Plutarchs' Parallel Lives - Tiberius and Gaius Gracchi

“Let no one enter who has not read Plutarch”

Plutarch, writing in the 1st century A.D. produced the most influential catalogue of non-religious role models in history. He was both a philosopher and a historian, and, in an extremely rare feat for either field, he had an enormous and enduring impact on the real world. In his lifetime he won recognition from the emperors Hadrian and Tranjan, but his real peak came 1700 odd years later, during the enlightenment. His Parallel Lives provided a common corpus of heroes and villains from Greece and Rome - founders of states, republican martyrs, tyrants who overthrew democracies, and great conquerors - to the educated. In an era where no-one had ever experienced anything but monarchy, he brought the ancient republics vividly to life, and made them so real in their minds that bringing about new republics and new orders became conceivable. I challenge you to read about the Founding Fathers or the French Revolutionaries without tripping over references to his Parallel Lives.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s father read Plutarch’s Lives to him as bed time stories from the age of seven. At the age of nine Manon Philipon brought Plutarch to church with her; “It was from that moment that I felt the impressions and ideas that were to make me a republican.” Charlotte Corday, who assassinated radical republican terrorist pamphleteer Marat, spent the day before the killing reading Plutarch.

Robespierre was Brutus in his own eyes, slayer of tyrants. On the day of his downfall he was compared to Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens, a knockout line in the national assembly, where all the deputies were steeped in the Lives; “Let no one enter who has not read Plutarch,” declared Jean-Louis David. Corsican rebel Pasquale Paoli said to Napoleon, the ultimate Neo-Plutarchian hero “There is nothing modern in you; you are entirely out of Plutarch.”

Stateside, Charles Lee knew when his republicanism began: “ever from the first time I read Plutarch been an Enthusiastick for liberty … and for liberty in a republican garb… It is natural to a young person whose chief companions are the Greek and Roman Historians and Orators to be dazzled with the splendid picture.” Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson and more adored him. During the revolutionary war Hamilton kept with him a pay book with 112 pages of notes. On 51 of those pages he had transcribed sections of Plutarch. Unsurprisingly, Plutarch was the most quoted ancient historian in the federalist papers.

When John Quincy Adams was appointed ambassador to Russia in 1809 he carried Plutarch’s Lives with him, rereading the biographies of Lycurgus and Solon on his way. When his son was elected to the Massachusetts legislature, John Quincy advised him to read Plutarch.

Earlier, Shakespeare took the plots for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens from his reading of Plutarch. In some cases he lifted passages wholesale from Thomas North's translations. When you are a good enough storyteller to be plagiarised by Shakespeare, you are a very good story teller indeed.

Who was Plutarch.

Plutarch, a Greek, was born in the 1st century AD, after they had been eclipsed by the Romans. He was born to a good family in an obscure town, and though his admiration for the great statesmen of the past was boundless, he did not have a chance to be one. Instead he wrote about them - a lot. He wrote 48 biographies, referred to as “Lives,” of the exemplary statesmen of Greece and Republican Rome. A handful of these lives are lost, but considering the attrition rates of ancient literature, an unusually high number survived the dark ages, a testament to their brilliance.

He intended his Lives not primarily as works of history, but as works of philosophical, moral instruction. He wanted to instruct and moderate the conduct of ambitious young men (that some dangerous young women, like Corday and Philipon might millenia later take inspiration from his works, probably did not occur to him) and to instill virtue in his readers.

Plutarch explained his method thusly:

“I am not writing history but biography, and the most outstanding exploits do not always have the property of revealing the goodness or badness of the agent; often in fact, a casual action, the odd phrase, or a jest reveals character better than battles involving the loss of thousands upon thousands of lives… I must be allowed to devote more time to those aspects which indicate a person’s mind and to use these to portray the life of each of my subjects.”

The problem from the perspective of moral instruction is that the stories are rip-roaring good fun. Even when the author condemns characters for their behaviour, for example Caesar, whose ambition plunged his country into a brutal civil war, destroyed the republic, and took the lives and liberty of millions of Gauls, Plutarch cannot help admiring him, and instilling that admiration in us.

One challenge when reading Plutarch today is that there are often substantial gaps in context where he assumes the reader already knows what happened at some important event - the way a contemporary writer might refer to Jim Crow or the New Deal and expect you to know what he means. That is just a bullet the modern reader will have to bite, but aside from that his narratives are extremely lively, his characterisation is sublime and he has an unmatched eye for a revealing anecdote. These are not stuffy works, in a more refined cutlure they were once bedtime stories for children!

I am going to try and persuade you to take them on, if I have not already, by presenting and reviewing one of the lives, that of the brothers Gracchi, Tiberius and Gaius. This biography is unusual in Plutarch’s oeuvre because it puts two individuals together in one work. I chose it because (a) it is in Oxford's collection of nine roman lives, which I have with me on holiday, (b) it's super juicy, (c) there are some nice parallels, both revealing and deceptive, that we can draw with our situation today.

It is a story of high drama, of populism, war heroes, the violence of the mob, a repressive elite, greed, civil strife, and massacres which leave the river Tiber clogged with corpses. It’s even got ghosts.

But before we can get onto that, we need to examine the socio-economic situation in Rome in the mid-to-late second century B.C.

The Situation

The events of this story took place after Rome had defeated Hannibal (elephants, Alps) and Carthage in the Second Punic War. Carthage still existed but only as a rump state. Rome was the uncontested dominant power in the Mediterranean. She had spent around five hundred years expanding from a small city state to ruling most of Italy, and then, in around half a century she conquered most of France, Spain, Sicily, Macedonia, and North Africa. This sudden explosion meant massive amounts of wealth flooded into Rome, in loot, in taxation from these new provinces, and in human chattel. This wealth accrued overwhelmingly to the upper classes, while all the new slaves suppressed demand for the labour of the free lower classes and produce from the provinces reduced demand for the produce of the small farmer. How could a man tilling his own fields compete on price with an aristocrat who owned hundreds of slaves?

He could not. He sold his land to the aristocrat at a suppressed price and moved - sometimes to the frontiers of the empire - but more often internally to Rome. This being the early iron age there was very little in the way of industry. If he was very lucky he found a trade, more often he did not and had to get by on some combination of handouts and whatever irregular work he could find. He became dependent. He could not support his family. He became desperate, disillusioned and angry. What had he fought for?

The stability and cohesion of the republic, which had endured without much internal strife for hundreds of years, had been fatally undermined. This was the stage onto which the Gracchi emerged.

The Brothers

The dual subjects of this life were born into one of the finest families in Rome. Their grandfather was Scipio Africanus, a George Washington or Napoleon tier figure in the Roman imagination, the man who had defeated Hannibal. Their father was twice consul, the highest ranking political office in Rome, and celebrated two triumphs. He died while the boys were both young, and his wife, unusually, did not remarry. She was so focused on the education of her children that she turned down a proposal of marriage from the Pharaoh of Egypt. Both boys had a lot to live up to, and their mother made clear to them her expectations that they would. She wanted, she said, to be remembered as the mother of the Gracchi, not as the daughter of Scipio, or the wife of her husband.

“She brought up these two boys, Tiberius and Gaius, with such devotion that although they were, by common consent the most gifted young men of their generation in Rome, their education was generally held to have played a more important part than nature in forming their excellent qualities.”

Tiberius, nine years older than his brother, first distinguished himself in war - an essential qualification for anyone looking to get on in Roman politics. Tradition held, and it may have been true, that he was the first man over the walls of Carthage when the city was finally wiped off the map. He negotiated a deal with a Spanish tribe which saved a Roman army, and he was one of the highest priests in Rome. (It did not strike the Romans as strange that a man would be an exemplary soldier and a chief priest). But such was the strength of competition amongst the leading men of Rome that Tiberius felt, though still in his twenties, that in his absence from the city he had fallen behind his peers.

To begin to remedy this he won election as one of the ten tribunes of the Plebs, traditionally a middling office and brief stepping stone to greater things. Now Tiberius, this bluest of blue bloods, could make a splash: he turned on his own class.

Land Reform

"The wild beasts that roam over Italy," [Tiberius] would say, “have their dens. Each has a place of rest and refuge, but those who fight and die for Italy have nothing - nothing except for the air and the light. Houseless and homeless, they roam the land with their children and wives. Their commanders lie when they exhort the soldiers in battle to defend sepulchers and shrines from the enemy, for not one of these many Romans has either hereditary altar or ancestral tomb; they fight and die to protect the wealth and luxury of others; they are styled masters of the world, and have not a clod of earth they can call their own”

Whenever Rome made a new conquest some of the new territory would become “public land”: farmland which would be leased back to citizens cheaply. There was a legal limit of 500 iuguera (309 acres) to what any individual could hold, but for generations this law had been ignored, and some of the wealthiest families in Rome had amassed a great deal more of this public land than this. Tiberius proposed to return the excess, minus some compensation, to the state, after which it could be rented cheaply back in small plots to the landless poor, going some way to restore the old balance of the state. In Plutarch's opinion, “considering the extent of the injustice and rapacity” that these laws were “designed to combat, no law was ever more moderately or mildly worded.” This was radical, but not revolutionary; think Thatcher or FDR (another traitor to his class), not Lenin.

Nor was Tiberius was alone in this scheme. He “consulted the best and most eminent men in Rome” on the proposal, men of a similar mind and background who were worried that the new economic balance would destroy the republic. But he was the front man, and it was his responsibility to see these reforms through, in the face of what would be rabid opposition.

His brother later said that, while in military service Tiberius “saw how the land had been abandoned, and how the only people farming or cultivating the land were slaves” but Plutarch attributes his decision to take up this cause to Tiberius’ ambition, his desire to outdo his peers, along with the adulation of the “general populace, who did the most to kindle his resolve and determination, by calling on him… to recover the common land for the poor.”

Opposition to TIberius

“Despite the remarkable leniency of these reforms the wealthy landowners were too greedy to tolerate the law, and too angry and aggressive to tolerate the person who introduced them”

Tribunes traditionally served one year in office, so Tiberius had little time to waste. The tribunate of the plebs was an office unlike anything in any modern system. Almost always held by members of the elite, it was supposed to be a bulwark for the ordinary people against the senate. In practice it had become a sleepy office, a brief stepping stone to greater things. But the tribunes had substantial powers. A tribune could introduce legislation and call on the people to vote upon it, a tribune could veto any and all legislation, and a tribune was sacrosanct; it was both a capital offence and a crime against the gods to cause him physical harm.

Tiberius was taking on an enormously powerful group, whose wealth he directly threatened. He knew he would be opposed, but perhaps he did not fully understand the strength of the reaction he would face. His opponents began by trying to besmirch his good name, but his reputation, given his background and military exploits, was stellar. In addition, his rhetorical talents were second to none, and his legislation was beneficial to the people, so the assembly of the people was undoubtedly going to vote for his legislation. The only way they could stop him was through the use of a compliant tribune, Octavius. Octavius had the same powers as Tiberius, most importantly the power to veto any and all legislation. So every time Tiberius introduced his legislation. Octavius, an old friend, would, with ostentatious displays of civility, debate the issue, and then produce his veto.

By this method - the obsequious tribune - the ruling classes had always been able to keep troublesome tribunes in place. They just needed to have one of their men amongst the ten tribunes, he could filibuster anything they didn’t like, and because the term of office was only a year, they could wait out the trouble.

But Tiberius would not yield, after publicly begging him to go voluntarily, or acquiesce, and being refused, Tiberius removed Octavius from his office by putting Octavius’ position to a vote of the people, his mob, a constitutional innovation, which, says Plutarch, who is otherwise very sympathetic to Tiberius, “was both illegal and extreme.”

The vote passed and Octavius was removed. Tiberius intended for that to be the end of it, but to win the vote he had whipped the people into a frenzy, a frenzy he could not now control: “A crowd of people surged towards Octavius, and he only just managed to escape them… but a loyal slave of his, who stood in front of his master to afford him some protection, was blinded.” The law was passed, land reform would begin, but he had committed a fatal mistake:

“The business with Octavius had not only offended the powerful men of Rome, but was also pretty unpopular with the masses, since it was felt that the gravity of the tribunate, which had until then remained intact in its high and noble position, had been besmirched and destroyed.”

He nevertheless retained the loyalty of a core constituency, and much of the mob, and decided to run for a second year in office, in part because it would protect him from prosecution. He introduced a raft of populist legislation, like reducing the length of military service, to help ensure re-election. This produced an exceptionally violent response from the most extreme of his opponents. A rumor was manufactured and taken to the floor of the senate that Gaius had asked the crowds for a diadem, a type of crown, and that he intended to stage a coup. The presiding consul - the most powerful man in Rome - refused to get involved, saying he would not initiate violence illegally. This did not satisfy the extremists who declared the consul a traitor, and set out to raise a mob of their own. The senators, nearly all of whom would have had military experience, “Picked up legs and other pieces of wood from broken chairs”, while their supporters fetched clubs from their homes (it was illegal to have a sword within the city). With this improvised weaponry they set out across the forum “and made their way up the hill towards Tiberius, clubbing his bodyguards to death.” Tiberius was caught, and beaten to death with these chair legs. They set out throughout the city, arresting and then exiling or killing without trial more of Tiberius’ supporters. Over three hundred of them were “clubbed or stoned to death; not one was killed by the sword.” This was a watershed in Roman history:

“This is said to have been the first time since the revolution against the monarchy that civil strife in Rome ended in bloodshed and the loss of citizens’ lives. All other major disputes on important issues ended in compromise.”

Nor was this cold, calculated murder, one of Tiberius’ allies was murdered “by shutting him up in a large jar and then putting vipers and other snakes in there with him.” They topped it off by denying the families of the victims to give their dead a proper funeral; by night all the corpses were thrown into the Tiber.

Tiberus had not made it to thirty.

Gaius

Gaius was barely an adult when his brother was murdered. He managed to escape the slaughter of his brother's allies, left the city, and as his brother had, set about distinguishing himself in military service. Life in the army suited him because it meant he could avoid politics, and it suited his brother's old enemies, because it kept him out of politics.

Unfortunately for them, Gaius was developing into an even more capable operator than his brother. In the provinces:

“Gaius gave clear evidence of all-round excellence. No one else his age could come close to him when it came to confronting the enemy, or to fairness in dealing with subject peoples, or to loyalty and respect for the proconsul, and he surpassed even his elders in self-restraint, frugality and diligent determination.”

More concerningly, back in Rome he appeared in the law courts, where opponents tried to tie him up with frivolous law suits, and his oratory “made the other speakers look like mere children,” surpassing even his late brothers’ talents and reawakening “the fear of the powerful men of rome… There was a great deal of talk in their circles about how they had to stop Gaius attaining the rank of tribune.”

Gaius spent the best part of a decade deciding on whether he should embark on a political career. On the one hand he had the example of his ancestors to live up to, he was bored by private life, “a life of feeble inactivity, filled with parties and commerce” and found “the appeals of the Roman people and his friends increasingly impossible to resist.” And yet, his brother had ended up a corpse in the river with three hundred others. Was that the path to follow?

Plutarch believes that ultimately “Gaius’ involvement in politics came about through a kind of necessity, rather than through choice.” Gaius made his decision when his brother visited him in a dream - a supernatural event for the Romans, not the working of the subconscious as it would be for us - “Why are you hesitating, Gaius? There’s no escape. Both of us are destined to live the same kind of life, and to die the same kind of death, as champions of the people.”

Gaius stood for election to the tribunate.

Gaius’ New Deal

“Every single one of the notables of Rome opposed his election,” but such was his popularity that so many ordinary people flooded into the city for the election - a difficult journey - that this opposition was not enough.

Ominously, his temper was not like his brothers. While his brother had been “Calm and unassuming,” Gaius was “lively and intense” and subject to rage. Upon taking office he began bringing forward proposals for reform that were much more radical than his brothers. There would be no compensation for illegal holders of land, the people were to get a grain dole, the power of the senate in the courts was reduced, there was to be better pay for soldiers, and a large road building programme to create jobs. These programmes all inflamed the reactionaries but the move which drew the most ire from his opponents was that when he addressed combined meetings of the senate and the people he turned his back on the senate and addressed the people, something no one had ever done. “By means of this slight change of angle and posture he… shifted the whole constitution from an aristocratic to a democratic basis.” Naturally, the masses loved him. “Even though Gaius did not announce his candidature or express an interest in the position, he was elected tribune for the second time, at the people's insistence.” Such was his popularity that the tactics which had hampered his brother - namely the veto of a co-tribune - could not stop him. His opponents were going to need a different strategy.

S vs PQR.

A novel plan was hatched. Rather than using a fellow tribune to veto Gaius, the senate would use a fellow tribune to out do him in populism. To undermine him, they would give the plebs everything they asked for and more. They set up as tribune a certain Livius, who, under their instruction, was to “Use his position to gratify them [the plebs] and to let them have their way even when the best course would have been to risk incurring their hatred… to propose laws without taking into considerations factors such as right and wrong, or the public good… the only thing he was concerned about was doing more than Gaius to gratify the whims of the masses.”

When Gaius "Proposed a bill to found two colonies… they accused him of currying favour with the people, but they backed Livius’ initiative to found twelve colonies and to send to each of them three thousand of the country's poor. And when Gaius distributed land to the poor on the condition that each man was to pay rent into the public treasury, they raged at him… but they approved of Livius’ plan to let the tenants off this rent.”

Astonishingly this worked. “The Roman people were reconciled to a certain extent with the senate, and whereas earlier they had regarded the men of distinction in Rome with suspicion and loathing, Livius did succeed in dispelling their memories of past grievances and toning down this bitterness”

Ultimately, it was a much more straightforward type of politics which did Gaius out of his position. His enemies stole the next election, his third, and even though he won a majority of the vote, the count was rigged and he was out of office.

Immediately his opponents set about repealing his reforms. They would need to win a vote of the people, and to prevent the work his brother had died for and he had dedicated himself to being undone, Gaius corralled his supporters to vote against the repeals. Two mobs stood opposed in the forum. An insult from a reactionary, “make way, scum, for good Romans,” provoked a fight. The man who made the comment was stabbed to death with long writing styluses. Gaius fell immediately into a deep despair. He knew his supporters had just given his enemies the excuse they needed to wipe them out.

War, Horrible War, and the Tiber foaming with Rivers of blood.

For the first, and tragically not the last, time in Roman history, the Senate formally passed a decree “ordering the consul, Opimus, to use all the means at his disposal to preserve the city and put down the tyrants. He warned his fellow senators that they should arm themselves, and he gave notice that every one of the knights was to assemble the next morning and bring two armed slaves with him. Fulvius [Gaius’ no.1 ally] responded by mustering and organising a mob, but Gaius stopped on his way out of the forum by his father’s statue and looked at it for a long time in silence, weeping and sighing.”

The forces of the senate were properly equipped with arms and armour, the forces of the populists were mere rioters. It was a bloodbath. Gaius understood he was soon to be martyred. His allies sent heralds to the senate in a desperate attempt to broker a truce, but negotiations failed. The Roman Republic, previously famous for its practicality and ability to compromise in internal matters, had crossed an irreversible threshold - if only there were a succinct idiom to express this, perhaps from Roman history - and after half a millennia of peace, the next century would be defined by a series of civil wars.

“Gaius conspicuously took no part in the fighting, but withdrew to the sanctuary of Diana, stricken with grief at the turn of events.” After his comrades prevented him from committing suicide (an honourable ending for a Roman sure of defeat, akin to Japaneese traditions) “he fell to his knees and, with hands outstretched towards the goddess, prayed that the Roman people might pay for their ingratitude and treachery with continual slavery, since it was clear that most of them were taking advantage of the amnesty that had been declared to change sides.”

There was a general slaughter, some three thousand of Gaius’ supporters were murdered and their bodies, again, were disposed of in the Tiber. Further indignity awaited Gaius. A prize had been put on his head; whoever brought it to Optimus would receive its weight in gold. His head was hacked off his corpse, and his cunning assailant removed his brain and poured molten lead into the cavity, to increase his reward.

The Gracchi had been dispatched, but their memory would live long, both with the people and with power hungry young men who had their eyes opened to the power of the mob:

“The Roman people… cowed and oppressed at the time of the actual events… shortly after showed how much they missed and longed for the Gracchi. They began to erect statues of them and to display them in prominent places: they consecrated the places where they were murdered and used to offer there the first fruits of all the seasonal sacrifices; and many people even sacrificed to the Gracchi on a daily basis, and bowed before their statues as if they were visiting sanctuaries dedicated to the gods.”

The Significance of the Gracchi.

The Republic would never recover from the violence exercised against the Gracchi, or from the missed opportunity for economic reform. In the next century there would be a series of civil wars: Sulla vs Marius, the Bellum Catilinae, Caesar vs Pompey, the Liberators vs The Triumvirate, and finally Marc Antony vs Augustus. Augustus, the first emperor, would end the republic and set out a new system of dictatorship. You can read about all of these lives, except for Augustus, which was politically dangerous to write, in Plutarch.

The Gracchi, though they failed, had revealed the power of the mob. Around a century later Caesar would be making political hay in a similar way to the Gracchi by talking about land reform. His motives were much less unselfish and his actions, of course, were fatal to the republic.

And what are we to make of the Gracchi? It’s very hard to place them into any convenient political box. They have been claimed as proto-marxists, and before then by French revolutionaries, and it is easy to see how they can be understood as socialists. But they fought for their country, both with great distinction. They were hardcore nationalists, who had no issue with slavery, their proto socialism reached only to their own people. Were they not therefore (gulp) proto national socialists? Or were they conservatives, trying to return their country to its previous balance, which had worked so well for so long?

This is part of the fun of engaging with a near two thousand year old political biography. It is like low-background radiation steel completely uncontaminated by our ideologies and our frameworks. But it does contain political truths. There is a lot we can draw from this narrative about populism, about contentious reform, about the way formerly functional constitutions can become broken.

This is only one of 48 surviving lives by Plutarch, and he tells the story much better than I have. All together the Lives are thousands of pages long, so the modern convention has been to chop them up and group them by theme in individual paperbacks. Penguin’s The Rise and Fall of Athens, Penguin’s Age of Alexander and Oxford University Press_’ Roman Lives_ are all very good.The University of Chicago has an excellent website where you can read them all for free. Caesar and Alexander are obvious places to start, but if you are prepared to dive in the deep end and revel in the profound, alien strangeness of the ancient world, start with Themistocles or Alcibiades.

Resources and Sources.

You can find all the surviving lives here, starting with my favourite:

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Themistocles*.html

Background on Plutarchs influence on American and French Revolutions:

Citizens, Simon Shama,

The Fall of Robespierre: 24 hours in revolutionary Paris, Colin Jones

Hamilton, Ron Chernow

Plutarch and the Early American Republic, Carl J. Richard

Great Books on the fall of the Republic:

The Roman Revolution, Ronald Syme

From the Gracchi to Nero, H.H. Scullard