A Sickness in Society
The influx of booty and tribute from the conquests created a class of extremely rich Romans – senators who were sent to the wars as generals and governors, and business men (knights) who farmed the taxes of the new provinces and provisioned the armies. Above all, each new victory brought in thousands of slaves: during the last two centuries BC the Mediterranean slave trade became an enormous business, with Rome and Italy being the main destination markets. During this period Roman society became a more slave-based society than any other before or since in history.
Many slaves were set to work on the land of the senators and other wealthy men, who set about developing their estates along new, much more businesslike lines. The ordinary farmers could not compete with these new estates, and more and more small farmers lost their lands to their rich neighbours. The estates grew larger, and more small farmers left the land. Many of them headed for Rome, where they swelled the ranks of a growing class of landless and rootless people.
Murderous Politics
The combination of great wealth and mass poverty in Rome itself poisoned the political climate there. Political gang-masters put votes and mobs up for sale, corruption spread, and Roman politics became dominated by feuding factions. These were not modern political parties representing broadly different ideologies, but there were ideas around which different factions grouped. One set of ideas was taken up by those (a minority in the senate) who wished to see land redistribution – estates limited in size and the balance of land distributed to the landless poor – and the opposing groups (the majority) wished to preserve the interests of the “best people” (i.e. themselves) intact.
In 133 a famous incident led to the death of a reformist politician, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, the first murder in Roman politics for centuries. The death of his brother, Gaius, in similar circumstances followed ten years later. Factionalism and strife steadily increased thereafter.
Professional Armies, Ambitious Generals
The decline of the small holder in the Italian countryside had another profound effect on Roman politics. He was the traditional mainstay of the Roman army, buying his own weapons and taking his turn with the troops. This system had already come under strain with Rome’s armies spending years abroad on foreign campaigns; indeed it was the lack of menfolk at home that often undermined a smallholding family’s ability to keep its farm. With the decline of the numbers of smallholders the filling of the armies by this class became impossible. To deal with this problem, the consul Marius opened recruitment to the landless classes (105 BC).
This had the effect of tying the interests of the soldiers much more tightly to their general than before – they now looked to him to ensure that they were provided them with land after their service had ended. Commanders could count on his soldiers putting their loyalty to him before their loyalty to the state, and the great Roman armies being fielded from this time on behaved increasingly like the generals’ private forces. In an effort to control the generals, their opponents in the senate would try to block their efforts to achieve land distribution in favour of their men, with the predictable result of throwing the generals and their men even more closely together, and provoking them to achieve their ambitions by extra-constitutional means.
War with the Allies
The last phase of the Republic, then, was dominated a succession of struggles between leading generals and their opponents in the senate on the one hand, and between the rival generals themselves on the other. But what set the stage for this phase was a fierce and entirely needless war between Rome and many of her long-standing Italian allies, in 90 BC.
This came about through the senate’s tendency to treat the allies with increasing arrogance, and exclude their citizens from the benefits of empire. The Allies’ frustrations boiled over into outright war, which belatedly prompted the senate to grant all Italians (south of the Po) full Roman citizenship. Many cities laid down their arms, but a few hill tribes were not defeated until 88 BC.
Civil War
In the aftermath, the famous old general Marius, who had won great fame by defeating a serious German invasion of northern Italy between 104 to 100, attempted to have himself elected by the People’s Assembly to the command in the East, where king Mithridates of Pontus had massacred thousands of Roman citizens. The general who had in fact been appointed to the command by the senate, Cornelius Sulla, then marched his army (which had been engaged in mopping up operations against recalcitrant Allies in southern Italy) to Rome and drove Marius into exile. He then set off for the eastern provinces.
As soon as Sulla was gone Marius and his supporters returned, seized control of Rome and carried out a vicious purge of their enemies. Marius died shortly after this, but his supporters retained influence in Roma.
In 82 BC Sulla returned with his victorious army (though Mithridates had by no means been totally defeated) and in his turn seized control of Rome. He had himself appointed dictator, and embarked on a reign of terror against his real and perceived enemies – much of the property confiscated was distributed to his veterans. Sulla also carried out a programme of reforms, aimed essentially at strengthening the power of the senate, and then, in 79 BC, retired from public life.
Next:
The History of Ancient Rome, Part 7: Pompey and Caesar
Article © TimeMaps 2007.
Last updated: 13th August 2007
