From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome from 133 B.C. to A.D. 68 Read Online Free PDF Page B

and then after a lull of over fifty years she had acquired two more: and all of them, except Macedonia, had come to her as a result of her prolonged struggles with Carthage. Now throughout the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world there was no state that could hope successfully to challenge the dominant power of Rome, who owed not a little to the central position of Italy in the Mediterranean: East and West had been beaten, and the future lay with Rome. She had in fact introduced a political unity into world history such as Alexander the Great and others had dreamed about. This was Rome’s great achievement. An acute contemporary Greek statesman, Polybius, realizing this challenging fact, wrote a Universal History covering the years 220–145 B.C. because he could not believe that anyone could be so dull as not to want to know how ‘the Romans in less than fifty-three years succeeded in subjugating nearly the whole inhabited world to their sole government – an achievement unexampled in history’. 3
    3.  THE SENATORIAL GOVERNMENT
    This spectacular spread of Roman influence naturally created many new problems with which the government must grapple if it was to remain in control of events. But before these problems are considered, a question arises: who was the government? The answer may in theory have been Senatus Populusque Romanus (and each of these two partners must be examinedseparately), but in practice the Senate was the effective governing body throughout the second century, until in 133 B.C. Tiberius Gracchus challenged it in the name of the People.
    The Senate had acquired this leading position not by constitutional enactment but simply through its own initiative: custom, not law, enabled it to govern. It comprised some three hundred men, drawn mainly from the landed aristocracy; they remained senators for life and held the chief magistracies. It thus contained the men who possessed the greatest administrative experience and political wisdom. Its steady direction of policy during the dark days of the Hannibalic War had given it great prestige, while the growing complication of foreign policy, when the Romans had to master countless details about the domestic affairs of numbers of Greek cities and states, made the Roman People willing to acquiesce in the Senate taking a lead in foreign affairs and also in financial matters. This the People may have been the more ready to do since it was they who elected the magistrates from whom the Senate was normally recruited.
    Naturally not all senators had equal influence and the business of the Senate was in fact very largely in the hands of the
nobiles
. These were an inner circle of senators, drawn from a very limited number of families; only a man who could boast a consul among his ancestors could claim to be a noble, and the consulship was the closely guarded prerogative of comparatively few families. During the hundred years preceding the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, practically half the consulships went to only ten
gentes
, while 159 of the 200 were gained by twenty-six
gentes
. Few men outside this charmed circle managed to force their way in: when such a one did win a consulship, he was known as a
novus homo
and ennobled his family for ever. A slightly greater number of ‘outsiders’ might gain a lower magistracy and access to the Senate, but they would not be able to exercise much influence there, because the business of the House was arranged in such a way as to give greater control to senior members who had held the higher (curule) magistracies. Thus the effective management of the State rested in the hands of some twenty or less families: they supplied the men who commanded the armies, governed the provinces, and by guiding senatorial policy shaped the destiny of Rome and the world.
    Real power does not always reside where it officially appears to belong. If the Senate exercised its control through customary rather than official recognition, the way