Gaius Sempronius Gracchus
Gaius or Gaius Sempronius Gracchus (c. 154-121 BC) was a Roman politician and soldier of the 2nd century BC C., member of a notable senatorial family of the Sempronia gens and brother of Tiberius Gracchus.
He was part of the agrarian commission created by his brother, despite his youth, and was serving in Hispania when his brother was assassinated. He pursued a policy of confrontation with the aristocratic oligarchy that ran the Senate, which in turn tried to impede his public career by prolonging his stay in the provinces, prosecuting him, and opposing his fellow tribunals. During his first plebeian tribunate he had a law passed by which all citizens residing in Rome were entitled to a free monthly ration of wheat; Thus, he won the sympathy of the people and attracted numerous impoverished peasants to the city. His popularity waned after his re-election, when he introduced a law to grant Roman citizenship to Latin communities and Latin status to Italian allies. The frontal opposition to these measures from the optimates, who used his colleague Marco Livio Druso to veto his actions and weaken his influence, and his absence from Rome organizing the colony in Carthage prevented him from being elected to a second consecutive tribunal charge. Declared a public enemy by the Senate, he committed suicide assisted by a slave and his possessions were confiscated.
He was noted for his oratorical qualities, described as vigorous and passionate, although he also demonstrated considerable self-control and persuasive talent. After his death, he regained the favor of the Roman people who raised statues to him, consecrated the place where his body was found, and offered daily sacrifices to the gods in his honor.
Birth and family
Gaius Gracchus was born at the end of the year 154 B.C. C. or beginning of the following in a senatorial family of plebeian origin, the Sempronios Gracos (a branch of the gens Sempronia), which had been giving consuls to the Republic for a century. His father, Tiberio Sempronio Graco, was an important member of the senatorial oligarchy, twice consul, governor in Hispania and in Corsica-Sardinia, censor and ambassador in Greece and Asia Minor. His mother, Cornelia, was the daughter of Scipio Africanus and was taken in antiquity as an example of a Roman matron.
He had eleven siblings, of whom only Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and Sempronia reached adulthood. The first promoted an agrarian law contested by the oligarchy and was lynched by the leaders of the Senate who opposed his reforms. The second was married to her cousin, Scipio Emiliano, in an unhappy marriage that had no children.
Gaius Gracchus, like his brother, chose a wife outside the Scipio circle. The chosen one was Licinia, the youngest of the daughters of Publius Licinius Crassus Dives Muciano, with whom she had two children, the eldest, a man of the same name of his father, who died in his youth shortly after him; the youngest, Sempronia, was the wife of Décimo Junio Bruto, so she is considered the mother of Brutus Albino, one of the tyrannicide.
Beginning of his public career
He began his political career serving as Tribunus Militum in 134-132 BC. C., during the war against Numancia, under the orders of his relative, and later enemy, Scipio Emiliano, while his brother Tiberio Sempronio Graco held the position of tribune of the plebs, developing the reform measures agrarian. During the siege of Numancia, his brother called him to be part of the land distribution commission. Thus, in the year 133 B.C. C. he was elected member of the agrarian commission (of the IIIviri agris dandis assignandis iudicandis ), a position that he would hold until his death. That same year, Tiberio died near the Capitol in an armed confrontation with the conservatives led by his cousin Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapion. At the age of twenty-two, Gaius Gracchus became the political heir of his brother and owner of the immense estate of the Gracchi.
He publicly defended Vetius in relation to the persecutions of the supporters of his brother Tiberius (132 BC), shortly after supporting the project of the tribune Papirio Carbón to achieve the interaction of the tribunate, which would confront him with Scipio (131 BC).
Gaius was appointed quaestor to the consul Lucius Aurelio Orestes in Sardinia in 126 BC. C., island in which he would remain as proquestor in 125-124 a. C. The accusations for his mismanagement during his magistracy as well as for instigating rebellion in the colony of Fregellae, leveled against him by the senatorial opposition, turned out to be completely useless.
Mob Tribune and Social Reforms
In 123 B.C. C. he was elected tribune of the common people and continued the political projects that Tiberio could not carry out, introducing some reforms in the constitution to try to implement the agrarian reform.
Among his first bills, the following stand out:
- The lex ab actis by which a magistrate dismissed by the people was excluded from investing in any other magistracy, in an attempt to improve the conditions of tribunal action against the will of the Senate majority.
- The lex de capite civis, also known as the lex Sempronia de provocatione, proposed bringing to trial anyone who had had citizens executed without having been allowed to appeal to the people, which had happened in the case of his brother.
- The lex ne quis iudicío circumveniatur, closely related to the previous one, provided for the imprisonment of any magistrate who interfered in achieving the conviction of an innocent person.
But his three great laws, voted in 122 B.C. C. were undoubtedly:
- La agrarian lawby which the triunviral commission of its legal powers was re-established, allowing the commission to receive powers to dispose of ager publicus of the provinces.
- La Federal law which forced the State to sell to the Roman population cereal at a uniform and low price.
- La Judicial law, unfortunately ill known, that abolished lex Calpurnia of 149 B.C. and ordered the recruitment of judges of the courts only among citizens who did not belong to the Senate order, which undoubtedly benefited members of the equestrian order.
In relation to the objectives of this last law, a lex Sempronia de vectigalibus was promulgated by which from now on the resources coming from Asia would be leased in Rome by auction, thus favoring the influential and corrupt publicans, who with the leasing of the collection and taxes in this province of Asia, subjected it to a monstrous looting in the light of all sources.
Cayo Graco carried out important reforms of a constitutional nature such as the lex de Provínciís consularibus, which forced the Senate to determine in advance the elections, which would be the senatorial and praetorian provinces, and a lex militaris, which exempted minors under seventeen years of age from military service. His program for the construction and repair of roads throughout the Italian peninsula developed economic resources and provided work for the poorest class.
Opposition to his reforms and his death
The senatorial oligarchy, impotent before the transformation into laws of these projects, finally found the moment and the means to get rid of such a dangerous tribune for their interests. In 122 B.C. C., when Cayo Graco was in Carthage founding the colony of Junonia in its vicinity, the tribune of the plebs Marco Livio Druso, a collaborator with the opposition, presented a series of demagogic projects -mostly unrealizable- that managed not only to make the the political environment upon Cayo's return, but rather seriously undermine his popularity.
The Rogatio Sempronia de sociis et nomine Latino, which proposed citizenship to Latin allies and the right to vote for Italians, was his last project and sparked violent senatorial opposition. In the same year 122 B.C. C., when the Rogatio Minucia was going to be discussed, Caius was preparing his third election as tribune of the plebs (unheard of), together with Marco Fulvio Flaco. However, they lost the election, and rather than resign themselves to seeing their political program stopped by the conservative opposition, they tried to impose themselves through violence.
The Senate decreed for the first time a senatus consultum ultimum that granted extraordinary powers to the consuls Quintus Fabius Maximus and Lucius Opimius to contain the disturbances and restore order. Skinny and Gracchus were declared enemies of the Republic: the first died along with his children and the second fled with his faithful slave Philocrates, whom he ordered to kill him when they were hiding in the Furrina forest, on the slopes of the Janiculum, a hill located on the west bank of the Tiber river.
The last followers of Gracchus, sheltering on the Aventine, could not resist the assault of the consular forces. Three thousand Gracchus supporters were then executed and their property confiscated.[citation needed] A series of laws enacted in the following years, such as the so-called lex Thoria, destroyed the work of the Gracchi. However, with the bankruptcy of the immemorial fortress mos maiorum -the established practice-, Roman politics would never be the same again, and, closed the possibility of internal reforms of the Republic itself, the regime Republican would completely collapse within a century.