Cicero - Anthony Everitt [12]
Even before Marius’ army reforms, wiser heads in the Senate realized that the land question had to be addressed. They backed a leading aristocrat, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, who was elected Tribune in 133 BC, to introduce a land-redistribution scheme. During riots in and around the Forum, a group of Senators lynched him. A Roman historian wrote in the following century: “This was the first time in Rome’s history that citizens were killed and recourse had to brute force—in both cases without fear of punishment.… From now onwards, political disagreements which had previously been resolved by agreement were settled by the sword.”
Ten years later Tiberius’s brother, Caius, returned to the fray. In addition to land reform, he tried to address another challenge facing the Republic, to which diehards in the Senate were turning blind eyes. The conquered and partly assimilated communities in Italy were becoming more and more envious of the rising tide of wealth flowing exclusively into Rome from its imperial possessions.
Italy was a patchwork quilt of communities and ethnic groups. Many of them had their own non-Latin languages—among them the civilized Etruscans, who had once dominated Rome when it was little more than a village, the fiercely independent Samnites in the impregnable Apennines, and the Volscians to the south of Rome. In the heel of Italy there were a number of well-established city-states founded by Greeks in the preceding four centuries. Some communities were granted Roman citizenship, but this was a comparatively rare privilege; others were given only what were called Latin Rights, a package of legal entitlements and duties which allowed a limited degree of involvement in the political process. Certain city-states or tribes kept a theoretical independence and were honored as Allies but exercised only a local autonomy. AS a security measure, a network of citizen settlements, coloniae, peopled by army veterans, was established across the peninsula.
The Italian communities were obliged to supply soldiers to fight the Republic’s wars, but they received nothing in return. The peninsula was becoming increasingly Romanized, but most of its inhabitants were not allowed to be Roman. Unless they were soon granted full rights of citizenship, an armed showdown was going to be unavoidable. Caius Gracchus’s attempt to give them what they wanted was a sensible move but deeply unpopular with public opinion in Rome. Suspecting that his brother’s fate awaited him, he armed a bodyguard and turned to violence. The Senate declared a state of emergency and he and some of his followers were summarily killed in a skirmish.
Now an external threat intervened. From 113 BC word filtered south that two huge Germanic tribes, the Cimbri and the Teutones, were on the move, traveling slowly from their homes in the Jutland area with their wives and children and without any ascertainable destination. It was feared that they intended to invade Italy.
A hero came forward to meet the hour: Caius Marius, who not only professionalized the army but also transformed its tactics. The basic unit was the legion, a body of between 4,000 and 5,000 men. It had traditionally fought in a formation of three lines; Marius changed that, dividing the legion into ten subgroups or cohorts. These were more mobile than the lines and could be deployed flexibly to meet threats on the battlefield as they arose. In 102 BC, when Cicero was