Book Two, Letter 10

To Cicero, on Tiberius Gracchus.

October 2018 CE

Dear Cicero,

I just wanted to write to you. I haven't ready any more of your stuff, I've been busy with Thucydides. He sure can talk.

The weeds do not grow on the farm Cicero, the drought here is sinking its teeth in. The October heat makes its promise of a summer we will all have to suffer through. Still, all that flowers, does so with great vigour and happiness. All the brilliant yellows and whites and pinks of Spring are dazzling to my eye as I walk the paths of the garden. The flowers seem to shout, to sing: Stop! Stop and see us. Stop and look at us, look at the world, for this moment will not come again.

It's an old, familiar message, but its easy to forget, isn't it.

Stop and smell the roses.

For me, this has been a year of finishing things, Cicero. I'm reaching fruition on some long term goals, projects I have worked diligently at for many years. With a steady hand upon the wheel, I have never taken my eye off these goals. Writing. Music. Art. This year, my novel reached an important landmark in the editing process – the difficult third draft. This year I completed recording my solo music album. This year I finished the triptych painting I started three years ago. The painting is to be a gift for the man in whose home recording studio my album was made.

A year of endings.

So, it's finally time I talked to you about the Catiline conspiracy. The Roman Republic was not a house of straw that fell down in a strong wind. It was an international system of political and military rule that broke down under its own weight over many passing decades. You can find cracks anywhere you look, but a good place to start, a dramatic way to begin the story, is the Gracchus brothers

Before the brothers, though, was their mother Cornelia, and their father, Tiberius (the elder)

                                                                                                  

Cornelia Graccha (Africana) rejecting the offer of marriage

                  from King Ptolemy.

                        Cornelia, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus

After the elder Tiberius Gracchus' death around 150 BCE, Cornelia (Tiberius' wife) took charge of the family estate and their twelve children. She is remembered as a discrete, noble and devoted mother. When the King of Egypt, Ptolemy, asked for her hand in marriage, she turned him down, preferring to stay a widow. In the course of her life, nine of her children died, leaving a daughter, Sempronia, and two sons.

In my own life, Cicero, after my family was torn apart by domestic violence, my mother took my sisters and I to live in a new town, where she raised us mostly by her own solitary efforts, putting the three of us through school, taking us to church, feeding us, clothing us, and providing a home for us during the difficult years following her separation and divorce from my father.

I know that I have often spoken very highly of my my father, but he was not always the kind, wise gentleman he has become in his twilight age, and the noble devotion and courage my mother displayed towards my sisters and I, shepherding us away from his violence and towards a better future, has impressed upon me a powerful respect for the heroism of ordinary women.

My mother, Patricia, was not rich like Cornelia. My mother was not born into a family of power and influence. No kings courted her hand in marriage, no servants waited on her hand and foot.

My mother is a great reader of books. When I visited her today, on the dining table was a copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a new illustrated edition. She read me some passages, and I shared a something from Marcus Aurelius, and from Epictetus.

We drank coffee together at the kitchen table and talked about the world; books, movies, Christmas plans. In the next room, the library, is an ancestor shrine of framed photos; every table, bookshelf and even the piano top, is crowded with images of family. In a prominent place amidst the books and pictures, is a stone bust of Queen Nefertiti, a miniature monument she has possessed for as long as I can remember.

My mother is a strong woman, intelligent and possessed of an enduring fortitude, and like Cornelia, she is an inspiration to her three children, and to the grandchildren who sprang forth from them.

Cornelia had twelve children, and only three survived to adulthood, Sempronia, Gaius and Tiberius. I marvel at the strength of will it must have taken to survive an onslaught of such repeated calamities as would take the lives of so many little ones. (I try to not think about it...if I ponder the possibility of my own children dying, I can only see a bottomless pit of despair inside me...)

I wonder in silence at the courage of women and the everyday valour of mothers.

Cornelia raised to adulthood her two sons and one daughter, and Cicero, it is the story of those sons that I wanted to discuss with you today.

Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, whose names are now synonymous with sedition and revolution.

Plutarch describes them well...

“Tiberius was gentle and composed, mild and reasonable, alike in his cast of features, expression and demeanour. When addressing the people, Tiberius always spoke in a decorous tone, and remained standing in the same position as he spoke. He was conciliatory and appealed to men's sense of pity, his speaking style was pure and his language was chosen with extreme care.

                                        

Whereas Gaius was highly strung, impassioned, harsh, impulsive, and often, against his better judgement, allowed himself to be so far carried away by anger while he was speaking that his voice would rise to a high pitch, he would lapse into abuse, and loose the thread of his argument. To guard against such digressions he employed a well educated slave name Licinius, who stood behind him with an instrument which was intended to correct the tones of his voice and give them their proper pitch. Whenever he noticed that Gaius's voice was becoming harsh or broken with passion, he would sound a soft note, and as soon as Gaius heard this he would immediately moderate his anger, tone down his voice, and show that his emotions were under control.”

So these brothers were raised to be high class, well educated gentlemen with political aspirations. Tiberius, being the elder brother, entered politics first, on a populist platform of land reform and citizenship rights.

As Rome conquered neighbouring territories, the land gained was annexed and divided up, a portion often being set aside for the poor of Italy. The wealthy of Rome had, through corrupt dealings, taken over this land, and had filled it with the slaves taken from foreign conquests. This meant that there were lots of Italian nationals, homeless, unemployed and angry. Many of them moved to Rome, where they could hope to find a place to live, and eke out an existence on food handouts.

It was a mess. So Tiberius, along with a circle of other influential men, drafted a series of law reforms which were generally considered to be very conciliatory. They would enforce the already existing legal limit on the amount of land any one individual could own, (which the wealthy had circumvented through proxy buyers) and the government would compensate the prior owners in a buy-back scheme, in order to redistribute the land back to the poor. No one would be prosecuted for illegal land purchases. It should have been perfect solution.

But Cicero, when is politics ever about finding real solutions?

The wealthy classes and the landowners hated the reforms and did everything in their power to oppose them, going so far as to accuse Tiberius of sedition, claiming that his entire motive for introducing such reforms, was to undermine the very foundations of the state. Their efforts were fruitless, however, against the powerful eloquence of Tiberius' oratory:

“The wild beasts that roam over Italy, have their dens and holes to lurk in, but the men who fight and die for our country enjoy the common air and light and nothing else. It is their lot to wander with their wives and their children, houseless and homeless, over the face of the earth. And when our generals appeal to their soldiers before a battle to defend their ancestors' tombs and their temples against the enemy, their words are a lie and a mockery, for not a man in their audience possesses such a family altar; not one out of all those Romans owns an ancestral tomb. The truth is that they fight and die to protect the wealth and luxury of others. They are called the masters of the world, but they do not possess a single clod of earth which is truly their own.”

The wealthy classes, realising they could not win by argument alone, sought the assistance of one of the Tribunes, Marcus Octavius. A Tribune is a people's representative in the senate, and they have veto power over decisions such as this. So, with Octavius in opposition, the reforms were stonewalled.

Tiberius, infuriated, changed his reforms to make them more pleasing to the common people, and set about to take the land from the wealthy, now offering no compensation, since they were in fact, in breach of the law. Octavius continued to refuse to give in on even a single negotiating point in the deal, rejecting it totally. The people grew restless. Tiberius made a choice which was illegal at the time, by calling on the people, to vote on whether or not to depose Octavius, so that the land reform vote could go through unopposed. Tiberius knew that it was wrong, he begged Octavius to reconsider, he threw his arms around him and kissed him in full view of the senate. Octavius stayed silent for a long time, tears filling his eyes, but when he looked out to the crowd and saw his backers, the rich and powerful standing together, his strength wavered and he told Tiberius to do as he pleased.

The people voted for Octavius' deposition. The crowd nearly murdered him as he was escorted from the senate house, but Tiberius threw himself into the melee and prevented any harm from coming to him, though one of Octavius' loyal slaves, whilst trying to protect his master, had his eyes torn out.

The story had seemed quite a lot like modern politics, up till this last point.

It's all fun and games until someone looses an eye, as they say.

Tiberius then got the land reform bill through. If only it could have ended there, but like sharks who gather at the smell of blood, Rome turned on herself, and things got really ugly.

Tiberius, in order to garner even more public support for his future attempt to be voted Tribune for a second year in a row, put forth new laws reducing the term of military service, and appointing equal numbers of the Equestrian Order, to serve on juries, which previously were only filled by those of senatorial rank. This last measure would effectively cripple the control over the courts held by the Senatorial class, and at the voting booths, a great conflict broke out between the two opposing camps, with clubs and staves being handed out among the crowd, and furniture broken up to arm the rest.

In the conflict, Tiberius was run down and clubbed to death by one of his fellow Tribunes, Publius Satyreius, who crushed his skull with the leg of a bench. More than three hundred other men were killed in the fray, by sticks and stones, but none died by the sword.

                                    The Death of Tiberius

Tiberius' body was forbidden formal burial, and was instead thrown into the river along with the other bodies from the conflict. Some of Tiberius' supporters were banished without trial, others were arrested and executed; Gaius Villius was shut up in a vessel filled with poisonous snakes, and so met his end in this way.

So ends the sad story of Tiberius Graccus, aged twenty nine. But the greater story to which he belongs, has only just begun. All this began long before your time Cicero, but these calamities form the foundation of what became the Cataline conspiracy, and so I began, as many other writers have, with the Gracchus brothers.

In my next letter, Cicero, I will discuss the life of Gaius Gracchus and ask you some difficult questions about that Republic which you held so dear to your heart.

In anticipation of many letters, and many more after those,

with gratitude and love

Morgan.