Restraint, Conflict, and the Fall of the Roman Republic by Paul Belonick;

Author:Paul Belonick;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Similarly, Gaius Gracchus could say that “it is inescapable that a man who approves of dishonest men will disapprove of honest men,” and from that premise could conclude that those who killed his brother—great nobles all—were in fact pessimi. The trouble was that Gaius’ enemies and Lucilius’ marks would have agreed with these all-purpose statements. The nub of debate was over who qualified as honestus, and in these decades answers were unpredictable. Everyone might believe in the abstract that a luxurious or libidinous man was malus. But Tiberius Gracchus’ episode revealed that a senator husbanding a fine estate was now a divisive character to a degree never seen before: intemperate and greedy (and thus no legitimate judge) to some, traditional and upright (and thus worthy of deference) to others.61

The last key after-effect was an important mental leap that sprang from this toggle-switch thinking. We have seen several men to this point in Roman history be unrestrained. Such obstinacy, however, had never been enough to merit death. Yet around the time of the Gracchi a new metaphor (if not yet the legal title, which would come) seems to have been applied for the first time to troublesome citizens: the concept of the hostis, an impudent foreign enemy against whom the use of ruthless force was second nature to the martial Romans.62 Scipio Nasica believed that Tiberius Gracchus’ unprecedented lack of restraint meant that he was actually trying to destroy the Republic. In 131 bc, Scipio Aemilianus judged Tiberius iure caesum (“justly killed”), and amplified the point in 129 when a mass of Gracchan supporters shouted for his death as a “tyrant,” to which Scipio casually replied, “They want to kill me—just what one would expect from the those who make war on the fatherland.”63 In toggle-switch thinking, normative disagreement was “war,” and there was no middle ground—and thus no quarter.

A decade later the hostis metaphor recurred when one of Gaius Gracchus’ supporters killed one of the consul Opimius’ attendants, and Opimius called on a senatorial mob and foreign archers to help put Gaius’ followers down as though enemies of the state. Even those opposed to Opimius adopted the metaphor: some felt that Opimius’ dedication of his temple to concordia too much resembled a victorious general arrogantly celebrating a triumph over foreign foes.64 According to many modern scholars, black-and-white exempla of legendary citizen-hostes such as Sp. Maelius, Sp. Cassius, and M. Manlius Capitolinus also gained currency around this time to help justify the brothers’ murders, and indeed at this juncture orators began to use such stories (with their simplistic messages) to justify violence against other malefactors.65 Certainly, if one truly believed that one’s fellow senators—even one’s own relatives, in Scipio’s case—were on the same moral plane as alien hordes, then mutual deference was in rocky straits indeed.

In sum, in these uncertain decades all agreed that the restraint ideals were powerful, wished to be perceived as following them, and attached political success to them. The political verdict on a man continued to be evaluated in terms of self-control.

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