only a couple were vested with the most awesome powers), coupled with the authority to veto (Lat.: "I forbid") decrees of praetors and consuls, made the office one of the most powerful in the entire Republican government.
That's not to say the plebs didn't have to fight for their rights along the way; they always had to be ready to unify and stand firm on the picket lines, and twice more in Roman history they were called upon to leave the city in order to remind the patricians of the importance of reform. After the first secessio plebes created the post of tribune, another was called in 449 BCE, this time to force the adoption of a standardized code of laws in the form of the Twelve Tables. Though about as fair and balanced as a trial conducted by Nancy Grace, the laws inscribed on the Twelve Tables were an important advancement over the unwritten, whimsy-based legal system of the priests that presided before their enactment.
The final secession occurred in 287 BCE, to force the adoption of the lex Hortensia, the piece of legislation that gave the Plebian Assembly its Republic-wide law-passing power. Laws were also changed and adopted to allow for the election of plebs to any position in the state, including priesthood, and to allow for marriage between plebs and patricians. From there, it only took a couple of generations for a new class of wealthy plebs – a kind of nouveau riche aristocracy – to evolve out of the marriage (literally) of those who could control the workforce and the hoi polloi, and those who needed the mob to support the ambitions of their families.
As Plebian as George W. Bush
By the 2nd century BCE, an unusual system of dualistic power reigned in the Roman Republic – with a little imagination, one might see it as a consul at the head of a mostly-compliant legislature, looking after the interests of the wealthy and the socio-religiously conservative, while everyone else has a real president to check the consul's power and reject any laws enacted by the patrician aristocracy that s/he deemed harmful to the people. It was probably inevitable that such a powerful position would become a target of conniving patricians. It was also probably inevitable that someone, at some point, would try to make the ultimate power grab by illegally unifying the powers of the tribunes and consuls into one office, and eventually that's what happened – lest we forget, the Roman government was stamping res publica on its coinage until the end of its days, right through the period that we modern types now clearly see as wholly autocratic and imperial.
Tiberius coins
Some of the most essential groundwork for the eventual fall of the Republic and rise of emperors in Rome was laid through the efforts of a pair of ostensibly-plebian demagogues a century before the Civil War that installed the Caesar formerly known as Octavius – and, by extension, credit must also go to the wise-marrying ancestors of the Brothers Gracchus. There were consuls and tribunes both in the backgrounds of the Gracchi, though their family name (traced, of course, through paternal lines) continued to reflect their humbler origins – "gracchus" means "grackle" or "blackbird."
If the chart proves too small to read, try here
Both Tiberius (the elder brother, 163-132 BCE) and Gaius (154-121 BCE) have familiar-sounding names, especially if you're a sci-fi dork like me – here's a little photo guide to help avert confusion:
These are the Gracchus Brothers; Tiberius is on the right
Via westminstercollege.com:
Don't confuse him with James Tiberius Kirk:
Nor his brother with Gaius Baltar, disgraced (but recently acquitted) ex-president of the humans on Battlestar Galactica:
Baltar "If I Did It" image from Battleblog Galactica
They had different styles and approaches to persuasion; as always, I'll defer to Plutarch on the matter:
" ...Tiberius was gentle and composed, . . . whereas Gaius was highly strung and impassioned. Thus, when they addressed the people, Tiberius always spoke in a decorous tone and remained standing in the same position, whereas Gaius was the first Roman to stride up and down the Rostra...Gaius's oratory tended to electrify his audiences and was impassioned to the point of exaggeration, whereas Tiberius was more conciliatory and appealed to men's sense of pity...Tiberius was mild and reasonable, while his brother was harsh and impulsive...but in respect of bravery in the face of the enemy, justice in their dealings with the subject peoples, scrupulous attention to their public duties, and restraint in the pleasures they allowed themselves, both were exactly alike. "
Tiberius Gracchus (Life), Plutarch, 2., via web.mac.com
The Gracchi were part of an increasingly powerful faction known as the Populares. Their opposition, comprised mainly of Rome's equestrian class (a little more middle class than the blue-blooded patricians; eventually, Gracchi reforms won many equestrians over to the Populare side) and old-school families who based their conservative stances on "Roman tradition," were called Optimates. Over the centuries, the wealthy had – of course, as the wealthy always do – rigged the political system in their economic favor, and the Optimates, of whom Tiberius initially counted himself a member, did not surrender their privileged status without resistance up to and including violence.
It isn't like reform was an unjustified pipe dream for the Populares and the masses who followed them – in reality, Rome's socioeconomic system had outstripped many of the class-based divisions that had worked back in the days when they were no more than a tiny city periodically warring with close-by neighbors. By the 130s BCE, Rome had conquered most of Italy and had brought Carthage, its greatest Mediterranean rival, to her knees, but in a sense, these wars created as many problems as they solved. The army was still made up entirely of landowners (no estate-less city dwellers need apply) who were signed on for the entire length of a campaign, regardless of whether it was a short, victorious one, or a long, dragged-out, Bush-type morass.
With the men off to war for years at a time, women and children were left to run the farms, where they often ran into financial problems – only to find that the only way to alleviate their poverty was to sell their farm to the wealthy landowners, who added the lands to their huge latifundia estates. Even those veterans who returned to farms they still owned (and who hadn't lost an arm or a leg in battle) found themselves unable to compete with the increasingly-large slave labor forces being used by the latifundia owners. The irony here is that it might very well have been the veteran's campaigning that brought those slaves to the guy who used them to undersell him out of home and business.
Over time, the decline in the number of small landholders had a debilitating effect on military recruitment – it'd be like The Decider trying to run his war using only college graduates, while at the same time rescinding degrees for non-payment of loans. Add to this the influx of slaves from the newly-conquered territories, plus the disenfranchisement of Rome's Italian allies (who suffered all the problems of the city's idle poor, without even the feel-good measure of having a vote in a citizen's assembly), and you have a situation ripe for demagoguery.
Enter Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus
It Didn't Have to Be This Way
As noted above, the Gracchi were from a powerful family, and at first their connections seemed to be pointing the elder brother toward rising stardom among the Optimate faction. He got a bit of the requisite military experience under his belt during the Third Punic War (149-146 BCE), serving under the wing of the general C. Scipio Amelianus, grandson-by-adoption of Scipio Africanus and the husband of Tiberius' sister, Sempronia. Having acquitted himself adequately during the siege and destruction of Carthage, Tiberius went on the post of quaestor in Numantia (part of the province of Hispania) under consul Gaius Hostilius Mancinus, and there things started to fall apart.
The campaign against the Celtic tribes of Numantia did not go well; Tiberius was forced to hastily arrange a humiliating treaty with them in order to avoid seeing a Roman force of about 20,000 destroyed by a Celtic army less than half that size. Back in Rome, the treaty was seen as a surrender document, especially by Tiberius' former benefactor, Scipio Amelianus, who denounced his brother-in-law as a cut-and-runner. The incident seriously damaged Tiberius' reputation (it didn't help matters that a few years later, as consul, Amelianus led the brilliant final siege and destruction of Numantia), and caused him to hate his former Optimate buddies so much that he advocated a wholesale restructuring of Roman land ownership to get back at them.
Actually, that might be considered pejorative conjecture – who am I to know what motivated Tiberius? An excellent set of articles at unrv.com looks at it from several angles:
What could be seen on one side as an attempt to rectify a dangerous and debilitating social system was viewed on the other as nothing more than a power grab and a flagrant attack on the Republican institutional ideas of the time. One-upmanship was countered with arguments and these countered with physical force. As the results at stake grew, so did the egos of the individual players. The goal of the betterment of society as a whole was lost, and victory became the only objective. As ambition and personal motivation became the predominant theme of the Late Republic, the social fabric that long held Rome together, against all odds, was being torn apart.
The Gracchi Brothers
The Populares party was convinced of the need for reform in many facets of Roman society. Some members, perhaps Tiberius included, simply liked to oppose the established authority, and he may have been used in his early days by the more prominent members. Whether Tiberius himself was sincere in his reforms to benefit the common man is impossible to ascertain, but regardless, he developed into an icon of equality for all people of Rome. Badly tarnished by the rejection of his treaty, Tiberius took up the challenge of reform with a zeal previously un-encountered in the Roman forum.
Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus
By 133 BCE, the plebs had elected Tiberius their new Tribune, and he set about his land reform programs with a vengeance. He infuriated the Senate by bypassing the customary discussion and debate, and instead taking his proposed legislation straight to the citizen assemblies, where it passed overwhelmingly. Octavius, the other Tribune that year with veto power, was more Ken Salazarish, and so was willing to do the Senate's bidding by killing the bill. In retaliation, Tiberius spent the rest of the year obstructing and vetoing everything the Senate and Octavius, the other Tribune, tried to do.
At the next citizen assembly, Tiberius again got his Agrarian Bill voted on and passed, and again Octavius vetoed it. This time, the elder Gracchus tried to have Octavius physically ejected from the Tribunate – an unprecedented violation of a tribune's sacrosanctity – but even though this failed, his bill carried the voting over Octavius' veto anyway. Ignoring a veto was patently illegal, but that's exactly what Tiberius and his supporters did; the Senate, probably worried that thwarting the mob meant courting destruction, was forced to acknowledge the Agrarian Bill as law. Still, they weren't happy, for as web.mac.com reports,
Gracchus was tinkering with the very balance of power in the Roman state, and others less principled than he would follow beyond where he led. The agrarian laws were forced through, but much ill will remained. The Senate pulled strings to make actually implementing the law extremely difficult, including a refusal to provide sufficient funding for the commissioners, who had to compensate former owners.
Upwards of 75,000 farms may have been created, and social conditions improved measurably, but Tiberius' relations with the Senate didn't get any better as the two sides began to argue over how to pay for the expensive redistribution. Since the King of Pergamum (Anatolia) had conveniently died without heirs and willed most of Asia Minor to Rome, Tiberius thought it would be a good idea to use some of Pergamum's tobacco settlement bequeathed wealth to pay for the land reforms and to divvy its land up among the commoners; Senators, for the most part, saw the king's gift as a chance to enlarge their holdings and enrich themselves with minimal effort. Using the mob as a tool of intimidation, Tiberius bullied the Senate, secure in the knowledge that as long as he held the office of Tribune, he was sacrosanct and couldn't be touched (let alone executed for hubris). That it was illegal for him to stand for election again didn't seem to faze Tiberius; he simply ignored the inconvenient law and started campaigning anyway.
This was finally too much for the Senators. A group of legislators and their supporters, led by Tiberius' own cousin, Scipio Nasica, armed themselves and descended upon a Populare campaign rally, swinging their clubs until the demagogue lay dead. The old general/brother-in-law, Scipio Aemilianus, was called in to restore order, but he kind of pulled a Biden when he was publicly questioned about Tiberius' death and shouted at the jeering crowd of Populares:
"I have never been scared by the shouts of the enemy in arms. Shall I be frightened by your outcries, you stepsons of Italy?"
Not long after that, in 129 BCE, Scipio Aemilianus went to bed and never woke up. Cicero outright accused one of Tiberius' followers of killing him, but the murder was never solved, most likely for political reasons. Fearing retribution, Scipio Nasica became the first Pontifex Maximus to ever leave Italy, but neither flight nor his office as Rome's highest priest could save him – he was found poisoned in Pergamum, most likely a victim of Gracchi supporters.
Scream II's Rules for Sequels, #2: The death scenes are always much more elaborate, with more blood and gore
Having his brother being beaten to death in a mob scene didn't dissuade Gaius Gracchus from engaging in Rome's hard-core politics, regardless of how sequels are supposed to turn out. His career began in 126 BCE, when he traveled to Sardinia to serve as quaestor under consul Lucius Aurelius Orestes, but since Sardinia had been long pacified, young Gaius never had to conduct an embarrassing treaty with people the Senate considered a beatable enemy.
After his return to Rome, Gaius got himself elected Tribune of the Plebs in 123 BCE, and quickly showed himself to be every bit the radical reformer his older brother had been. His first order of business was to exile a consul who had been instrumental in his brother's downfall (the guy had, after all, had Tiberius' body cast into the Tiber, there to rot unburied, as well as conducted a post-mortem purge of Populares), then Gaius moved against the system as a whole:
- He proposed a law stating that anyone removed from office by the will of the people would be ineligible for future positions, which would curtail the careers of the corrupt
- He moved that judges be chosen from the equestrian class rather than the traditional patricians, cutting into patrician prestige as well as a significant source of revenue – the courts were all about extortion and bribery
- He made equestrian contractors, rather than patrician agents, the tax-collectors in the new regions of Asia Minor. He further secured middle class support by initiating public works projects (baths, harbors, etc) whose construction and business primarily benefited the equestrians.
- He re-instituted his brother's agrarian reforms (they'd been kyboshed shortly after Tiberius' murder), and put protections in place against corrupt officials
- Instead of promising a chicken in every pot, Gaius offered up legislation that would allow citizens to buy grain from the state at half the going rate. This made him very popular among anybody who had to work for a living.
There was nary an aspect of Roman social, political, and economic life untouched by Gracchi reforms. Historioranter Velleius Paterculus, writing a century after Gaius' death, said of him,
" He was for giving the citizenship to all Italians, extending it almost to the Alps, distributing the public domain, limiting the holdings of each citizen to five hundred acres, as had once been provided by the Licinian law, establishing new customs duties, filling the provinces with new colonies, transferring the judicial powers from the senate to the equites, and began the practice of distributing grain to the people. He left nothing undisturbed, nothing untouched, nothing unmolested, nothing, in short, as it had been.
History of Rome, II, vi. 3-6, via web.mac.com
In the end, it was that first idea mentioned by Paterculus that proved the undoing of Gaius Gracchus. Citizenship for all Latins and Latin status for all Italian allies would have vastly expanded the pool of people who loved and supported him, but in addition to the Senate (who saw little inducement to further subdivide and share power), it alienated his Roman mob base like conservative Republicans running away from Bush's "amnesty bill." Though he was re-elected Tribune in 122 BCE, Gaius' support of the unpopular legislation left him weakened enough that the Senate could start to swiftboat him, and that they did.
Through a Senate-friendly Tribune named Lucius Drusus, the old Optimate types started covertly introducing legislation that was far more liberal than that of Gracchus – so much so that the reformer was left looking like a mossback conservative. Drusus' reforms only targeted the commoners of Rome, and so carried with them the added benefit of nativist mob appeal. Gaius' support eroded away as Drusus rode the wave of public opinion, despite the fact that his "reform legislation" was only meant to be temporary, and would be in force just long enough to ensure the repudiation of the Gracchi. When the elections of 121 BCE came around and Gaius campaigned for a third term as Tribune, it was a measure of the fickle mood of the mob (and, perhaps, Gaius' naivety) that he lost.
Finally realizing that he'd been played, Gracchus led his followers into the streets, with the protests eventually coalescing into a large, angry, and – this is important – armed mob on the Aventine Hill. This played right into the hands of Consul Lucius Opimius, who declared the protest an "insurrection" and began seeking extraordinary powers from a willing Senate. They gave Opimius the Senatus Consultum Ultimatum ("ultimate decree of martial law"), under which he organized a force of legionary infantry and auxilia archers and attacked the Gracchi "army."
Gaius, like his brother, died amidst the mob that had propelled him to power. He was likely stabbed by one of his slaves, but stories differ as to the slave's motives – some say Gracchus ordered his own death as his enemies closed in, while others hold that the slave was doing the bidding of the enemies of the Gracchi, and took Gaius by surprise. Regardless of the circumstances, at the end of the day, he and his brother's reforms were dead, and in the purges that followed the massacre, upwards of 3000 reform advocates were rounded up and strangled.
The legacy left behind by the Gracchi, however, was tremendous. As this article nicely sums up,
Some historians blame the Gracchi for setting a train of events in motion that would later destroy the Roman Republic. The balance of powers between Senate and assemblies, nobles and commoners, was more fragile than Romans at the time believed. Whether by stepping upon the Senate's turf (regarding foreign policy, taxation and financing, or the simple moral suasion of asking the Senate first for approval of laws submitted to the people), there is no question that the Gracchi both preferred taking legislation directly to the people. They were thus responsible for upsetting that balance of power. Alternatively, it can be argued that the Gracchi led the first serious attempts to reform Roman constitutional weaknesses from within the system, and that the Senators proved themselves incapable of reform by their blatant resort to violence in removing both brothers and their adherents. Perhaps most dangerously, the relations between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, Italian and Roman, were embittered by Romans who saw in the murders of the Gracchi over a ten-year-period the hopelessness of seeking reforms through legal channels. The genie of political violence was out of the bottle; it would not go in again. From this time onward, the tensions between Senate and people became ever more embittered. Similarly, ambitious young tribunes without the principles of the Gracchi would make use of their position as rabble-rousers to enhance their own political careers.
Is it redundant to ask if any of this sounds familiar?
Historiorant:
Populism, wealth redistribution, ambitious young tribunes using their positions as rabble-rousers to enhance political careers? Envy, ego, and the manipulation of power on a broad scale? Personal enmity resulting in political violence? Such things could never transpire in the land of free market competition, could they?
I'm afraid the answer to those and other pressing questions will have to wait until next time, as once again, it seems your resident historiorantologist seems to have bitten off more than one diary's worth of material. The Huey Long portion already extends six single-spaced pages beyond this pretty good stopping point, so for tonight, I think I'll curtail what otherwise might wind up being the Longest Diary Ever.
Tune in next week – about the same bat time, same bat sites* - for the exciting conclusion: Of Grackles and Kingfish, Part II – An American Gracchus?
- a new entrance to the Cave of the Moonbat will soon be available through BitsOfNews.com! More on this exciting development soon!
Historically hip entrances to the Cave of the Moonbat can be found at Daily Kos, Progressive Historians, and Never In Our Names