Transcription
Once he had fought off the accusations of cowardice that ungrateful Romans had heaped upon him, as he returned from the Spanish wars, Tiberius looked around him at Italy, and what did he see? Not one free man working in the fields, not one soldier he had fought with at Carthage or in Hispania tilling their own farms. No, he saw slaves, the captives of war, working vast estates for absentee landlords who sat simply counting their money in Rome.
This could not stand. This would be his cause. For centuries Rome had struggled with how to distribute its land. When gains were made by conquest, they were to be "ager publicus": public land. These lands were then to be rented out to the people so that all might reap the rewards of Roman victory. But early in Rome's history the rich began to rent out all of this land, so a law was made that no man might own more than 500 acres of the public land. For a short while that worked. But then, rich family started inventing false names and renting land under those, until at last the fraud became so public that the law was ignored entirely.
Wealthy landowners held vast estates in their own names, pushing off those who would work the land for themselves and their families. And with the prolonged wars that Rome found itself in, and the great influx of cheap labor in the form of slaves, those middle-class Romans, those yeoman farmers of the Roman world who are being taken from their land by the wars for such long periods of time, found themselves bankrupt and replaced with the very spoils, the very slaves their duty had brought to Rome.
So Tiberius resolved to bring back the ancient laws, and see that no one owned more than 500 acres. That the new lands won in conquest would be distributed fairly rather than simply gobbled up by the small fraction of a percent of Romans who could afford sprawling estates. So, he got himself elected Tribune of the Plebes. For despite his lofty ancestry, he himself was a plebeian and not of the senatorial rank. As tribune, he set about the work of righting this wrong.
He began by consulting many of high repute: the Pontifex Maximus, the Console, and when he wrote his proposition, he wrote it in terms befitting his disposition. For he wasn't a hot-tempered man, but rather a man of sober and measured character. And so he wrote a law that didn't punish those who had for so long been ignoring the rules. In fact, it asked that they do nothing more than surrender the illegally held land, after the State had paid them for it.
He appealed to the people, saying "the wild beasts that roam over Italy have every one of them a cave or a lair to lurk in, but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common air and light indeed, but nothing else. Houseless and homeless, they wander about with their wives and children. And it is with lying lips that their imperators exhort the soldiers in their battles to defend sepulchre and shrines from the enemy, for not a man of them has an hereditary altar, not one of these many Romans an ancestral tomb, but they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury. And though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of Earth that is their own."
But despite this, he was met with opposition. Those who held the most land, the richest of the rich, accused him of trying to foment a revolution. They spent their money and their effort to tell the poor that they would be better off without the redistribution of land that Tiberius offered. That it was unroman, an attempt to simply make a Gracchi into a king. But those efforts did them no good, for the people of Rome, the many homeless and itinerant soldiers who had wandered to the capital in search of work knew what had been done to them. They had experienced it first hand. And so, Tiberius's law passed.
But the powerful members of the Senate convinced one of the other tribunes to veto the law. This rarely used power of the tribunes was meant to safeguard the people. The tribunes were empowered to veto any legislation passed by the Senate or the assembly, in order to protect the Plebeians from the arbitrary exercise of power. And as such, a Tribune's veto was absolute. There was no way to overrule the Tribune's veto once invoked, unless the Tribune himself revoked it. So that was that. This law was dead.
And so Tiberius introduced a harsher, more punitive version of the same law and demanded that it be voted on. But every time the law was to be voted on, the other Tribune was there to veto it. So Tiberius used his veto to block every single law that was trying to be passed. He also used his powers to stop money being taken out of the Treasury, so the government ground to a halt. So the rich and the powerful began to plot against Tiberius, and he himself began to walk about armed. And the fabric starts to tear.
The whole Roman system was built on the fact that, sometimes, offices need extraordinary powers to be versatile enough to do what the State and the people required, and that ideas of honor, tradition, and social ostracism would ensure that the officeholders acted in good faith, for the Republic was held together by tradition ,and an understanding that those in politics, even if out for their own personal gain, would operate largely for the good of the State. The rules and the powers of offices were treated with respect as things to help create a functional government and society, not as systems to be gamed and exploited to their limit for whatever one's momentary ends were.
The Tribunary veto was one such thing. For centuries it had been respected, used sparingly to oppose actions that couldn't be stopped any other way. It was an extreme measure that forced the Senators to pause and reflect on how their actions were affecting the people. It was a power granted in the trust that it would be used appropriately, and not abused for political disputes. But here that restraining power is broken. And once broken it can never be repaired.
But it wasn't just the veto. The very office of Tribune was abused as well. For Tiberius came to another radical policy, one which wasn't technically against the law, but violated everything the republican process stood for. He wanted to overturn the results of the last election. He moved to have his opponent removed from office by popular vote, so that he could get his reforms passed. So he gathered the tribes and before then pleaded with Octavius, the other tribune, to step down, but Octavius would not.
So one by one the tribes voted, as was the Roman way. When at last there was but one more tribe required to vote against Octavius to strip him of his tribunate, Tiberius halted the voting, and again turns to Octavius, and asked him to step down. But after a long pause Octavius again said that he would not. And in came the fateful vote. Tiberius told one of his men to drag Octavius from the rostra. He was no longer a tribune. And as he was dragged down from the platform, the crowd surged forward. Tiberius pleaded with them, and the wealthy men of the state tried to ward them off, but to no avail. Now that Octavius was no longer sacrosanct, they wanted blood. One of Octavius's nearest servant had his eyes ripped out, and Octavius himself barely escaped. But at last, Tiberius's agrarian reform was passed. Join us next time for the aftermath.