After 150, however, the prestige of the senate was in decline and the body seemed less able to control ambitious individuals. When the war against Carthage became
Stalemated in 148 Scipio Aemilianus, whose early career in Spain and Africa had been brilliant, won a consulship and the command on the behest of a tribune, who threatened to use a veto to block the consular elections if Scipio did not get the command. Scipio was under age and had never been praetor but the senate was unable to block the appointment. In 142 Scipio became a censor, seeing off a rival candidate whom the senate supported. It was said that he was surrounded by excited crowds who clamoured for his appointment. In 134 he gained a second consulship, again through popular support, in order to finish off the Spanish war at a time when second consulships were forbidden by law. In 143 Appius Claudius Pulcher celebrated a triumph even though the senate had refused him one.
These developments probably reflected growing popular unrest. The long wars in Spain, where soldiers served for an average of six years, were increasingly unpopular (hence the desire to appoint commanders to finish the job even when they were technically not qualified to take command). Recruitment was faltering and there was growing tension between the consuls, whose interest was in raising large armies, and the tribunes who, in their role of representatives of the people, resisted new levies of citizens. The cockpit of politics remained a small area in the centre of Rome and popular involvement, even if only in crowds who shouted their approval or disapproval of speakers, was a constant backdrop to unfolding events.
It used to be believed that these tensions were intensified in the second century by changing patterns in agriculture, notably the emergence of large commercial ranches, the latifundia, and the increased use of slaves. It was argued that this was followed by a corresponding decline in smaller peasant landholdings, leading to the distress of the dispossessed. The sources, however, are difficult to interpret. There are the census returns (of male citizens) that can be used to estimate the population of Italy, and its growth or decline. Literary sources, such as Cato’s treatise on agriculture, provide some limited evidence and this has been enlarged by field-walking which attempts to trace changing patterns of rural settlement. However, the sheer diversity of Italy’s geography, between mountain communities and those on the plains, and between Romanized and native peoples, make generalizations from these combined sources impossible. We now know that the buying up of land by the elite had begun much earlier than the second century so that this was not a new, sudden phenomenon. Moreover these wealthy landowners preferred to own a number of medium size, rather than enormous, estates. Their economies were a mix of cereals, vines, olives, and stock with orchards providing a variety of fruit. This was not ruthless commercialization, even though expanding trade, which provided further opportunities for classes below the senatorial families, who disdained such things, brought new export markets, especially for wine from Campania. (The growth of trade can be noted in simple changes such as making amphorae more robust so that they can be shipped more easily over long distances.) Earlier estimates that the countryside may have been flooded with slaves (as many as 2 million in one case) are now being revised downwards—there is simply not the evidence to show a slave economy, although most farms did employ slaves alongside free casual labour and tenants. (See Nathan Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families, and
Death in the Middle Republic, Chapel Hill, NC, 2004, for a recent assessment of this difficult area.)
The view now, therefore, is that land hunger was not primarily caused by the smaller landholder being dispossessed from his land by commercial pressures. An increase in rural population may have been just as important as a cause of land shortages. Disruption was certainly more abrupt during the wars and confiscations of the first century Bc (see Chapters 23-4) than it was in the second century. The ‘pull’ factor of the enormous growth of Rome now seems as significant as ‘push’ factors in the countryside with the poor naturally attracted by economic opportunities of city life. One estimate is that a population of 200,000 in Rome in the early second century reached one million by the time of Augustus two centuries later. This is where there was a new tension. There were hurried attempts to improve the water supply of the city in 144 and a crisis in the corn supply in 138. Evidence for actual unrest is limited but it was in these years that the tribunes appear to have become more active on behalf of the citizenry, as has already been seen in relation to military recruitment. In 139 a tribune managed to get a law passed introducing a secret ballot for the annual election of magistrates, the first of several ballot laws. In 133 this revival of tribunate confidence was to drive the Republic into political crisis.
Note: The introduction of Roman coinage
The earliest unit of coinage was the as, issued as a pound (324 grams) of bronze in the early third century BC. This was 300 years after coins had first been used in Greece and Rome’s minting of coin might be seen as part of its adoption of Greek culture. Not long afterwards the first silver coins appeared and about 214 the two metals were given an equivalent by setting a silver denarius as equal to ten asses. The as was gradually reduced in weight until it was the equivalent of 54 grams in bronze. The denarius was also revalued (in 141 Bc) so as to be equal to sixteen asses. As the as became less valuable a new coin, the sestertius, 2.5 asses, was minted and this in its turn was later revalued to four asses. The sestertius was used freely as a measure of wealth or an annual payment, such as a soldier’s salary. With the Romans absorbing so much silver from booty and mines in Macedonia, production of the denarius soared. By the middle of the second century BC Rome was minting as many denarii in a year as some Greek cities would in a century and the silver denarius became the standard coin of the Mediterranean world until the third century AD. (See the entry ‘Roman coinage’ in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, revised 3rd edition, Oxford, 2003, for further details as well as Christopher Howgego, Ancient History from Coins, London and New York, 1995 for more general background.)
World History
