chapter eight Crisis and Restoration, 91-70

rome had faced a grave crisis in Italy during the Second Punic War, but the Italian War fought between 91 and 89 was far more calamitous. In the only war of record the Romans faced a genuine manpower shortage; two consuls in con­secutive years were killed in battle; and for the duration senators in Rome laid aside their togas to wear military dress instead.

Inspired by the resolute demands of Rome’s Italian allies for full member­ship in the Roman state, the Italian War was unprecedented, forcing peoples who shared essentially the same cultural expectations and outlook to confront one another with violence. Long association with Rome had shaped Italian cul­tural expectations and outlook. Together over the centuries Italians and Romans had reached an accommodation to the social and economic changes introduced in Italy by Roman expansion. Together they had conquered the Mediterranean, sharing the experience of Roman military discipline and organization. In the months leading up to the outbreak of hostilities, Romans and Italians had served

harmoniously as comrades-in-arms in seven full-strength legions, perhaps as many as forty-two thousand Romans and eighty-four thousand allies, on Roman military fronts around the Mediterranean engaged in the joint venture of world conquest. Elite members of Italian communities and their Roman counterparts enjoyed a common base of wealth, status, and education.

This chapter and the next explore the interaction between public law­making and events over a period whose limits are set by significant historical events: the Italian War beginning in 91 and the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44. Conspicuous among the problems of this turbulent period are the widespread frictions accompanying the expanding Roman population. Con­spicuous among the attempted solutions are the numerous public law propos­als addressing a wide range of issues, the great majority dealing with the restoration of the Roman way as interpreted by different groups of elite Romans. The entry of new citizens into the pool from which political leaders emerged, intensi­fied by the convulsive toll of war and civil war on the political leadership over the decade from 91 to 80, brought about a radical transformation in the num­bers and composition of the oligarchy. The struggle to absorb unprecedented numbers of new citizens at all levels had profound consequences for customary ways. This transformation underlay changes in the public lawmaking arena, involving the politically obscure origins of many officeholders who proposed laws, the issues they presented to lawmaking assemblies, and the conduct of the assemblies. Thus a prime factor in these changes was the expansion of the Roman community accompanied by the attenuation of the traditional balance among the various tribes, classes, and status groups.

This transition eventually led to the emergence of a new office, the “dicta­tor for writing the laws and restoring the Roman state,” whose holders, first Sulla and next Caesar, for the first time appropriated the process by which the Roman people had acted in unison with duly elected officials to enact legit­imate law.

THE LAWMAKING OF 91-89

As the war progressed it appeared that the allies would destroy Rome. In June of 90, P. Rutilius Lupus, the consul commanding Roman operations along the northern Adriatic coast, died in battle. In the same year, Rome lost the sup­port of her allies, the Etruscans and Umbrians, to the north, as well as some of her allies to the south, who threatened to join in the war on the side of Rome's adversaries, the hostile Apennine tribal groups led by the Samnites and the Marsi. Rome would be surrounded by enemies except for her Latin allies, who shared far deeper ties of culture, language, and kinship with the Romans than any other group in Italy. An indication of Roman fears for the survival of Rome at this time is the highly irregular conscription of several thousand former slaves to garrison towns and cities on the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy, from Cumae to Rome.

At the bleakest moments of this crisis, when the Roman state appeared to be on the brink of destruction, the Romans found deliverance in a law proposed and passed in a public lawmaking assembly. Following the latest disasters in 90, the consul L. Iulius Caesar, commanding Roman operations against the Sam­nites in southern Italy, returned quickly to Rome, where he held a hurried meet­ing with the Senate and drafted and promulgated a public law proposal granting citizenship to the Latin allies and to all Italian allies who to date remained loyal.² Posted in the Forum and intoned by a herald during the required period of three weeks, the bill was doubtless the object of intense scrutiny and debate by senators and elected officials in the presence of the Roman people in pub­lic meetings convened for the purpose.

That the most severe crisis to date in Roman history, the Italian War, was resolved by a grant of citizenship proposed and approved at a lawmaking assem­bly underscores the deep faith shared by all Romans in this key process for estab­lishing consensus in the resolution of an otherwise intractable crisis and underscores the use of such gatherings as instruments of last resort.⁵ By 90, both the necessity for opening wide the gates of full citizenship and the magnitude and the complexity of the Roman problems with their Italian allies came into clearer view. Although the Romans were now slowly winning the struggle the costs were extraordinarily high. The death of the consul L. Porcius Cato early in 89 in an unsuccessful engagement against the Marsi was an unexpected blow, but a number of other tensions had been gathering for some time.

Of the sixteen critical issues raised at public lawmaking sessions over the years 91 to 89, as noted in table 8.1, one-quarter (four) were designed to deal with economic issues, two were concerned with matters relating to Roman tribes, and one each covered the assignment of members to the Senate and to jury duty, the foundation of colonies, and the appointment of a special com­mission of investigation.

But the big issue at public lawmaking assemblies between 91 and 89, as we might imagine, and one covering almost half of all proposed public laws, con­cerned citizenship grants and the tribal assignments of new citizens. As hoped, the lex Iulia of 90 defused (in the short term) the immediate cause of the Italian War, a demand for parity between the Romans and their Latin and Ital­ian allies or the destruction of Rome. Only the Samnites, Sabellians of Nola in Campania, and Lucanians refused to agree to terms unless the Romans agreed to the return of lands appropriated in the past. In 89, the year after enacting the lex Iulia, the Roman people were asked to extend citizenship to still more inhabitants of Italy, when the tribunes C.

THE RESTORATIONS OF SULLA, 88 AND 8l

The Italian War was the beginning of a long period of civil dissension in Italy. The Italy-wide struggle over citizenship was soon followed by a second episode of civil conflict and war, between 88 and 82, initiated now by the polit­ical leaders of Rome. The immediate cause of this second phase of conflict was competition between Rome's two most celebrated military commanders, C. Marius and L. Cornelius Sulla, over the command of a military expedition voted against King Mithridates of Pontus. Eventually, all Italy became involved, a strong indication that the crux of the struggle rested on much deeper and more widespread concerns, as we shall see it did. The second phase of conflict was manifested in several eruptions over related issues, beginning with Sulla's hostile march on Rome in 88 to forcefully invalidate the recent enactment by the tribune P Sulpicius to replace him in the command against Mithridates with Marius. The next eruption came in 87 with the siege of Rome by the authoritative Marius, five times consul, now nearly seventy years old, supported by the consul L. Cornelius Cinna and the proconsular commander Cn. Pom­peius Strabo; the siege was accompanied by the murders of a number of sena­tors. There followed a year of civil war, once Sulla returned from Asia in 83, in which Roman legion battled Roman legion across Italy. Civil war was con­ducted in a faraway arena as well, the province of Spain, where the Roman commander Q. Sertorius continued the fight until his assassination in 72. Within Italy, Sulla was eventually victorious in 82, whereupon he turned to the task of the restoration of the Roman state. While the civil war of 83-82 is an index of the social and economic upheavals all across Italy in the recent Italian War, to an even greater extent, the entire episode opens an important window onto the predicament of the Roman leadership, nearly two hundred years after the beginning of Roman expansion in Italy, in its efforts to lead a larger and more diversely populated state.

The war against Mithridates brings the predicament of the Roman lead­ership, now heading a greatly expanded citizen population, into focus. War in Asia was eagerly sought in 88, because of the heavy cost of the Italian War to both Romans and Italians. Throughout the 90s, Mithridates had acted to reassert a local dominion over western Asia, which had been under Roman dominance for nearly one hundred years. While his single most hostile action of record, the murder on the same day by prior arrangement of all Italians in Asia, numbering many thousands, is believed by modern historians to be an apocryphal story, it illustrates the Roman determination to find just causes for war with Mithridates. Given the devastation that the Italian War brought to the monetary economy of Italy, a military campaign, in a region as rich in wealth as western Asia, offered the most promising avenue to restoration that the Romans understood.

Military campaigns often played a significant role in maintaining social order and cohesion in Roman society. Since the First Punic War, military campaigns in sequence offered Romans a quick and direct way of exporting potentially dis­ruptive, armed, and trained fighting men who otherwise might threaten pub­lic security. In addition to the obvious incentive of employing the huge numbers of men who had been under arms in the Italian War, a successful military cam­paign would improve the economic situation by bringing in booty from pros­perous cities and regions. The success of the maneuver is reflected in the striking fact that the Romans were far less likely to use public lawmaking assemblies to establish consensus when they were successfully, that is, profitably, fighting abroad.¹⁰ Military success therefore provided a powerful instrument for bring­ing about stability in Rome. Under the circumstances, the command against Mithridates in 88 held tremendous potential for the man chosen to hold it, if he was successful. Such a man held the key to the restoration of Rome. Such a man was the ideal Roman leader.

The consuls elected for 88 were Q. Pompeius Rufus and the most successful Roman commander of the Italian War, the patrician Sulla. On his election to the consulate Sulla had been assigned the province of Asia with the command against Mithridates, King of Pontus, and was waiting for his army to assemble at Nola when a tribune, the noble P. Sulpicius, presented four controversial bills.¹¹ Clearly aiming at reconciliation and the restoration of some balance in the expanded Roman community after a trying war, Sulpicius proposed one measure recalling the men exiled following investigation by the court estab­lished by enactment in 90 to assign blame in inciting the allies to revolt, another registering new citizens and former slaves throughout all the tribes, and a third setting a lid of two thousand denarii on the amount of money senators could owe. The people's ultimate acceptance of such bills reflected a communitywide desire to integrate some new members in controlled ways, to reconcile old, and to conserve the Senate membership at a time when indebtedness threatened to force the expulsion of some senators. In particular P. Sulpicius, an acutely observant risk taker, had accurately discerned the wishes of Roman equestri­ans, whose personal attachments and business interests tied them most closely to their counterparts in Latin and Italian towns. But there was unmistakable dissent within the community as well, centering on the registration of new cit­izens in all the tribes. Violent disagreements marked the public lawmaking ses­sions at which magistrates and senators publicly aired the arguments about these three proposals of the tribune Sulpicius. The consuls were especially outspo­ken in their opposition to Sulpicius's measures.

Even more dissension surrounded Sulpicius's fourth and last public law pro­posal, which transferred the command against Mithridates to the elderly Marius, as another tribune had done twenty years earlier in 107, when the Roman people replaced the proconsular commander and noble Q. Caecilius Metellus Numidicus with the consul and new man Marius in the command against Jugurtha. Notwithstanding his age Marius offered the kind of leader­ship many Romans, in particular equestrians, thought imperative in the com­ing war with Mithridates. Ancient and modern commentators on the events of 88 believe that Sulpicius promulgated this particular measure to consolidate equestrian support for the other three. But before any of these measures came before a voting assembly the consuls as per their right declared the suspen­sion of all public business (iustitium), thereby neutralizing the tribune's proposed measures by preventing him from formally presenting them to the Roman peo­ple. A riot ensued, encouraged by Sulpicius and Marius, in which Romans died and the consuls feared for their lives. The consul Sulla at length canceled the iustitium, Sulpicius convened the voting assemblies, and the measures passed, notwithstanding the displeasure of the consuls.¹²

The reaction to the approval of these measures was unprecedented in Rome. The consul Sulla, holder of Rome's highest elected office, quickly went to Nola and roused the troops, most of them probably Sulla's own veterans from the Italian War, to march against his political enemies in Rome. These citizens under arms had not been on hand in Rome to vote. The troops unanimously resolved to follow Sulla and capped their steadfast loyalty to their commander by murdering the legate, M. Gratidius, who was sent to take command of the army for C. Marius.¹³ But most of Sulla's officers withdrew, refusing to serve on a mission of dubious legitimacy despite the authority of the consul's office. The Senate in Rome was likewise horrified and ordered two praetors to Nola to for­bid the advance. Abused by the soldiers the praetors were forced to return.¹⁴ At Rome Sulla's army encountered opposition from city inhabitants, who stoned the troops from rooftops, and from men quickly armed and led by Marius against Sulla's legions, to no avail.¹⁵ For the first time a commander entered Rome at the head of his legions without formal dispensation from the Senate or Roman people to do so. Never before had duly enacted laws elicited such a patently lawless response from one of Rome's highest elected officials. A grimmer set­back to the legitimate expression by the Roman people of their sovereign wishes was unimaginable.¹⁶

More was to come as Sulla set out on his own program of restoration. Join­ing with his colleague Q. Pompeius Rufus, Sulla had the tribune P. Sulpicius killed. The enactments carried by P. Sulpicius were annulled on the grounds that they had been carried during niustitium. Other enemies in the Senate to the number of twelve were killed or exiled, including C. Marius, who fled to Africa.¹⁷ With much of the elite opposition out of the way, Sulla resorted to an immediate use of public lawmaking assemblies. The exile of Marius and others was presented to the Roman people by the consuls and enacted as law. Far more significant were the measures, which offered quite a different version of recon­ciliation and restoration than the earlier measures of P. Sulpicius.

In particular, in a series of three public law proposals the consuls dramati­cally changed the entire process of public lawmaking assemblies, which was so critical in establishing consensus. In future all bills presented to the people were to be approved by the Senate. The centuriate assembly, in which citizens assem­bled in centuries and voted according to wealth, rather than the plebeian tribal assembly was to enact law. The tribunes' authority was to be restricted. Roman voters enacted all three bills as law. Other bills added three hundred new mem­bers drawn from the equestrian class to the Senate; founded colonies for veter­ans; and established that interest payments on debts were to apply to the principal.¹⁸ At this time, if not several years later, Sulla may also have proposed a bill on suretyship (sponsio), which appears to address the same issue as P Sulpi- cius's measure on senators' debts.¹⁹

We might wonder at the about-face the approval of these measures presumes on the part of the voting population now in Rome. Were the same voters pres­ent? Ancient recorders report that citizens already in Rome when Sulla marched on the city were hostile to Sulla's proposals and that these same citizens later rejected candidates he endorsed at the electoral assemblies.²⁰ But there was now another group of voters on hand for the lawmaking assemblies, namely, Sulla's soldiers, who formed a significantly large group. Accordingly, at the vot­ing assemblies convened to vote on the consuls' measures, the sovereign will of the Roman people was again duly expressed. Once before, between 123 and 122, had Romans engaged in the kind of “competitive” lawmaking so unmis­takable in 88. In one respect, however, the lawmaking of 88 was as unprece­dented as Sulla's march on Rome. Never before had Roman consuls turned to public lawmaking on such a scale, under such circumstances, as a deliberate corrective to a prior public and legitimate expression of communitywide wishes. Nor had Roman consuls ever before challenged so many aspects of the public lawmaking process.

Although momentous in their implications for the future, the changes insti­tuted by the consuls were tolerated only briefly in the short term. The presence of so many men under arms especially in the vicinity of Rome had played a cru­cial role in Sulla's successful effort to restore order to Roman society and to transform the public lawmaking process. Consequently, with Sulla's legions gone, and the legions of Cinna, Marius, and Strabo on hand holding a large number of new citizens, Sulla's laws were annulled in 87 and Sulpicius's laws reenacted. But these changes were also relatively short-lived. Four years later Sulla came back to Italy, and the order first suggested in 88 eventually prevailed in the most lavish outpouring of public laws in Roman history to date.

Bringing the campaign in Asia against King Mithridates to a temporary con­clusion, Sulla returned to Italy in 83 at the head of six Roman legions.²¹ All Italy mobilized for war. The consuls L. Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus and C. Norbanus and the praetor Q. Sertorius hastily marched their legions south to engage Sulla. Cn. Papirius Carbo was proconsular commander in northern Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, heading an army from what was left of the corps of nearly twenty legions holding by modern count one hundred thousand men, mobilized in 85 and 84 from the new citizen communities of Italy to defend against Sulla.²² Sulla was joined by elite Romans who had retired to rural estates or fled Italy during his absence: Cn. Pompeius, son of Cn. Pompeius Strabo, and Q. Caecilius Metel­lus Pius. He also recruited more troops from among new citizens—before return­ing Sulla had assured the former allies that he would uphold the registration of new citizens begun in the census of 86.²³ From the beginning the war went badly for the consuls and other commanders facing Sulla. Scipio's army deserted him at Teanum and joined Sulla's troops. Norbanus was defeated near Mt. Tifata and withdrew to Capua, where he withstood a siege for a time. Cn. Papirius Carbo was forced back to Rome by Pompey, who had conscripted troops from among his father's veterans in Picenum, where his family's estates were located. Other elite Romans joined Sulla. Sensing disaster, Sertorius, a new man from Sabine Nursia, left Italy with his legions to take up his assigned command in Spain.²⁴ Civil war continued throughout the remainder of this year and the next as Sulla fought his way north, meeting stout resistance only from former Italian allies, especially Samnites, the core of resistance to Rome during the recent Italian War. Never having formally agreed to terms with the Romans, the Samnites in that earlier war had fought Sulla in many difficult battles. The Roman commanders opposing Sulla found their legions gradually whittled away as troops deserted in numbers to join Sulla. Even so, new consuls were elected in 82 to continue the fight—C. Marius, now twenty-six years old, the son of C. Marius; and Cn. Papirius Carbo, consul for the third time. After a series of reverses Carbo fled alone to the Roman settlements in Africa estab­lished almost twenty years before for veterans of his colleague's father. Marius was killed in the siege of Praeneste. With the opposition leadership neutral­ized, routed, or killed, Sulla was victorious.

To the Romans under arms, Sulla had proven himself to be the right leader. The primary issues of the civil war ensuing from the competition between Mar­ius and Sulla for military command—the rightful leadership of Rome and the restoration of social order—had also reflected powerful divisions on all levels and between groups throughout Italy. Under these circumstances, the extent to which all society, new citizens and old, at some level pulled together to fight the external war is remarkable: all were deeply committed to the war against Mithridates. It is not surprising therefore that ordinary Romans and Italians, who had difficulties in remaining loyal to Cinna and the other rulers in Rome between 86 and 83, showed no hesitation in joining Sulla before and after he returned from Asia. The pattern of mutiny and desertion that begins with the murder of L. Valerius Flaccus, the “legitimate” commander of the province of Asia by his legate Fimbria, whose troops then deserted to Sulla, and continues with the murder of Cinna by soldiers in 84 comes to typify the last years of the civil war, as legion after legion of fighting men chose to serve with Sulla rather than the commanders who levied them. No other leader, after the death of Marius, had the right stuff in the view of so many.

In Rome, the interrex L. Valerius Flaccus convened the people in the cen­turiate assembly to enact a public law creating a new position for Sulla and legitimizing his actions to date. By the end of 82, the Roman conqueror of Italy, who had previously been declared an outlaw and seen his consular laws of 88 annulled, entered Rome to assume the unprecedented office of “dictator for writing the laws and restoring the Roman state.”²⁵ Over the next year, Sulla took direct action on a number of fronts. The Samnite troops who had surren­dered to him were called to assemble in the place of military levies in Rome, the Villa Publica. Believing that they were to be conscripted for military ser­vice about ten thousand Samnites responded. Instead they were massacred, a familiar Roman action regularly taken against her most intractable enemies. In the present case, extermination provided, in the Roman context, a sensible solution to pressing claims for parity within the Roman community by groups the Romans thought they could not absorb. Sulla dealt quickly with Roman adversaries as well. Sulla published a list of names of men who could be killed with impunity, entitling their killers to a reward. At least forty senators, six­teen hundred Roman equestrians, and a total of forty-seven hundred men from these and the next highest property ratings were proscribed, their properties confiscated and sold.²⁶ Henceforth proscriptions, like foreign wars, served to infuse the treasury with needed capital and provide capital and land for vet­eran troops.

In addition, Sulla laid penalties on whole communities, fining or retracting citizenship from some towns in Italy that had opposed him; dismantling the walls of others; and confiscating lands and buildings in still others. Some of these measures were presented by the dictator to the people, who enacted them as law.²⁷ Other steps were actions taken by Sulla as proconsular commander, legitimized by the lex Valeria; still others appear to rest on the annulled laws of 88, which the lex Valeria reinstated. About twenty colonies were established in such towns, and the confiscated lands and buildings, as well as still available public property of the Roman people (ager publicus), allotted to around 120,000 soldiers discharged from Sulla's legions at the end of the fighting and settled in their military units.²⁸ One ancient recorder, Appian, identifies the primary motivation behind these settlements as Sulla's desire to control Italy with vet­eran soldiers loyal to him. We discussed similar Roman actions in chapter 4 during the first phase of Roman expansion across Italy, as well as at the end of the Second Punic War. At the same time these settlements provided a rather large number of able men, potentially drifting and dangerous members of an agrarian society, with their primary access to resources—land. Most of these and earlier arrangements in Asia were ratified by the lex Valeria, which made Sulla dictator.

But Sulla's enduring restoration of the core of the Roman community was made through the public lawmaking process, using the centuriate and tribal assemblies.²⁹ Sulla sponsored at least eighteen laws in 81, shown in table 8.2, the largest number ever promulgated by a single individual to date. Some were revivals of laws he had carried as consul in 88, which had been annulled. All suggest a new use of public lawmaking assemblies in ways that might not have been tolerated by the people at less disrupted times. One of Sulla's laws corrected losses in the Senate by creating new senators from the equestrian class. Such an infusion may have been proposed first by C. Gracchus in 123 for the purpose of indirectly including equestrians on the panel of jurors for the standing court.³⁰ Gracchus's public law proposal failed in that year, but he car­ried a similar bill in 122 that added equites equo publico directly to the list of jurors. Another public law known as the lex Cornelia de XX quaestoribus increased the number of quaestors to twenty and made the office of quaestor the office of entry into the Senate. A portion of this enactment is extant on one surviving bronze tablet from the set of tablets on which the law was engraved. Sulla carried other bills relating to offices and officeholding: the ages for hold­ing the quaestorship, praetorship, and consulship were regulated, as were the order in which the offices were held, the interval between the offices, and rep­etition of the consulship; the tribunes' right of veto was restricted, their right to sponsor law was removed, and their ability to hold further office was removed. Still other laws passed over 81 increased the number of augurs and priests (pon­tifices) and restored the selection of new members by the college rather than election by the people; and regulated expenditures on luxury items. A public law abolishing the distribution of state-supplied grain restored to tribal leaders, senators, and elected officials an important avenue for enhancing the political support of the majority population.

Among the most consequential of Sulla's “new laws” (leges novae) as Appian describes them, an expression whose meaning we will consider later, were the series of enactments further defining capital crimes previously handled by the urban praetor or tresviri capitales (depending on the status of the miscreant) or the permanent courts de repetundiis and de maiestate and establishing or modifying the courts in which such crimes were investigated. The identifica­tion and articulation of crimes against the state had been an emerging concern of the Roman leadership since the mid-second century. Among the listing in table 8.2 were enactments that formed or reformed permanent courts (quaes­tiones) to consider accusations of extortion (de repetundis) against elected offi­cials and senators; of murder (de sicariis et veneficis); of forgery (de falsis); and of embezzlement (de peculatu).³¹ Sulla also carried several laws on maiestas, conventionally translated as treason, and the quaestio de maiestate. In these laws of the “dictator for writing laws and restoring the state,” scholars have seen what appears to be, for the first time in Roman history, a systematically thought- out program rather than the customary reactions to immediate situations.³² It is more likely that the laws were designed to allow Sulla and the Senate to con­trol undesirable members of the Roman elite by accusing them of crimes that could be sustained.

While the aims of this program are complex, let us focus on what it achieved in regard to the most pressing problem of the day for Roman senators, namely, the Roman leadership. The scale of the administrative challenges facing sena­tors and the highest levels of society generally was growing ever larger. At the same time the admission of new citizens into the highest property classes had intensified the native competitiveness of the governing classes. Now elite Romans were forced to face these issues in a distressingly direct way in conse­quence of the exceptionally high mortality rate among senators and men of equestrian rating during both the Italian War and the civil conflict of the 80s. Casualties during the Italian War included an unreported, though proba­bly high, number of senators and equestrians. The number multiplied in 88 when Sulla marched on Rome, murdered some men, including P. Sulpicius, and exiled others, including Marius. The next year, Marius and Cinna marched on Rome and proceeded to murder senators and equestrians who had opposed them. While the reports of the massacres are probably exaggerated by their source (ultimately Sulla's memoirs), we nonetheless know the names of about ten sen­ators who died. Thereafter new senators were probably added by the censors elected in 86, L. Marcius Philippus and M. Perperna; but Sulla certainly had many of these senators killed in 82 when he again entered Rome.³³ Unlike Mar­ius and Cinna, Sulla devised a legal sanction for his vengeance, the proscrip­tion list. As a result of the accumulation of combat casualties and murders throughout the decade between 91 and 81, both the three-hundred-man Senate and the class of equites equo publico were depleted and undermanned.³⁴ New members had to be found. We have seen Sulla's solution in regard to the Senate, a public law as consul in 88 adding three hundred equites to the Sen­ate. While this law was almost immediately annulled, Sulla then revived it as dictator and it was enacted in 81, in the lex Cornelia iudiciaria. To be sure, the Senate held fewer than three hundred senators by this time, thanks to Sulla's proscriptions, so that when Sulla expanded the Senate membership by adlecting three hundred equites equo publico, he presumably also adlected an indeterminate number of equites to bring the Senate up to its new full comple­ment of six hundred.³⁵ As for the class of equites equo publico, enough men of equestrian rating were available to keep the numbers up: The proscriptions enriched some men at the expense of others. Sulla's grant of citizenship optimo iure to ten thousand freed slaves of the proscribed and his land grants to the veterans of twenty-three legions are but two of the best-known instances of the redistribution of resources. New equites equo publico and thus potentially the replacements for the senators were mostly equestrians of obscure back­ground and municipal origin; some were new citizens.³⁶

This second, successful attempt by Sulla to bring three hundred equestrians into the Senate addressed directly and indirectly two immediate concerns: the depleted ranks of the Roman Senate as a result of war and the controlled entry of new citizens in the highest classes. Since each man selected was approved by the vote of the Roman tribes, Sulla created a new aristocracy, drawn from the equestrian class and validated man by man by the Roman tribes.³⁷ Other bills relating to offices and officeholding exhibit similar concerns. The lex Cor­nelia de XX quaestoribus, noted previously, made this office the regular entry into the Senate and increased the number of annually elected quaestors to twenty. On this basis it has been estimated that twenty vacancies occurred yearly in the six-hundred-member Senate and that Sulla's reform of the quaestor­ship was intended to maintain the Senate at strength.³⁸ Such a law removed the need for the customary revision of the Senate list (lectio senatus), a review of the senators' qualifications and character conducted by the Roman censors every five years before the interruptions of the previous decade.

Although the fighting men of Italy made an unequivocal commitment to Sulla, the dilemma of leadership continued, for Sulla himself and all Roman leaders. Efforts to resolve the dilemma took many forms, some more deadly than others. One solution, as we have seen, was extermination. The murder of thousands of Roman senators and equestrians by Sulla in 82, as well as many more thousand Samnites, and Sulla's extensive reprisals against Etrurian and other towns reflect a general determination to rid Roman society of difficult elements at all levels. In a more benign fashion, the determination to prevent the increase in citizen numbers from upsetting the traditional relationship between groups is reflected in the efforts to keep new citizens from voting by preventing their registration in property classes and controlling the tribal vote. Sulla's attempts to deal directly with these issues exacerbated the difficulties in maintaining the Roman way, at a time when the death of many Romans in war necessitated the creation of a renewed Roman political aristocracy and the solution to the Italian War had in fact brought about an impressive expan­sion on all levels of society.

The repercussions of Sulla's program continued to pound at the highest lev­els of society over the next thirty years. Immediate crises involved the social integrity of the leadership. In 77, the proconsular commander of Transalpine Gaul, M. Aemilius Lepidus, after failing as consul in 78 to undo the changes instituted by the laws of Sulla through his own proposals of law to restore the powers of the office of tribune and compensate men whose lands had been confiscated by the measures of Sulla and to restore the grain dole, attempted to do so by force of arms. Marching on Rome with his legions in 77 he was defeated by Q. Lutatius Catulus. Lepidus escaped to Sardinia, accompanied by many of his soldiers, but died there. The soldiers then followed his legate M. Perperna Vento to Spain, where they joined Q. Sertorius. Between 77 and 72, the civil war concluded in Italy by 81 continued in Spain, as Sertorius bat­tled ably against the successive Roman commanders sent from Italy, Q. Cae­cilius Metellus Pius and Cn. Pompeius Magnus. War ended only when Sertorius was murdered by one of his officers in 72. Before his death, thousands of Roman troops were called to fight under the commanders sent from Rome.³⁹ In these actions and in the loyalties of the ordinary Roman soldiers who participated in them, it is obvious that legitimate leadership continued to be a critical issue. Leadership would continue to be the prime divisive issue in the Roman state down to the creation of the position of emperor by the adopted son of Julius Caesar, C. Julius Caesar Octavianus, after his victory over M. Antonius at Actium in 31.

More significantly for the future of the Roman public lawmaking process, Sulla's use of the lawmaking capacity of the Roman people signifies an aware­ness on the part of Sulla of the political potential of public lawmaking assem­blies. Sulla clearly equated his public law proposals and his own political advancement with the advancement of the Roman system. This was some­thing probably all political leaders had always done; the performance of the “popular” tribunes C. Flaminius in 232, Ti. Gracchus in 133, even more his brother C. Gracchus in 123-122, and L. Appuleius Saturninus in 103 and 100 are cases in point. But earlier, elected officials were kept in line by the overwhelming power of the collective body of Roman senators. Now with Sulla, the attenuation of the traditional system made a more directly politi­cal use of public lawmaking possible. At the same time, the dramatically increasing frequency of public lawmaking assemblies—eighteen in 81 alone— involving Roman participation for most of the year politicized the process to an extent never before possible. Like their leaders, Romans increasingly came to see public lawmaking assemblies as a public instrument of value in the day- to-day struggles within Rome.

NEW CITIZENS, 9I-7O

Over most of their history, some Romans were hostile to newly made citizens, fighting to exclude or at least contain such men even when the community as a group was deliberately bringing them in. The restricted tribal assign­ments were directed not only against ex-slaves but also against Latins, who voted in a single tribe chosen by lot, and particularly against the thousands of Latins and Italians made citizen in 9O and 89. The fierce opposition displayed toward the tribal enrollment of new citizens provides a measure of the threat to the Roman system induced by the challenge of new members at all levels. Without an understanding of the attachments linking ordinary people and Roman leaders, how could new citizens participate? Hence at all times the most apparent, because the most articulate, locus for hostility to newcomers was the Roman leadership. In the second century, leaders at times articulated their fears in public oratory, stridently opposing any influx of newcomers into the Roman citizen body on grounds that old citizens would find their perquisites dimin­ished and their customary arenas overrun. Arguing against a bill proposed by C. Gracchus in 122 to extend Roman citizenship to allies, the consul C. Fan­nius warned that city residents would be crowded out of their meetings, games, and festivals if the law was approved.⁴⁰ They had to guard their votes against the Latins and Italians, who would outnumber them if granted the citizenship. A similar sentiment surfaces two generations later, in the consul Cicero's speech De Lege Agraria 2, delivered in 63. Cicero advised city dwellers that it was not in their interests to forsake the perquisites of city life for a plot of land. Whether these expressions accurately reflect the fears of ordinary Romans we are not likely to know for sure. That they were aired at such events suggests that they were somewhat popular on lower levels. Certainly, they reveal a rather con­sistent position on the part of Roman leaders over a long period.

Actual resistance to new citizens took different forms and attained different levels of hostility depending on the particular group. Its primary expression was the legal restriction of the new citizen's participation in community life. Con­tinuous efforts were made to contain new citizens, who were variously Latins, ex-slaves, or Italians, through restrictions on tribal assignments. The question of inclusion, and who to include, went back and forth over a long period. By the late second century, the threatened impact of massive numbers of new citizens— almost triple the number of old Romans, roughly one million voting men—rip­pled through Roman society on all levels, creating a considerable dilemma for Romans. On the highest levels of society, the issue of absorption entailed more precisely the rightful leadership of Rome, brought increasingly into ques­tion as a result of the continuous admission of Latins and Italians into Roman citizenship and the highest property classes. But on lower levels, the issue entailed the customary relationship between the leaders and the led, a far more trou­blesome matter to political leaders.

In turns some Romans worked to ensure control of society by the right sort of men, the boni and optimates in Rome's political vocabulary, and to rid the com­munity of undesirable members, while other Romans worked to reestablish com­munity cohesion through the recall of exiles, the accommodation of new citizens, and the purification of the ranks of the leadership. Some Romans were fiercely resistant to the idea of incorporating Latins and allies, while others were fiercely determined to incorporate them. Before the Italian War, a tribune, Minicius, probably in 91, carried a bill assigning the children of marriages between a Roman and someone from a group without the “right of legal marriage” (ius conubii) to the status of the non-Roman.⁴¹ There must have been a sufficient number of such individuals to make their citizen status a matter of concern. The efforts, in 91, of the tribune M. Livius Drusus to incorporate the Latins and allies through a promised bill, which was never promulgated, exemplifies both the general efforts of Roman leaders of the latter group over the previous generation or two as well as their acceptance of the realities of the Roman state in Italy.⁴² Drusus's murder in 91, by an unknown assailant, followed by the Roman Senate's imme­diate annulment of his successful enactments—a sequence of events that sparked the Italian War—underscore the passions of the group of Romans opposed to incorporation. The anticipated bill and eventual murder of M. Livius Drusus in 91; the commission of investigation established by the enactment of Q. Varius Hibrida in 90 to set up a special commission of investigation to prosecute sen­ators and equestrians who encouraged allies to revolt; and the enactment of P. Sulpicius to recall men who had been exiled by the commission are all episodes in the struggle between proponents of community purification and commu­nity cohesion.⁴³ The issue surfaces most overtly, of course, in 91 with the Ital­ian demand, backed by arms, for incorporation.

Although the crisis over inclusion in the Roman state as we have seen was resolved through the lex Iulia of 90, the dilemma involving the Roman lead­ership was far from over for Romans. Throughout the decade from 91 to 81, a time of almost continuous civil conflict and dissension, beginning with the Ital­ian War and ending with the civil war fought between L. Cornelius Sulla and his Roman opponents, the fundamental point at issue was the absorption of new citizens into the Roman state. Absorption continued to occupy Romans not only across the decade to 81 but down to the end of the Republic, posing a consider­able dilemma for elite Romans, to which we shall return. Suffice to say here that the Romans resolved it only at the expense of the Roman Republic.

Here let us focus on the recourse to lawmaking assemblies to facilitate the absorption of new citizens into the Roman state between 91 and 70. Table 8.3 collects the public law proposals concerning new citizens over the period. In the period of the Italian War, the primary battleground for the tensions sur­rounding the absorption of new citizens was the public lawmaking assembly, convened repeatedly over a five-year period to address the registration of new citizens in tribes and property classes. In the past, tribal assignment was determined by statute only when the assignment of marginal members of the Roman community was at issue, ex-slaves in particular. But after 90, when as a result of the lex Iulia the new citizens would outnumber the old by about two to one, the question of tribal assignments for new citizens was sufficiently explo­sive to require the intervention of public lawmaking assemblies.⁴⁴ While sheer numbers, in and of themselves, were relatively unimportant in determining the tribal vote, as we have seen, they were critical to the customary relationship between tribal leaders and tribesmen and in particular to the ability of tribal leaders to focus the loyalties of tribesmen on the right decision to be made in electoral or lawmaking assemblies. If all tribes were flooded with large numbers of new citizens the traditional balances essential for the effective working of the assemblies could be lost.

Accordingly, the Romans initially envisioned restrictive tribal assignments. The lex Iulia of 90 probably registered new citizens—Latins and allies who had remained loyal to Rome—in ten new tribes (table 8.3).⁴⁵ The lex Plautia Papiria of 89, which extended citizenship to adscripti, does not appear to have addressed tribal assignments. But another tribune, L. Calpurnius Piso, may have proposed the creation of two new tribes, presumably to hold new citizens (table 8.3).⁴⁶ Over the next three years there followed a public debate that nearly destroyed the Roman state. The restrictive new tribes (because they would have voted after the thirty-five existing tribes) were eliminated in 88 by the tribune P. Sulpicius, who enacted a bill permitting all new citizens and ex-slaves to register in all the tribes (table 8.3).⁴⁷ Within a short time the consuls of 88, L. Cornelius Sulla and Q. Pompeius Rufus, rescinded this and other statutes brought by P Sulpicius. They carried further measures, as we shall see, that con­trolled the admission of new citizens in another way. The consul Cinna in 87 presented the matter again (table 8.3), unsuccessfully; his proposal was vetoed. When he pushed ahead with the voting assembly, his colleagues for the first time in Roman history, sent armed men into the Forum to scatter the voters.⁴⁸ The episode precipitated the civil war of 87-86. But when Cinna and Marius returned to Rome the public laws of Sulla and Pompeius were in their turn rescinded and the measures of Sulpicius reinstated. Thereafter the question of tribal assignment was resolved not by lawmaking assemblies but by the censors, the Roman Senate, and the key figure in the decline of the Republic, L. Cor­nelius Sulla, consul in 88 and dictator in 82-81.

During Sulla's absence from Italy, the question of the incorporation of new citizens at the lower levels had continued to dominate the concerns of the rulers of Rome. Indeed, although the immediate causes of the civil conflict between 88 and 82, stemming from competition between two Roman leaders over a mil­itary command, appear on the surface to be unrelated to the Italian War, the fundamental point at issue had been the incorporation of new citizens in the Roman state. Censors were elected in 86, the first in twenty-nine years (since 115), who appear to have registered new citizens throughout all the tribes. And reportedly by Senate decree in 87 the new citizens were permitted to vote.⁴⁹ That all it took to implement the intention of the lex Julia was a decree of the Roman Senate, not another public law seems surprising. After all, the lex lulia redirecting Roman goals on granting citizenship had been made, and the flurry of public law proposals concerning tribal enrollments were advanced and decided in an atmosphere of civil war between 90 and 86. Even so it is a good indica­tor of unanimity among the current crop of senators about allowing new citi­zens to exercise their power as voters.

However, Sulla clearly considered this solution to the question of incorpo­ration untenable. Notwithstanding his earlier assurances to the former allies that he would accept the registrations of 86—which conveyed an implicit recog­nition of all the rights and privileges of full citizenship, in particular voting— he effectively nullified them through a set of revolutionary changes involving Rome's electoral and legislative assemblies. Specifically he blocked the tradi­tional avenues to effective citizen participation as voters in the centuriate assem­bly and in the plebeian tribal assembly, the chief lawmaking assembly, through restrictions on the censorship and the tribunate. Without recourse to a law­making assembly, the office of censor was simply set aside: no censors were elected in 81, the next regular census, nor were any censors elected again until 70. In this way Sulla thwarted any further registration of new citizens in Rome's property classes and perhaps also in the tribes at the regular time of the quin­quennial census. It was a deliberate move, scholars believe, calculated to slow the entry of qualified Italians into the equestrian class and Class 1 (since only the censors in Rome could assign new citizens to a class) and thence into the corresponding voting centuries of the centuriate assembly.⁵⁰ Registration in a property class was a prerequisite for voting in Rome's centuriate assembly. It was likely also to hinder the enrollment of new citizens in the tribes and con­sequently their ability to vote in tribal assemblies.⁵¹ Although it is sometimes believed that tribal assignments were made locally, that is, automatically, it is hard to see how new Romans could vote unless new tribal leaders were in place in the tribal government to confirm them as tribe members in Rome. No doubt the local supervision of the tribes was in disarray.⁵² In any case, even if new cit­izens were able to vote in the full tribal assembly and so enact law or elect low- ranking officials under the leadership of consuls or praetors, they were excluded from voting in the centuriate assembly.

Equally damaging to the ability of former allies to fully exercise the rights and privileges of citizenship were Sulla's innovations in regard to the tribunate. As we have seen in 88, Sulla carried bills placing stringent restrictions on the office of tribune and on the functions of the plebeian tribal assembly. Specifi­cally, the lawmaking capacity of the officers of the plebeian assembly, the tri­bunes, was eliminated and the primary organ for enacting public law, the plebeian tribal assembly, was replaced by the full tribal and centuriate assemblies (table 8.2).⁵³ Annulled in 88, the laws were restored in 81 (table 8.2). All law­making business was henceforth conducted in the centuriate assembly or the tribal assembly convened by consuls or praetors.⁵⁴ Concurrently, Sulla's restric­tions on the tribunate, in particular the removal of the tribunes' authority to bring bills to the people, neutralized the communitywide feature of public law­making by tribunes as well. Indeed, only 14 public law proposals, or 6 percent of the total number (230) across the period 91-44, were presented to the people in the years 79-70 (table 8.4), in assemblies convened by praetors or consuls. Thus the effective incorporation of new citizens at all levels, to the point where they could exercise their power as voters in lawmaking assemblies, was slow in coming. While new citizens were promised registration in all the thirty-five tribes in 86, the whole process of formal incorporation through tribes and property classes was put on hold until 70.

The reluctance to grant citizenship to the allies until there appeared to be no other solution and the reluctance to allow former allies to fully participate in voting assemblies after 90 reflected deep-seated and widespread fear as to the impact of the absorption of such vast numbers of new citizens on the society. There was a reality here. With the inclusion of 740,000 Italian and Latin allies, the Roman male citizen population of roughly 394,000 would jump in princi­ple to 1,134,000, some of whom sought access to elite levels, and now included dozens of diverse groups.⁵⁵ In fact, when the censors of 70 held an enumera­tion at last of citizens, old and new, 910,000 were registered, up from the 463,000 Romans who had presented themselves before the censors in the previous cen­sus of 86, attesting to the widespread interest on the part of new citizens to pres­ent themselves before the censors in Rome.⁵⁶ The fundamental problem in bringing masses of new citizens into Roman society, some of whom qualified for higher status, was how to do it while maintaining the traditional Roman way, especially the balance between elements that allowed the development of a community consensus best seen in times of crisis in the public lawmaking process. Bringing new citizens, especially in such large numbers, into the var­ious tribes threatened the status of the elites within their primary political base of power, the tribes. Expanding the various hierarchies of elites further shook the nexus between political leaders, tribal leaders, and tribesmen. The vari­ous crises that unfolded over the years from 91 to 44—the crisis of military lead­ership of 87, the civil war of 83-81, the attempted coup of M. Aemilius Lepidus in 78, the slave rebellion led by Spartacus between 73 and 71, and the Catili- narian conspiracy of 63—were all in one way or another an outcome of the fail­ure to accord full citizenship to qualified newcomers and to effectively manage their absorption into Roman society.

Over these same years, as shown in table 8.4, public lawmaking events reached the unprecedented average of almost five laws per year as Roman lawmakers sought to restore the rapidly disappearing political balance. For hundreds of years such assemblies had been used successfully to develop a community con­sensus on controversial issues. This time, however, the outcome would be dif­ferent: the more legislation was passed the more complicated and intractable became the problem. The problems accompanying the incorporation of new citizens after the Italian War were never resolved before the end of the Repub­lic and were the single biggest factor in the continuing civil dissension in the Roman state.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE SULLAN RESTORATION

Sulla's program of “restoration” had produced tensions at all levels of society, centering on access to resources in Italy. The heavy reparations levied on some communities by Sulla, including the confiscation of private and municipal prop­erty, mostly in central and south Italy, and the settlement of thousands of sol­diers in colonies imposed on penalized towns in the same areas, as well as the proscriptions of individual Romans and Italians, intensified the disruption of the war itself, extending its impact across two generations. Some already wealthy, elite members of Roman society profited from confiscations in the short term. Even nonelite members of society might profit, like Chrysogenus, the ex-slave of Sulla who made millions by buying up confiscated estates at a fraction of their value and reselling them at full value. The approximately 120,000 veter­ans who received land allotments appear to have benefited in the short term. Some doubtless even thrived. Yet chronic indebtedness among the rural pop­ulation of Italy, which becomes increasingly evident after 81, combined with settlement on marginal lands made success an elusive outcome for veterans. In the long run these men faced the same challenges as other small landholders. We may imagine that survival was difficult for anyone put down in a new envi­ronment where the land was mediocre, even if it was possible to create famil­iar networks of cooperation—a likely possibility since veterans were settled in their military units. The contemporary historian Sallust's contention that Sulla's veterans, settled on lands in Picenum, Etruria, and Apulia, were impov­erished by 63 seems plausible.

Debt in fact appears to have been a constant companion to many Romans, especially rural inhabitants, in large part because of the restricted cash flow in a limited monetary economy. When available stocks of bronze, silver, and gold were used up, especially in payment of desperate military endeavors, difficult times followed for all. Major wars whose successful conduct or conclusion failed to bring gold and silver into the Roman treasury were followed by widespread indebtedness among rich and poor, urban and rural dweller alike. This was true not only of the civil wars of 91-89 and 87-81 but of most wars fought between the 130s and the 60s. There was little loot except for what infantrymen could carry off themselves from pillaged villagers and townsmen. The public outrage at the disappearance of the gold from Tolosa, in Gaul, in 104 while en route to Rome, reportedly into the pockets of the commander Q. Servilius Caepio, pro­vides an insight into the public interest in loot.⁵⁷ The cost of continuous war, accompanied by fewer war profits, introduced a new level of indebtedness into Italy. Rural inhabitants of Italy, old and new citizens alike, experienced debt and debt bondage. In turn, while rural land tenure continued to be insecure anyway after the lex Agraria of 111, which had primarily confirmed the status quo of 123, the reparations Sulla demanded from Italian communities espe­cially in Etruria, Picenum, and Apulia had again raised the question of access to ager publicus. The accumulation of wealth in the hands of senators and a growing number of men with the equestrian rating further intensified tensions within the uppermost stratum of Roman society. Concurrently, since the civil wars of 91-81, new citizens had been frustrated in the full realization of Roman citizenship by barriers preventing their registration in property ratings and tribes. Thus, both new and old citizens numbered among the rural inhabitants of Italy had been increasingly distanced from the rewards of Roman empire.

As before, but to an even greater extent, military service continued to be the chief route to survival for all affected inhabitants of Italy threatened by debt or subsistence crises. In 86, Cinna conscripted one hundred thousand Italians. Cn. Pompeius Magnus raised three legions in 83 from the rural inhabitants of Picenum, clustered on the marginal lands of his family's vast estates. Through­out the period between 80 and 50, the Romans, now including Italians, were deeply committed to external wars, from Spain to Asia—paradoxically, in view of both ongoing internal crisis as well as the particularly heavy losses in man­power during the Italian War. Before 58, the largest commitment of troops was found in the eastern Mediterranean, primarily fighting Mithridates, King of Pontus, with whom war had resumed in 74. In 67, Rome also mounted a major campaign against the pirates based in Cilicia, placing Cn. Pompeius Magnus in command. The following year they rolled this campaign into an all-out Roman bid to annex the eastern Mediterranean with its untold wealth. In 58, Rome mounted a similar assault on Gaul, under the leadership of C. Julius Cae­sar, while M. Licinius Crassus in 54 led an attack on Parthia. On average, one hundred thousand Romans marched to war every year between 80 and 50.⁵⁸ More legions were conscripted between 79 and 65 than at any other time in the history of the Roman Republic.

Now, however, military service did little to alleviate the situation. The social churning resulting from many departures from Roman society, an estimated 272,000 men from 83 to 81 alone, as well as the constant drain across the period, was intensified by combat casualties. Several years witnessed heavy losses in battle. In 74, M. Cotta was defeated by Mithridates at Chalcedon by land and by sea, with reported losses of 5,300 (Memnon) and 4,000 (Plutarch) men. In 73 and 72, the slaves in Italy vanquished six Roman armies, including those of the two consuls of 72 and a proconsul. The number of casualties is unre­ported, but successive defeats at the hands of slaves undoubtedly brought considerable shame to Rome. In 67, Mithridates destroyed a Roman army in Pontus, killing 7,000 Romans, including 150 centurions and 24 tribunes. In 53, Gauls ambushed a Roman army, killing the two commanders. Also in 53, in the biggest single Roman defeat of the era, Crassus lost 30,000 men—20,000 killed and 10,000 taken prisoner—by the Parthians at Carrhae. Many more thousands died in the civil wars between 50 and 46.⁵⁹ While individuals might indeed benefit from war, Roman society as a whole did not.

What routes to survival other than military service attracted impoverished Romans? We might expect a surge of migration to market towns or to Rome. But migration always appears selective of those a notch or two from the very bottom of society. As noted in chapter 4, during the initial phase of Roman expansion many displaced Italians seem to have stayed in their regions of ori­gin: when the best arable land was taken by the more powerful, the powerless moved to marginal lands. So, too, in later centuries. In 81, when similar dis­ruptions occurred in Etruria, the original Etruscan inhabitants of the Apen- nine town of Faesulae, who were dispossessed of their land and citizenship by Sulla in favor of his veterans, remained in the area. They then rose against the new inhabitants in 78.⁶⁰ How and where they had survived in the mean­time is a matter for speculation: probably on the marginal mountain highlands or in swamps and marshes, as had been the case in other parts of Europe. But clearly, they had stayed put in the region. The impoverished citizens of Etruria and Picenum, whose numbers were large enough in 63 to provide Catiline with a base of support, also stayed on the land. The praetor Q. Caecilius Metellus Celer conscripted troops from the ager Picenus and ager Gallicus in 63.⁶¹ Among them were Sullan veterans who though deeply indebted were nonethe­less still in possession of their lands. The continued existence of small land­holdings in Italy, which point to the continued presence of independent or tenant farmers, has been amply confirmed by archeological excavation. The conclusion that long-distance migration in this period was an option for spe­cific individuals with particular experiences, and was not the rule for all Ital­ians, is unavoidable.⁶²

The divisions within the Roman leadership presented another alternative for hard-pressed Romans in the years between 80 and 50, namely, rebellion. While military service had become a major unifier of Italy by the time of the Italian War, service had also intensified the gap between elite and nonelite members of the wider society. Again during the Roman civil wars, both in the period from 87 to 80 and in the period from 50 to 44, soldiers in opposing legions exhibit confusion about “legitimate” causes and leaders, largely because their own interests converge but jointly diverge from the elite-centered inter­ests of many of their leaders from the Roman aristocracy. The political com­petitiveness in particular of elite Romans appears to be a concern unique to that group. To be sure, the loyalty of a legion to its commander was often unshakable. But such steadfastness depended absolutely on the commander.

Notwithstanding the divergent interests of the leaders and the led, both loy­alty and leadership in Roman society had a strong personal dimension.

Some leaders accordingly inspired strong support. In 78, L. Aemilius Lep­idus capitalized on the legacy of disruption and debt in his efforts to bring a new leadership to the helm in Rome, first through his public law proposals and, when they failed, through war. The crisis of continuing dissension in Italy was compounded between 73 and 71 when a slave revolt led by the Thracian Spartacus broke out in Italy. Italy again had a grave need for troops. In 73, the armies formed by Spartacus around a core of slave gladiators and prison­ers from Capua defeated three hastily conscripted Roman armies. In 72, the slaves again defeated the armies of the two consuls as well as two legions in Cisalpine Gaul commanded by C. Cassius Longinus, consul in 73. The success of these slave armies, composed mostly of Gauls and Germans, in maintaining themselves in the regions of Italy through which they passed as well as in attract­ing ever more fighters attests to the number of desperate Romans in the rural areas willing to join Spartacus. Something had to be done. A large army was formed. M. Licinius Crassus Dives, who had been praetor probably in 73, was placed in command as proconsul. When two legions of this army, com­manded by Mummius, were again routed by slaves Crassus was provoked to order the decimation of a cohort of the survivors, an extreme punishment last used in the third century. Under Crassus's leadership, the Romans concluded the war against Spartacus in six months, in late 72 and early 71. At the end the Senate instructed Cn. Pompeius Magnus, holding a proconsular command in Spain, to return to Italy to join his army to Crassus's.⁶³ Although Spartacus was killed, and a grim public display was made of some of the slave survivors, the rural poverty that aided Spartacus's revolt in Italy persisted.

In 63, L. Sergius Catilina drew on the same group of impoverished men again, specifically “allies,” according to Dio, that is, new citizens, and “disaffected Romans.” When forced to leave Rome he headed for Faesulae in Etruria, where he took over the legion already raised by an ex-centurion. Official fears of the potential danger from armed slaves were again roused: Capua was garrisoned to protect the gladiator schools lest Catiline's supporters were to free the slaves there.⁶⁴ The praetors M. Bibulus and Q. Tullius Cicero were sent to the cen­tral Apennines and southern Italy respectively to discourage the Paeligni and Bruttii from similar actions.⁶⁵ The depth of commitment on the part of the men who joined Catiline is clearly revealed when Sallust, the historian of the upris­ing, marveled that not a man ran from the battlefield at the final encounter.

The failure of these uprisings is a measure of the Romans' success even now at reaching generally acceptable solutions to societywide crises in public lawmaking assemblies. As we shall see in the next chapter, dedicated and ambi­tious Roman leaders initiated significant lawmaking efforts in order to amelio­rate conditions and promote the advancement of the Roman system. Thus lawmaking itself, requiring at least temporary migration to Rome to attend pub­lic lawmaking sessions, presented yet another, countervailing alternative for hard-pressed Romans.⁶⁶ The convergence on Rome of voters who accepted the increasing politicization of the process coincided with the politicization by Roman leaders of associations (collegia) and “clubs” (sodalitates), structures that had emerged long before in Roman society in response to the social needs of an expanding, mobile population.

Some impoverished Italians and Romans turned to outlawry to survive. Ban­ditry as an alternative means of survival was evidently characteristic of Etruria, the region that had suffered the harshest punitive measures imposed by Sulla in 81 and had led the response to Aemilius Lepidus’s call to arms in 78 and Catiline in 63. So common was banditry in the central region of Italy, home to the estates of wealthy men, that M. Terentius Varro took it for granted as an ordinary hazard of plantation farming in his handbook on farming, intended as a guide perhaps for his wife, Fundania. Banditry became more common through­out the Italian countryside in the latter part of the last century, providing a refuge and a means of survival for debtors or men from communities whose ter­ritory had been appropriated alike. After the failure of Spartacus’s rebellion and Catiline’s revolt, remnants of those armies still roamed less populated regions of Italy. In 60, the proconsul C. Octavius, on his way to his province in Macedonia, “mopped up” some of these outlaws in Apulia. In 59, the Senate initially allotted as provinces to the consuls Caesar and Bibulus (very much against their liking) the “woods and trails” (silvae callesque) of Italy, suggest­ing that there was a need for policing outlaws in remote regions. But before now, the growing scale of piracy throughout the eastern Mediterranean in the 80s and 70s attests to an even more widespread dislocation of peoples as well as another alternative for desperate men. The pirates of Cilicia welcomed the displaced men of Italy as eagerly as men from other regions around the Mediter­ranean. Pompey’s resettlement of vanquished pirates in 67 as well as the increas­ing organization and discipline of pirate raiders suggest that they included a high number of Romans and Italians.⁶⁷

In short, the economic crises and civil dissension in Italy arising from the incorporation of new citizens, the impact of the large-scale involvement in the military, the poor return in the form of booty for investments in military cam­paigns, and the impressive loss of life in war permeated to all levels of soci­ety through Italy. But to our wonder, the evidence clearly shows that masses of voters still displayed the same respect as ever for the process of public law­making when it came to correcting some of these societywide ills. The poten­tial of public law to redistribute resources was especially important. Public laws established the largest land grants to soldiers, for instance, in which soldiers of the same unit passed from camp to colony or individual allotment: those of Sulla in 81 and Julius Caesar between 47 and 44. Sulla gave allotments in twenty-three colonies to approximately 120,000 soldiers; Caesar gave land grants to approximately 5o,ooo.⁶⁸ In 44, the soldiers to whom land had been given were quartered in temples in Rome, waiting to go. In preparation they had sold their possessions and had chosen group leaders from their number to lead each group to the colonies. Sadly, when Caesar was assassinated in March their consternation was great lest his successors would annul the grant—so accustomed had Romans become to the evanescence of public law.⁶⁹

As we shall see next, the customary avenue for resolving the inevitable ten­sions, public lawmaking assemblies, for the first time were undergoing a related transformation at the hands of a new aristocracy. Although the impetus for the new, more immediate use of the process seems to have come from the top, all Romans eventually shared in the new perception of the immediate political uses of public lawmaking.

THE NEW LEADERSHIP AND THE LAWMAKING OF 70

When Pompey first entered the Senate on becoming consul in 70 at the age of thirty-six, he petitioned his friend, the scholarly senator of praetorian rank M. Terentius Varro, to prepare a handbook of senatorial responsibilities so that he would know what senators did and how they did it.⁷⁰ The explanation for this surprising unfamiliarity with a Roman senator's scope of duties and their execution, on the part of a man from a consular family, was his unanticipated, utter avoidance of the traditional training grounds for the Roman Senate: the junior legal commissions and elective offices. Pompey's early career was exclu­sively military; and even in this regard his career path was exceptional, for after his initial customary military service on his father's staff during the Italian War, circumstances not only prevented him from presenting his candidacy for one of the twenty-four elective military tribunates but made his appointment to any of the other military tribunates politically risky. In fact, Pompey gained entry into Roman political life through his highly irregular tenure as commander pro praetore between 83 (when he was twenty-three) and 79 and as commander pro consule between 77 and 71.⁷¹ When elected consul, Pompey had held no previous elected office. The pattern was unusual, but it draws attention to persistent irregularities in the preparation for rule of an entire generation. The reasons are not hard to find.

The Italian War and the civil conflict of the 80s produced high casualties among senators and equestrians. Combat and proscription left at least one hun­dred senators dead by 82, one-third of the entire Senate body. New members were found among the equites equo publico. When Sulla increased the total membership of the Senate to six hundred in 82, he did so by adlecting equi- tes.⁷² But the equites equo publico had also suffered high attrition between 91 and 82, as had the equestrian class generally: forty-seven hundred lost in the proscriptions, probably far more in the fighting. Nonetheless, the administra­tive demand for equestrians continued. Before Caesar's even bigger revision of the Senate in 46, normal attrition and special circumstances necessitated fur­ther additions to the Senate. It has been estimated on the basis of the lex Cor­nelia de quaestoribus that twenty vacancies occurred yearly in the six-hundred-member Senate and that Sulla's reform in the quaestorship was intended to maintain the Senate at strength.⁷³ In 70, sixty-four senators were removed by the censors.⁷⁴ Hence the avenue of entry into the Roman leader­ship, widened by war, remained wide open.

The men who entered were mostly equestrians of obscure background and municipal origin. Some may have been new citizens.⁷⁵ Throughout Italy the number of such men had been increasing. The north Italian town of Patavium claimed five hundred men of equestrian rank during the reign of Augustus, an exceptionally high figure thought to demonstrate local wealth: At this time the circumstances and fortunes of these individuals were greatly aggravated by civil war.⁷⁶ Not every town boasted so many rich men. Nonetheless, Brunt conjec­tures that men with a property rating of at least HS 100,000 in the more than three hundred towns in Italy in the first century, who comprised a class of town councilors, numbered fifty thousand.⁷⁷ We have already seen that these men were critical additions to Rome's leadership between the fourth and second cen­turies. They were more critical at the conclusion of the decade-long struggles in Italy between 91 and 82. At all times, and especially in wartime, when mor­tality rates were high, men of equestrian rank drawn from all communities of Italy provided an expanded pool in the Late Republic from which officials, offi­cers, and administrators were drawn. The changing composition of the Roman Senate in the first century reflected this expanded pool.⁷⁸

So too did the growing number of new men in office. In particular, many junior officeholders throughout the first century were men without any polit­ical antecedents, whose fathers or grandfathers had not held high office. The most reliable listing of known new men and men of municipal origin (some new citizens) who entered the Senate between 139 BCE and 14 CE numbers 563.⁷⁹ These men were also elected to office, rarely high office but the lower offices. A useful set of figures drawn up by Vanderbroek, based on this listing, shows that a group of eighty-seven tribunes holding office between 78 and 49, whose antecedents and careers are known, included thirty-five, or 40 per­cent, from obscure backgrounds, that is, men from families that had not pro­duced a high elected official.⁸⁰ Presumably, many more such men were found among the military tribunes and Vigintisexvirate.⁸¹ And not only were a fairly large proportion of the junior officeholders political newcomers, but an increas­ing number of low-ranking senators were recruited from men of equestrian rat­ing who had not held office. It is reasonable to expect that these changes were accompanied by a transformation in the conventions of leadership followed by elite Romans.

As big as the demand for administrators had been in the second century, it was far bigger in the first century, commensurate with the number of offices to be filled. In every year after 70, eighty-four junior offices had to be filled by election: ten tribunes, twenty quaestors, four aediles, twenty-four military trib­unes, and twenty-six members of the Vigintisexvirate. Every year, three hun­dred equestrians were put on a list of jurors by the praetor and were required to be in Rome in order to be available if called to serve on a jury. Because the offices were held for only one year, and the album iudicum was drawn up anew every year, we can imagine that the apparatus over time involved a great many equestrians, drawing deeply on the resources of the equestrian class. If only the equites equo publico, roughly 1,800 men, and some of the larger group of men with an equestrian rating, the tribuni aerarii from Class 1, were drawn in by the demanding range of legal, administrative, and political posts required to regulate and manage the Roman state, then over time we should expect a great many members of this restricted group to become acquainted with some of the materials and procedures of rule. Given that 840 men were needed for the eighty- four elected offices that had to be filled annually between 70 and 60, and that at a minimum 3,000 men (drawn from senators, equestrians, and tribuni aer­arii) were on the album iudicium over the period—not to mention the men serving on special commissions as legates or envoys or as members of a recuper- atorial panel, recuperatores (senators, scholars think)—then about 4,000 men in all would be involved over the period. Assuming a stable group and an annual turnover in positions, then every senator and every equites equo publico would be actively involved every year in the business of justice and leadership and roughly 2,000 more elite Romans outside the Senate and outside the ranks of the equi­tes equo publico would at one time or another be privy to the conventions of rule across this ten-year period. Adding in the necessary and numerous young assis­tants, the number grows. Clearly a large percentage of Rome's elite members— indeed all of Rome's senators and equites equo publico, as well as many of her equestrians—were engaged year-round in the process of administration and adjudication. No wonder so many elected officeholders with the authority to convene the people could be expected to have at least rudimentary acquain­tance with Rome's public law in the first century.

As the number of offices expanded throughout the period of the Republic and the requirements of Rome's system of justice at all levels, so too did the size of the pool from which such administrators came. Between the fourth and sec­ond centuries, more and more aristocrats came from the municipalities of Italy. After the Italian War of 91-89, still larger numbers of Italian aristocrats entered the pool. Accordingly, across the period from the fourth to the first centuries, the steady demand for administrators was matched by the steadily increasing number of potential administrators. By the first century, both demand and num­bers were commensurately large, with significant implications for the prepa­ration of Rome's equestrians for leadership, in particular for participation in the public lawmaking process.

The waning of the Roman Senate's paramount role in lawmaking provides an indication of the direction of change. The Senate, traditionally the repos­itory of auctoritas, was traditionally also the main source of advice and affirma­tion tapped by sponsors of public law. The opinion of the Senate about public law mattered a great deal to the people throughout our period of interest. For in a hierarchic society such as Rome, the sanction or censure of this exalted body ideally articulated in advance the collective will of the people. Though the Senate continued to rank as a chief source of authority in Rome down to the end of the Republic, whose affirmation of and recommendations about pub­lic law and proposals of law mattered, other sources appeared in consequence of Rome's expanding leadership. The authority and influence of individual officeholders, and increasingly senators without office, sometimes carried far more weight than that of the Senate. The ability of individual leaders to win support over the collective wishes of the Senate emerges in the record first with C. Flaminius in 232 and characterizes the lawmaking process from the tribunate of Ti. Gracchus in 133 down to 44. While these developments are generally viewed as a fundamental change in the lawmaking process, involving both the arenas and the sources of authority, their underlying causes indicate broader changes. In particular the growing divisions within the Senate membership by the end of the second century, as individual senators began to operate to an extent on their own, signal the opportunities opened by the emergence of more groups in Roman society. Now, individual Roman leaders could turn to singu­lar advantage the unspoken relationship between Senate and people.

In many respects, however, little appears to have changed. Where public law is concerned, when tribunes or consuls did not take their proposed laws directly to the Senate, they turned instead to the other obvious sources of expert­ise that they used publicly in meetings of the Roman people. These were individual elected officeholders and senators without office, men who did not always align themselves with the Senate as a collective body. From the perspec­tive of the voters, they were nonetheless authoritative: The assumption that Roman senators collectively or individually knew the Roman mind was deeply held. Moreover, there was little difference in what they might say. The same matters were aired in the Senate and in public meetings in regard to proposed laws. Similarly, in both the Senate and in public meetings, the debate sought to develop a version of law that would appeal to the widest number of Romans. The significant difference was that Senate meetings were closed to the Roman people, a matter of growing concern to Romans by the mid-first century because it involved the conditions believed essential for the unhindered expression of community consensus.⁸²

Returning to Pompey in 70, we might wonder about the nature and extent of the deficiencies in Pompey's training that he so clearly wanted to remedy. More important, why would a Roman of Pompey's position seek to remedy these deficiencies? Thirty years after Pompey's petition to Varro, Cicero argued strongly in his theoretical treatise on the laws of Rome that senators should observe three rules: they should attend sessions of the Senate, speak in turn and briefly, and have a grasp of the affairs of the Roman people.⁸³ By implication sena­tors in Cicero's day were not always knowledgeable about the scope of sena­torial responsibilities. Nor indeed were magistrates, for Cicero complained as well that the elected officeholders of Rome did not know the responsibilities of their office, relying on what their assistants told them.⁸⁴

Witnessed in Pompey's request to Varro is on the one hand an acknowledg­ment of reality and on the other, a sense on the part of some Romans, that Rome's leadership has somehow deviated from an ideal state. Magistrates entered annually revolving offices and could not hold the same office again until ten years had passed. Low-ranking senators entered the Senate after holding the tribunate or quaestorship and never progressed beyond these offices or at most the office of aedile. These men were noticeably (to articulate contemporaries) less well equipped to carry out their responsibilities in the Late Republic than in previous generations. To be sure, the specialized knowledge demanded by other Roman institutions formed the subject of scholarly and practical treatises even before the first century. The handbook Varro produced for Pompey was not the only one of its kind, nor indeed the first.⁸⁵ Varro drew heavily in his own writings on similar didactic manuals that described in great detail the pro­cedures consuls must observe when convening assemblies, for instance. Know­ing how to perform the responsibilities of office was important. But understanding the limits of action was even more critical. In the competitive atmosphere of Rome in the Middle and Late Republic, it is easy to imagine that instruction books helped officeholders understand what they should not do as much as what they should know.

The curious investigator wonders what thoughts ran through the minds of most new senators, entering junior offices and the Senate at an especially rapid rate in the first century, as they confronted their change in fortune and even more the senatorial responsibilities accompanying the change. How many had been groomed for such responsibilities in an adolescence and young man­hood shaped by the traditional apprenticeship in the arts of government as well as war and senatorial aspirations? Very few, judging by ancient report of their origins and qualifications. Nor had all of the newcomers adlected to the Sen­ate held any office. We have to conclude that the Senate, infused with new blood in 81, emerged reconstituted as a body fully half of whose membership was not necessarily privy to the conventions of rule shared by an earlier elite group. How senators executed their responsibilities, insofar as we can see, was profoundly affected by the changes in personnel. More critical were the changes in the preparations for rule and consequently the understandings of the new leaders. Different conventions were bound to emerge at the same time that events occurring in public arenas, prominent among them public lawmaking, became even more important in the competition for office and leadership.

Indeed, to a greater and greater extent in Pompey's own lifetime the knowl­edge of Roman ways included public lawmaking. More Roman leaders holding the offices of consul, praetor, tribune, and, in the case of Sulla, dictator would present more public laws to Roman voters between 91 and 50 than in any ear­lier period of comparable length. Even before 91, the ability to accurately dis­cern the will of the Roman people had become the cachet of a dedicated Roman leader. Such a leader was Tiberius Gracchus, murdered at the end of 133 by his fellow senators, and Gaius Gracchus, forced to commit suicide in 121. Follow­ing the Italian War, as his lawmaking program in 81 plainly shows, Sulla was another genuine leader who survived the feat. Whatever he learned from Varro in 70, Pompey's achievements as consul in that year and again in 55 and 52 place him, too, firmly in the slim ranks of Rome's most discerning lawmakers. More than most ambitious Romans, Pompey appears to have been acutely aware of the importance of lawmaking in cementing the relationship between a Roman leader and the Roman people.

The two men elected consul for 70, Pompey and Crassus, were leaders of recognized ability, tested most recently against the desperate army of Sparta- cus.⁸⁶ Together Pompey and Crassus delivered the Roman state from great peril. Together they stood for and won the consulate. In terms of political experience, they were an odd couple. Never had Pompey performed any of the junior juridi­cal or administrative tasks forming the essential background to high office. Never had he presented himself as a candidate for any office. Indeed, his can­didacy for the consulship was illegal under the circumstances, leading some scholars to suspect he had been granted a dispensation from the law.⁸⁷ Con­versely, the noble Crassus had ascended the cursus, office by office, and was properly acquainted with the conventions of rule.⁸⁸ It was Pompey nonethe­less who demonstrated the greater ability to lead in a traditional Roman way by articulating the desires and concerns of the Roman people. Orating to the people in 71, his first speech as consul-elect, Pompey declared the return of tra­ditional government.⁸⁹ No longer would the people's tribunes endure the loss of powers stripped by Sulla. No longer would Roman administrators despoil the provinces. No longer would the courts pervert justice. The people, Cicero reports, roared their endorsement of Pompey's objectives.

These objectives were quickly implemented by the lawmakers of 70, the two consuls and the praetor L. Aurelius Cotta. In association with Crassus, Pompey enacted a measure to revive the tribunate. The severe restrictions that the lex Cornelia de tribunicia poteste of 81 had placed on the office of tribune had trou­bled many Romans. Although a number of attempts had been ventured to reverse the measure, none succeeded in fully restoring the intended functions to the office.⁹⁰ Most important, the tribunes still lacked the legislative and jurisdic­tional powers that enabled them to balance the unilateral authority of the Roman Senate. The lex Pompeia Licinia de tribunicia potestate restored the vigor of the tribunate. Henceforth, down to the end of the Republic, the office provided a busy platform for political newcomers and nobiles alike with visions of per­sonal advance as leaders who could discern the will of the Roman people. Not only the tribunate but the courts were addressed by lawmakers in 70. Reversing another of Sulla's controversial reforms, the praetor L. Aurelius Cotta carried the lex Aurelia iudiciaria, which instituted three panels of jurors for Rome's standing courts, one each for senators, equites equo publico, and tribuni aer- arii.⁹¹ Thus was broken the Senate's exclusive hold on the right to adjudicate capital crimes alleged against its own members, instituted by the lex Cornelia iudiciaria of 81. Instead, the lex Aurelia enlarged the pool of high-status Romans

capable of passing judgment on the behavior of (mostly) senators and coin­cidentally admitted men from a wider range of backgrounds. Some jurors might even be men whose citizenship derived from the lex Iulia of 90.

While these measures were instrumental in loosening the grip of a relatively small number of Roman nobiles on the direction of the Roman state, of far greater consequence was the consuls' undertaking to directly address the intent, at long last, of the lex Iulia of 90 by facilitating the registration of new citizens, traditionally the task of the censors, in tribes and property classes. The office of censor, however, in abeyance for nearly twenty years, had been rendered unnecessary by Sulla's legislation as part of his effort as we have seen to adjust to the expansion of the citizen population.⁹² Once again, censors were elected to conduct the census, the first since 86, in which 963,000 Romans were enu­merated. The figure, three times greater than the results of the last census, reflects the vast crowd of new citizens denied full membership in the Roman state until now.⁹³ The censors also revised the Senate list, expelling sixty- four senators. The review of the equites equo publico followed, in which an unknown but undoubtedly significant number of equestrians were cast out or enrolled. In any event, the reinvigoration of the tribunate combined with the election of censors was a powerful step toward restoring community cohesion along traditional lines.⁹⁴ It took, however, a leader of some ability and strongly in touch with the Roman people to see the utility of such restorative steps in keeping with customary Roman ways.

CONCLUSION

Together the citizenship grants of 90 and 89, advanced and endorsed by the Senate, the highest of elected officials, the Roman consul, as well as the tri­bunes and the Roman people, in response to the crisis of the Italian War, pro­duced the most significant and the most wrenching change of scale ever achieved in the Roman civic body. Although the granting of citizenship through the incorporation of outside communities or their leaders had become routine since 338, as we saw in chapter 5, the practice had so far occurred on a relatively small scale. In consequence of the lex Iulia granting citizenship to loyal Latins and Italians, strengthened by later laws facilitating the further grant of citizen­ship to adscripti in Italian towns and Latins and allies in Cisalpine Gaul, the earlier trickle of new citizens threatened to become a raging torrent. The adjust­ment of Roman tribes to new citizens proved one of the most intractable prob­lems ever taken to lawmaking assemblies. The difficulty of implementing those arrangements in the laws of 90 and 89 that appear to have addressed tribal registration provides clear demonstration that the outcome of a public lawmaking assembly was valid only when everyone believed in the solution.

Behind the facade of public agreement that accompanied the passage of pub­lic laws granting Roman citizenship to Latins and Italians in the first century, a great deal of potential conflict lay hidden. The solution to the Italian War, the public law granting citizenship to all Italians in 90, signaled an end and a beginning: the end of a traditional and relatively slowly changing Rome that could develop agreement on the resolution of apparently intractable prob­lems through the use of public laws and the beginning of an unprecedented shift in the social and political foundations of the Roman Republic, which con­tinued to run its course until the demise of the Republic in 44. The resolu­tion of the Italian War by public law was very much in line with the traditional uses of public law for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, the influx of new citi­zens that descended on Rome as a result of the new laws, including a signifi­cant element of eligible men clamoring for inclusion in Rome's elite classes, created a situation that could not be resolved through public lawmaking.

Fearful casualties among the older Roman noble clans coincided with the appearance from municipalities throughout Italy of an impressive wave of wealthy men who met the criteria for inclusion on the highest level of Roman society to create a volatile situation among elite Romans. As they had done in similar difficult situations in the past, elite Romans turned to the public lawmaking process to resolve the challenges of the new situation in the traditional Roman way. This time, however, the size and the scale of the threat were of such a mag­nitude as to attenuate the linkages between the various groups that underlay the function of public lawmaking assemblies as a legitimate instrument for devel­oping a community consensus. To the fundamental problem of assigning masses of new citizens to tribes and property classes, thus allowing full access to the benefits of Roman citizenship, was added the challenge of absorbing masses of wealthy newcomers into the various elite levels. Initially undeterred, enter­prising Roman officeholders seized the opportunity to propose bills to absorb Italians as citizens on all levels. In quick succession laws were approved allowing newcomers access to traditional Roman structures of power: masses of newcomers were assigned to tribes, while many of the wealthy among them joined the Senate. Alas, as the magnitude of the absorption became apparent the journey of the new citizens to the voting arena was impeded by limited implementation of the new laws on tribal membership, while wealthy newcom­ers found it difficult to enter the ranks of elite Romans. Quickly it became appar­ent that the absorption of new Italian citizens was going to be one of the most difficult issues ever confronted by Romans.

The eventual transformation of Roman society as a result of the dissemi­nation of Roman citizenship to Italians went far deeper than the Romans them­selves perhaps expected, although it is clear they expected trouble. The inevitable increase in numbers was staggering in itself. The scale of the resulting citizen population, the largest ever seen in the ancient Mediterranean, was extraordi­nary. As many Romans had feared, the blanket grant of citizenship to all Ital­ians initiated a great sorting out in the society that did not run its course until the demise of the Republic.

The ultimate failure to absorb new citizens on all levels, despite an increas­ingly intense use of the public lawmaking process to resolve the crisis, under­lay every major social upheaval of the period 91-44 and eventually led to the transformation of lawmaking assemblies themselves. The difficult job of assign­ing this vast body of new citizens to tribe and property classes, which entailed opening access to the Roman leadership for wealthy outsiders—a trouble­some process since the beginning of citizen grants in the fourth century—proved far more difficult after the Italian War. Customarily the Roman censors fit new citizens into existing tribes or created new tribes as the Romans expanded across Italy; infrequently assignments were achieved through public law. But after 91, when the issue became dangerously divisive, political leaders convened law­making assemblies to decide the question of new tribes and tribal membership. Their failure to resolve these issues presaged the eventual and fatal transforma­tion of the lawmaking process. In years to come, the Romans found themselves attempting to resolve apparently intractable problems that required society­wide consensus through the use of an instrument that itself had become griev­ously flawed by its inability to deal with the massive influx of newcomers caused by the grant of citizenship to all Italians in 89. Reflecting the inability to absorb Italians, public lawmaking assemblies were now less representative of the citi­zen body than ever. As we shall see in the final chapter, the problems intro­duced in Roman society by its vastly increased scale proved almost insurmountable in the long run, despite continuing efforts to restore the integrity of the tradi­tional Roman system.

Source: See appendixes A and C.

^aDates in parentheses are approximate. See appendix C.

TABLE 8.2 Sulla's Laws, 88—80

(continued)

Source: See appendixes A and C. ^aDates in parentheses are approximate. See appendix C.

TABLE 8.3 Laws Concerning New Citizens, 91—44

Source: See appendixes A and C.

^aDates in parentheses are approximate. See appendix C.

^aUnknown: 9 laws.

Notes

1. Veil. Pat. 2.15.2: cf. Brunt 1971,439.

2. Cic., Balb. 21; Gell. 4.4.3; Cic., Fam. 13.30; cf. Veil. Pat. 2.16.4.

3. So Appian, B.C. 1.49, commenting on the conscription of former slaves and a Senate decree promising citizenship to allies who remained loyal that preceded the lex lulia.

4. Scholars believe that the law applied to Italians who had remained “individu­ally loyal” to Rome. As a result of the laws most Italians stopped fighting. Those who surrendered and agreed to recognize Roman law were given citizenship by Senate decree

in 87 (Gran. Lic. p. 21 Flemisch; Livy, Epit. 80), except the Samnites and some Luca- nians, who wanted restitution of property as well. Taylor i960, 102 n. 4, avers that the decree would have to be followed by a law.

5. Contra Brunt, following Badian, who believes the lex Plulia came too late to make a difference and the end of the war came because of “hard fighting” by Romans, which reduced Italians to “unconditional surrender”: Brunt 1988, 107-8 with n. 37.

6. Sherwin-White 1973, 151-53; Badian 1964, 75-76.

7. Cornelius Sisenna, fr. 120 Peter. See Taylor i960, 102 n. 3, and MRR 2.33-34. These were grants as rewards for bravery. The earlier lex Iulia had reportedly given com­manders the right to grant citizenship with the concurrence of their consilium. One pos­sible recipient of such a grant was the great-grandfather of Velleius Paterculus, Minatius Magius of Aeculanum, who raised a legion from among the Hirpini to fight with the Romans: Vell. Pat. 2.16.2.

8. Taylor i960, i02 with n. 6.

9. Censors were elected in 89 to register new citizens in new tribes but failed to complete the census: Cic., Arch. 11. The public law proposal of P. Sulpicius register­ing new citizens in the old tribes intervened. See Taylor i960, 103, and Mommsen, R.St. 2.342 n. 3.

10. Chapter i.

11. Sources in MRR 2.41-42, s.v. Tribunes.

12. The relationship among the bills and the timing of the assemblies are unknown. See Badian i964, 34-70.

13. Val. Max. 9.7 ext. 1; Oros. 5.19.4; cf. Plut., Mar. 35.4, Sull. 8.4.

14. Plut., Sull. 9.2.

15. Appian, B.C. 1. 55-63; Plut., Sulla 7.1-10.2.

16. An alternate interpretation, from a strictly political perspective, is Badian's assessment of Sulla in terms of who supported him after 88, the “Sullani” (see especially his remarks on Sulla's relationship to the troops): Badian 1964, 219-21.

17. Vell. Pat. 2.i9.

18. Vell. Pat. 2.19.1; Flor. 2.9.6-8 (exile); Appian, B.C.1.59; Livy, Epit. 77 (admin­istrative measures); Festus 516L (debt).

19. Gaius 3.124, 125; see Kaser 1955, 1.555 with n. 30; and Thomas 1976, 337.

20. Hostility of city inhabitants: Plut., Sulla 10.

21. Brunt 1971, 441.

22. Probably more if we assume that they were at full strength. In 84 some of these were sent on campaign against Illyrians in the Balkans across the Adriatic Sea: MRR 2.58. This was done “to prepare them to fight Sulla”: Brunt i97i, 44i; Badian i964, 227-28.

23. Plut., Crass. 6.2-3.

24. Sertorius: Wiseman i97i, no. 394.

25. Seager provides a useful assessment of the constitutionality of Sulla's career from this point onward: Seager i994, i99-206.

26. Senators and equestrians: Appian, B.C. 1.95.442, with commentary of Gabba 1958. The total comes from Velleius Paterculus 9.2.1; on these figures see Brunt 1971, 301-2. Proscriptions: F. Hinard, Les proscriptions de la Rome repuhlicaine (Rome and Paris, 1985), 17-144. Hinard has argued persuasively that the lex Cornelia de proscriptione (now RS 2 No. 49) was enacted in an assembly: Hinard 1985, 67-74.

27. This is discussed later in this chapter.

28. In the belief that the legions were never full, particularly when “hastily raised” during civil war, and that casualties had been high, Brunt argues that the number of troops receiving land was less, probably around 80,000. Brunt considers the figure of 120,000 provided by Appian “a paper figure for the complement of the 23 legions to whom lands were apportioned”: Brunt 1971, 305.

29. The evidence is presented by Hantos 1988, 69 with nn. 2 and 3. Hantos notes that although Sulla did not have to use the assemblies for his lawmaking, he did. The lex Cornelia de civitate Volaterranis adimendis (Cicero, Dom. 79) addressing the citi­zenship of Volaterra and Arretium was certainly presented to the centuriate assembly. The lex Cornelia de XX quaestoribus was certainly enacted by the tribal assembly: see the remarks accompanying RS 2. No.14 (lex Cornelia de XX quaestoribus). We do not know which assembly enacted other laws.

30. The rogatio Sempronia iudiciaria: Plutarch, C. Gracch. 5.2-3; Livy, Epit. 60. The law is uncertain (RS 1. 98).

31. Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis = RS 2 No. 50; see Ferrary, “Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis,” Ath. n.s. 79 (1991): 417-34. The lex de falsis is omitted from Sulla's legislation by J. Crook, “Lex Cornelia ‘de falsis,'” Ath. n.s. 75 (1987): 163-71.

32. For a conventional approach to Sulla's legislation as dictator see Hantos 1988, 69-161.

33. Revision of Senate list: Cic., Dom. 84; Livy, Epit. 83, 89; and Cass. Dio 41.14.5. Sulla and new citizens: Wiseman 1971, 26, 140.

34. Probably at least one hundred senators died, one-third of the entire body: Hinard 1985, 116-19, 264-69.

35. Sall., Cat. 37.6; Cass. Dion., Hal. 5.77.4; Appian, B.C. 1.100; Livy, Epit. 89. See Wiseman 1971, 7.

36. Wiseman 1971, 6.

37. Appian, B.C. 1.100.

38. Cf. Wiseman 1971,96, n. 3.

39. Brunt 1971,470-72.

40. Malcovati 1967, 32 frag. 3.

41. MRR 2.22, s.v. Tribunes.

42. MRR 2.21-22, s.v. Tribunes.

43. Varius: MRR 2.26-27, s.v. Tribunes.

44. On the importance of the vote and tribal assignments see Brunt 1988, 125-27.

45. Appian, B.C. 1.49 with commentary of Gabba 1958; Vell. Pat. 2.20.3. See Tay­lor i960, 102-3 based on Appian, B.C. 1.49.

46. L. Cornelius Sisenna, frag. 17 and 120 Peter. See Sherwin-White 1973, 153.

47. Asc. 64C, Appian, B.C. 1.55-56; MRR 2.41.

48. Appian, B.C. 1.64.

49. Census in first century: Wiseman 1969a. Senate decree: Liv. Epit. 80.

50. Taylor 1960, 119, citing earlier scholarship.

51. Taylor i960, 105-6 and 120. Taylor suggests, however, that registration in local municipalities was sufficient to vote in the tribal assembly.

52. Mommsen believed that the census was taken locally after the Italian War (R.St. 2.368 ff.), a position held also by C. Nicolet, “Economy and society, 133-43 BC,” CAH 9, 2d ed., ed. A. Lintott, J. A. Crook, and E. Rawson (Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, and Sydney, 1994), 602, based on evidence in the tabula Hera­cleensis (dated, in Nicolet's belief, between 75 and 45). Taylor, followed by Lo Cascio, thought this was not done until Caesar: Taylor i960, 120 n. 7; Lo Cascio 1999, 164 (summarizing arguments in a forthcoming book).

53. Cic., Leg. 3.22; Verr. 2.1.155; Cluent. 110; Caes., B.C. 1.5, 7.3; Sall., Hist. 3.48.8 and 12M; Dion. Hal. 5.77.4; Vell. Pat. 2.30.4; Asc. 67, 78, 81C; Plut., Caes. 4.2; Suet., lul. 5; Appian, B.C. 1.100, 2.29; Livy, Epit. 89.

54. The first lex Cornelia Pompeia of 88, which was now reintroduced, according to some, restored the Servian basis of the centuriate assembly: Appian, B.C. i.59; Livy, Epit. 77; cf. Cic., Leg. 3.9.22. MRR 2.40 takes Appian as meaning that the centuriate assembly rather than the tribal assembly was made responsible for voting statutes.

55. Roman census figures from 115, the last reported census before the Italian War: 394,336 Romans. Brunt estimates Italian allies at roughly 740,000 before the Italian War: Brunt 1971, 97, 90.

56. Failure of the censors of 86 to register new citizens: Badian 1964, 223. Return of 70/69: Lo Cascio 1999, 162-64 (difference between return of 70/69 and 28 is explained by new efficiency of registration).

57. A commission of investigation was set up; Cic., Nat.Deor. 3.74; Oros. 5.i5.25.

58. Based on legions under arms throughout the period: see chapter 5, note 61.

59. Brunt 1971, 690-93.

60. Sall., Hist. i.54-73M.

61. Cicero, Cat. 2.5-6, 26; Fam. 5.2.1; Sall., Cat. 30.5; 42.3; 57.2; Plut., Cic. 16.1.

62. As has been amply demonstrated for modern Italy: cf. W A. Douglas, Emigra­tion in a south Italian town: An anthropological history (New Brunswick, NJ, 1984).

63. Sources: MRR 2.124.

64. Sall., Cat. 30.5.

65. Cass. Dio 37.41.1; Oros. 6.6.7.

66. See chapter 6.

67. Little detailed work has been done on the phenomenon from this perspective. See M. Clavel-Leveque, “Brigandage et piraterie: Representations ideologiques et pra­tiques imperialistes au dernier siecle de la republique,” DHA 4 (1978): 17-32.

68. Keppie 1983, 50: ten legions, under strength, at most twenty thousand men.

69. Appian, B.C. 2.i20.

70. Varro's praetorship: MRR 2.466 (probably before 76).

71. Pompey's career: MRR 2.603 “Index of Careers”; and MRR 2.64, 77, 81, 84, 90 (pro praetore against Lepidus, pro consule against Sertorius), 94, 99, i04, ii2, ii8, i24.

72. Sall., Cat. 37.6; Dion. Hal. 5.77.4; Appian, B.C. i.i00; Livy, Epit. 89. See Wise­man i97i, 7.

73. Wiseman 1971, 96 n. 3; Hopkins 1983, 47.

74. This is discussed later in this section.

75. Wiseman 1971, 6.

76. Strabo 5.1.7; see Brunt 1971, 200.

77. Brunt i988, 245.

78. The classic presentation of the topic is Syme 1949· On new men from the late second century onward, Wiseman 1971 is essential.

79. Wiseman 1971.

80. Vanderbroek 1987, 38.

81. Military tribunes: Suolahti 1952; Demougin 1983, 279-98.

82. No decision could be made if outsiders were present in the Senate House: Cass. Dio 39.28.3.

83. Cic., Leg. 3.4.11.

84. Cic., Leg. 3.20.48.

85. Von Premerstein, PW 4.726 s.v. Commentarii; Rawson 1984, 233-49.

86. This is discussed earlier in this chapter.

87. That is, the leges annales. Mommsen speculated that he was given such a dis­pensation by the Roman Senate, not the people: Mommsen, R.St. 3.1232-33.

88. We do not firmly know the stages of his political career before his praetor­ship, which is probably dated 73. He may have been aedile in 76: MRR 3.120 s.v. M. Licinius P.f. M. n. Crassus. He was a legate of Sulla in 83 and probably again in 82: MRR 2.65 and 71. He profited greatly from Sulla's proscriptions: Plut., Crass. 2.3-6.

89. Cic., Verr. 1.43.

90. Attempts include the failed proposals of the consul of 78 and the lex Aurelia de tribunicia potestate of 75.

91. On the identification of equites and tribuni aerarii on this album see Brunt 1988, 210.

92. Mommsen, R.St. 2.336. Significantly, neutralizing and revitalizing the cen­sorship had not required a public law decision as the office of tribune had: we might assume there was less dissent.

93. Lo Cascio 1999, 162.

94. Pompey and Crassus would be consuls together again in 55, when they would again enact significantly restorative consular laws.