Yes, I know, it’s an illustration of Julius Caesar’s assassination. Bear with me, nobody paints the Gracchi.
Today, I saw screaming on Facebook about civility, screaming on Facebook about political correctness, and screaming on Facebook about Justice Kennedy’s retirement. I saw a whole lot of screaming on Facebook that liberals and the Left need to block any Trump nomination just as hard as the Republicans blocked Obama’s nomination.
Let me tell you a story. It’s not a story you’ve been hearing much recently. It’s not a story about Germany in 1932 or American concentration camps in 1942. But it’s a story that needs telling, especially today.
In 146 BC, Rome ascended triumphant over her enemies. They burned and salted Carthage and so won the Mediterranean, and burned and salted Corinth, and so won the rich and decadent East. They had been at war for generations, and had only narrowly escaped death at the hands of Hannibal. Rome was joyous.
And then Rome came home.
The militia men who served in Rome’s armies were the “citizen-farmers,” who left their plows to take up swords and defend their city and then come home to finish bringing in the harvest. But the Punic Wars had been going on for generations, and those citizen-farmers hadn’t seen their farms in years. When they came home, there were no crops to harvest, nor unrusted tools to plow and sow and harvest with. Their land was worthless, and they were destitute. The senators, the nobles of Roman society, and the knights, their partners-in-crime, bought up the “worthless” land for a little money so that veteran Gaius Agricola and his family could go to Rome and look for work there. They planted vast plantation estates to grow wine and olives instead of wheat, and made vast profits off it because they could use slaves.
Oh yes, the slaves. Rome had always had slaves, like any other society in 146 BC, but the wars had brought more slaves. First hundreds. Then thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. So when Gaius Agricola made it to Rome to seek work, there was no work for an honest citizen to do. All the work was being done by enslaved Celts, and Greeks, and Carthaginians. Rome had once been an economy with slaves, but after their greatest victory over their greatest foe, they became an economy of slaves.
With the citizen-farmers driven from their land for the benefit of the senators and the knights, there was no one left to fill the legions. The legions were drawn from the free farmers, and there were no free farmers any more, and so the legions left to “pacify” Greece and Africa were dangerously undermanned.
And the Senate did nothing, because they might lose their investments and, anyway, Gaius Brutus who could trace his ancestry all the way back to the founding of the Republic had to keep up with Gaius Valerius who could do the same, and had a governorship over in Macedonia. They were too afraid of each other, too caught up in their petty rivalries, to do a thing for poor Gaius Agricola and his family, now starving on the very streets outside the Forum.
In all quarters of Roman society, the mos maiorum, “ways of the elders,” civility, political correctness, respect, decency, whatever you want to call it, was starting to break down.
And then came Tiberius Gracchus.
Tiberius represented the People. Nevermind that he was one of the most well-connected men in Rome, whose grandfather Scipio Africanus had defeated Hannibal, whose mother was already being held up as a demigoddess of Roman femininity, Tiberius Gracchus represented the People. He ran for tribune (think House Representative) on one platform and one platform only: land reform. He wanted to break up the huge plantations and get the land back to Roman citizens, to till crops and raise children and man the legions. The Senate laughed. They had seen such efforts before, and always quashed them, usually at the outset when, by tradition, civil and decent tribunes brought bills before them first, before the People had a chance to see it.
So Tiberius Gracchus went to the People first. He brought his bill before the Assembly of the People, who supported it full-throatedly. But when the time came for a vote, his fellow tribune, Marcus Octavius, did something no civil or decent tribune would do. At the Senate’s prompting, he vetoed the proposal. The People could not vote on it. Since Octavius and the Senate were being so uncivil, Gracchus decided to meet fire with fire, and ordered a vote for his fellow tribune to be deposed. Octavius vetoed that, too. Octavius, in fact, vetoed everything that came before the Assembly, delaying and delaying until the People and Gracchus dropped the whole thing. It was a shocking act of incivility, one that threatened the function of the entire Roman government.
So Gracchus had him removed by force. He ordered some strong, patriotic, upstanding gentlemen (mostly unemployed, mostly starving) to carry him out of the Forum. This struck at the heart of Roman civility and decency, since tribunes were “sacrosanct” and legally could not be attacked. But surely Octavius didn’t really count as a tribune any more, did he? He’d vetoed the People’s vote and needed removing. And since there were still plenty of strong, patriotic, upstanding gentlemen in the Forum, everyone agreed that this must be so.
Tiberius Gracchus got his vote. That just left the Senate. And the Senate had already shown him how to get them to comply. He simply vetoed the City of Rome out of ever functioning. Even things as picayune as opening the city gates in the morning or approving the previous meeting’s minutes were vetoed. After all, Octavius had done it first, and on the Senate’s orders. But strong, patriotic, upstanding gentlemen (mostly friends of senators and knights, mostly well-fed and well-armed) started swarming around the tribune, despite his ancient claim to civility and sacrosanctity, so the People formed a guard around him, willing to muss up any of the Senate’s nefarious agents provocateur. …or anyone suspected thereof, or anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time, but accidents happen.
Tiberus Gracchus got his vote. But the Senate, feeling uncivil, voted his new “agrarian commission” no budget to work with, hoping to strangle the duly appointed commission on the purse string, contrary to all Roman decorum. Gracchus feared other shenanigans the Senate might pull, so he staffed the commission with men he could trust, reliable men, men of his own family and blood.
The matter hung there until fate intervened, in the form of a foreign power injecting itself in Rome’s affairs. The King of Pergamum (near where Constantinople would one day rise) died and bequeathed his kingdom to “the people of Rome.” The Senate had long held the power to decide how to spend the government’s money, a power its namesakes and descendants across the world enjoy to this day. Gracchus had none of it, declaring that the King bequeathed his fortune and his land to “the People of Rome,” the People that he represented, and that the money belonged to the Agrarian Commission. Rumors started to swirl that the King of Pergamum had promised Gracchus “a purple robe and a royal crown” and that he was preparing to declare himself the King of Rome.
The Senate, fearing for the ancient laws and customs of the free Republic that they commanded, knew they had to act, especially as Gracchus had just won his second election as tribune of the People. And Gracchus had already shown them how. The People assembled on the Capitol Hill, where no forged weapons were allowed by ancient custom, decency, and common civility. Tiberius Gracchus began to speak, and a fight broke out at the edge of the Capitol, rumors flying that it was slaves armed by the Senate to kill Gracchus and his supporters. They took up the benches and chairs of the Capitol, wooden and thus never forged, and promised violence in kind. Gracchus tried to shout over the din, then to gesture, but the crowd saw his head jerk as if he were begging for a crown.
Tiberius Gracchus died of a chair leg to the head, slaughtered on the sacred Capitol. Three hundred of his loyal followers died with him. Their blood stained the Forum.
The next century would see Gracchus’ little brother, Gaius, slaughter a messenger in the Forum and himself be slaughtered, the Senate and the People take up arms against one another, the rise of ambitious generals like Marius and Sulla who crushed Rome underfoot with their armies in order to wipe out their political opponents and more importantly each other, the death of free speech in Rome, the Civil Wars of Pompey and Caesar and Antony and Octavian, proscription lists of every man you didn’t like made to commit suicide by cop (or roving army, whatever), Cicero’s tongue and hands mounted on the walls of the Forum, and, finally, the re-establishment of Roman monarchy under Augustus, on the pretense that he was “just the first citizen of the Republic.”
Some of those horrors were from the Populares, the followers of the Gracchi brothers, who preached equality and the rights of the People, even if it means a mob-appointed king. Some of those horrors were from the Optimates, the followers of the Senate, who preached rule of law and the Republic, even if it crushed Rome’s most vulnerable citizens. If you can untangle who was worse, you can untangle who first breached civility, the mos maiorum, between Gracchus and the Senate. And if you can, you’re a better historian than I am.
“Civility,” like “political correctness,” is just another word for treating people with respect. And, like “political correctness,” it can be twisted into an instrument of power and control. The fact that the instrument can be misused does not erase the fact that it has a proper use. The Trumpist agenda and its Republican supporters is horrific, from concentration camps for profit in the southwest to the systematic erasure of voting rights, and it began with Trump’s own disgust with anything remotely resembling civility, decency, or the mos maiorum. The Republicans first denied Obama his Supreme Court election in defiance of all tradition, and now, all we want to do is deny Trump his, for good reasons and for bad.
But we are going to need political correctness, civility to come back, sometime, somewhere, or nothing will be spared.
What’s the road we should take instead? Fucked if I know. But I know exactly where the road marked “fuck civility” leads. It’s the road the Romans, both Optimate and Populare, both Senate and Gracchi, took in the years after 146 BC. It’s the road that leads to Augustus and then to Diocletian*. It’s a road that takes its sweet time getting there, and spares no one along the way.
There has got to be a better way, because that road leads nowhere.
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*FUCK Diocletian. Seriously.
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