Words for Board: Tiberius Gracchus, Marius, Legion, Centurion, Sulla, Mithridates, Proscription, Pompey, Sertorius, Spartacus

Warfare yielded big profits to the winner in the ancient world. You could loot cities, tax the losers, and get lots of new slaves. Now it causes the winner to go into debt and eats up raw materials as well as lives and the loser has to receive foreign aid cuz they lost so much. By the year 167 BC in Rome, there was no tax on Roman citizens cuz all the conquered people were paying so much of the taxes that the government didn't need the money from its own people. There were lots of slaves which made the price of them go down and the quality go up. The best slaves to have were the Greeks with their higher education. Most of the Romans wanted Greeks to teach their kids. But that caused a great generation gap between the old Roman nobles who can't even read and their kids who are educated with the new Greek sophistic education. There were also penalties of war. There were lots of people killed. Southern Italy was destroyed by Hannibal. War kept getting farther from home. Lots of Roman soldiers found they had lost their farms when they got back cuz the wife and kids couldn't manage. They lost out to wealthy farmers who used their Greek slaves and could grow things cheaper than a small farmer without slaves. The small farmers couldn't make it. They sold out and went to the cities, but there's nothing for them there. They couldn't find jobs cuz slaves were there to do all the simple stuff and the small farmer wasn't educated in anything except farming. They were permanently unemployed. They were similar to the American blacks after WWII.

In 133 BC (post-Punic War), there was something new in Rome–political violence. There was a new aristocrat, Tiberius Gracchus, who was a Patrician who had been raised by Greek slaves. He had sympathy for the lower classes. He ran for Tribune and was elected in 133 BC. He was unusual as a Tribune cuz he was a Patrician and should have been running for Consul. He ran on his land law bill. There was an economic/social/military problem in Rome with the small farmers cluttering up the unemployed ghetto area. They had nowhere to go. Plus, it was Roman law that you had to own land before you could join the army. There were all these men and they couldn't even fight if there was a war. He wanted to give free farms to the ghetto people. You have to give it to them cuz they can't afford to buy it. That way they'd be working again. Did Rome have the state-owned land to give? Yes and no. When Rome conquered Italy up and down, the state always reserved some land for itself. But, remember, during the Punic Wars when Rome needed another navy and Rome had to borrow money from its rich citizens to get it? The rich didn't just loan the money out of the goodness of their hearts. They required collateral so the state put up the land and said they could use it as their own until the state paid back the loan with interest. So, all this time, the rich have been using the state land as their own. Why hadn't the state paid back the loan? They've got the money from taxes and could well afford it. But the Senate gives all the advice on finances in Rome and they had never advised the state to pay back the loan cuz they were the ones using the land.

Tiberius' land law bill said: 1. No private land would be seized by government. 2. The rich would be given some of the state land so they wouldn't feel cheated. 3. The rest of the land would be taken over after the state repaid the loan, whacked up into farms, and redistributed to the poor. But, while Tiberius was talking about the bill, one of the Tribunes vetoed it. But you thought the Tribunes were supposed to be for the poor??? Right, but the Senate had bought this Tribune's vote. Now all discussion on the bill should cease for a year. But they didn't count on Tiberius and his new Greek speech techniques. He made a speech to the Tribunes and people gathered about the meaning of "sacrosanct and inviolable." Supposedly, you can't touch a Tribune while he's in office. But, what happens when a Tribune goes insane and starts killing people. Or when he went down to the docks and started setting fires to the public grain supply. Or when he sells his veto to the upper classes. The Tribune, seeing how the speech had been going, left early before things got too rough. Tiberius said he was going to introduce his bill one more time and see how people felt about it. It passed. He broke the law by talking about the bill after it had been vetoed, but he was a relativist. It was necessary to get that law in and he had done it for the good of all. But, boy, was the Senate mad. However, it was going to take a long time to get the bill going. It was going to take a lot of money, too, cuz the land had to be surveyed and, if the rich had made any improvements (wells, grapevines) on the land, it had to be assayed and compensation had to be made for their work. The Senate never advised any money to get the bill going so they blocked the bill (called a pocket veto).

At this time, the king of Pergamum died over in Eastern Asia. Normally, you'd say who cares? But he had willed his country to Rome since he had no successor. He wanted Roman protection for his state against the Seleucid Empire. Rome accepted. Tiberius used the extra money from Pergamum to fund the land law bill by some fast shuffling. That made the Senate even madder but they had a trump card, they thought. Tiberius' term was coming to an end and, according to tradition, he couldn't stand for office 2 years in a row. However, he announced in the emergency that he would run again. The Senate armed a mob who beat Tiberius and 300 of his followers to death and stopped the bill. The rich are not going to share with the poor. The bill died cuz there was nobody powerful to get behind it. Nothing good was happening for the lower class. A couple of year later, Tiberius' younger brother Gaius ran for Tribune on his brother's land law bill. He turned up dead in the streets.

The Roman upper class was making a big mistake by blocking the poor. They were blocking a whole class of people. A blocked class is a group of people who want to do better but they are being held back. It's like a steam cooker with the lid clamped on. Eventually the result is going to be an explosion of the lower class and revolution if things don't change. What they should do is unblock the class in a way that the talented people could rise and would then support the upper class they just joined. That way, they wouldn't be in the lower class anymore to lead it and it would collapse without leadership.

Rome had a province in Africa (the old city of Carthage). Next to it was the kingdom of Numidia which was independent. It was in trouble with revolution and stuff and Rome sent troops to settle things down. They kind of took over the area. It made the reputation of a new general: Marius. He changed the army. He allowed people to join the army without owning land. As soon as Africa was settled, the German barbarians had begun drifting down from the North. By 113 BC, they were on the banks of the Danube River which was as far south as Rome wanted to see them. Rome had been sending little armies up to stop them and the barbarians had been rolling over them. In 105 BC, the barbarians made a mistake. They hadn't been reading their Texaco maps with the little red lines to find Rome and wandered into Gaul instead. They were having a good time whooping it up in Gaul. In the meantime, Marius got home from African and reorganized the army. He changed it to make it more efficient. Now there were Legions with 6,000 men each. It was the biggest unit in the army. It was divided into Cohorts (with 600 men each), which was then divided into Centurions (with 100 men each). (Now the old Roman movies should make more sense!) For the 1st time, Marius made sure that the army was getting professional training in swords and shields. The training was coming from gladiator schools. (You'll hear about gladiators later on.) In 102 BC, Marius whipped up on the barbarians and destroyed them. Marius had made a promise to the people who had been fighting under him. He had promised them a farm at the end of the campaign for them to retire on. He didn't have the land but he hoped to get the new territory in Africa for them from the Senate. The Senate pocketed the land and Marius was disgraced.

In 89 BC, there was a quick civil war in Italy that had to do with who was a 1st class citizen and what were their rights. It ended with everyone being a first class citizen and took less than a year. It wasn't important except that it made the reputation of a new general–Sulla. Sulla used to be a junior officer under Marius. The people in the east in Asia Minor saw Rome was fighting the civil war and thought it was a sign that Rome was going down the tube. Mithridates of Pontus (in NE Asia Minor) decided to take advantage of Rome being busy at home and marched his troops into Roman territory. He had the great dream of conquering all of Asia Minor which meant he'd have to fight Rome over Pergamum. He gobbled up lots of territory where there were no Roman troops stationed. He thought he had years to get it together in Asia cuz everybody knows civil wars take a long time. He didn't figure Rome would be back together within a year. The people in Asia welcomed Mithridates cuz they didn't like the Roman tax system. [Time out to hear about the Roman tax system: As a Roman, you could buy an office to collect the taxes for an area. Rome took sealed bids to collect and gave the office to the highest bidder Your bid was what Rome took for the taxes for the next 5 years. You go the office for 5 years and what you collected from the people of the area for the next 5 years over and above what you bid was your profit. The governors were supposed to be preventing the collectors from getting too much from the people, but they were on the take from the collectors so the people were getting the shaft.] Anyway, Mithridates wanted to make sure the Asians stuck with him so he had to make them do something so they couldn't just turn around and join the Romans against him. To do that, he had to make the Romans mad so they wouldn't take the Asians. So, he ordered the Asians to massacre all the Roman civilians in the area (about 80,000 people). Meanwhile, Athens opened her port to him and he conquered Athens and Macedonia (where there also were no Roman troops). Rome got settled and needed to send an army to put a halt to Mithridates' career. But they had 2 big generals–Marius and Sulla. Who to send? Sulla took the matters into his own hands and took his army and marched on Rome and seized the government. That was easy cuz the people didn't care about the government. The lower class (the majority) didn't care–things couldn't be worse under Sulla than under the Patricians who were blocking them. Sulla took the army and left for Greece and Asia. While he was gone, his enemies recaptured the capital and returned it to the old government. Sulla clobbered Mithridates twice in Greece and followed him back to Asia. He whipped him there too, but he didn't capture him. Mithridates slunk back to Pontus. Sulla got all the Roman real estate back. But what do you do with all the people in Asia who had massacred the Roman citizens? You have to do something to show your displeasure. So, as an act of reprisal, Sulla quartered his troops on the people for the winter. Armies are mean, professional killer types. In peacetime, you usually try to keep control of them by putting them in barracks. Quartering them means making private families take in some soldiers to keep, feed, and generally entertain for the winter. It's probably the worst thing he could do other than destroying them.

Sulla went back to Rome and seized the government again. He published a Proscription list (death list) of "enemies of the states," i.e. enemies of Sulla. He was fair–he allowed his friends to put their enemies on the list, too. He was the first to seize the state. He beat Mithridates but he didn't finish him off. That was his career. Sulla retired to lead a life of "refined debauchery" that killed him within a year.

Some new generals are coming up. They were junior officers under Sulla. One was Gaius Pompey who made a very minor reputation under Sulla. As a joke, Sulla started calling him "Pompey the Great" and Pompey believed him. All of the world but Roman Spain was under Sulla's control. In Spain, there was another great general–Sertorius. Sertorius was an enemy of Sulla's who had gone up there to train troops to beat Sulla. But he was too late , cuz Sulla had control of everything by the time Sertorius got it together. However, he was neat. He had a problem cuz his army was made up of barbarians. As has been mentioned, barbarians are flaky. How do you get them to be consistent (or, at least, predictable)? As a general rule, barbarians are also more religious. They don't know how to explain things or handle problems so they just let religion take care of things. As people get more civilized, they rely on religion less. Sertorius told them he was a prophet of god sent to them. One of his troops found an albino fawn in the woods and smuggled it into camp. Sertorius trained it to come to him when he called it as proof he was a prophet. It impressed the barbarians (you ever seen a white deer, Clyde?–nope, not me–must be he's telling the truth). Sertorius also arranged a special postal system of swift Pony Express type couriers so he would get the news about 10 hours ahead of regular post. He could be reviewing the troops and call the deer to him. The deer would whisper the latest report in his ear, which he would announce to the troops and 10 hours later the normal courier would come in and prove him right. There was a group of cave barbarians that nobody had ever bothered yet. Hannibal had left them alone cuz nobody could get them out of the caves. Sertorius wanted to get them cuz no one else had. He made a dust bowl by having horses ride over the land in front of the caves to kick up dust. After about a week of dust, the barbarians came out of the caves. He was really neat. Rome decided they didn't like Sertorius being up there and sent Pompey to get him. Pompey couldn't even find him and bumbled around Gaul. But Pompey got lucky and somebody assassinated Sertorius. Without Sertorius, the barbarians fell apart and Pompey got Spain by default. Back home, they said, "He sure is great" and Pompey said, "Yup, I sure am."

Meanwhile, Mithridates, seeing the Romans at each other again, sat "Hot Damn!" and started causing trouble in the East again. Rome raised another army and sent it over. It was a weird army for Rome. Sometimes it fought and sometimes it went on strike against its generals. However, it did beat Mithridates but it didn't finish him off either cuz they kept going on strike. In 73 BC, Pompey was in Spain and the other army was in the East sitting down a lot. At that time a group of gladiators in a training school in southern Italy broke out under the leadership of Spartacus. He was a deserter of the Roman army who had been caught and made into a gladiator. He started liberating slaves in southern Italy. It was easy cuz there weren't many Romans in southern Italy cuz it was mostly pasture land. And the armies were off in the world somewhere. Eventually Rome raised a third army under the leadership of Crassus (see next lecture for more on him) to go down and get Spartacus. Crassus beat him and all the slaves were fleeing the field. In the meantime, Pompey had landed in southern Italy and finished off the fleeing slaves. Pompey got the reputation cuz he finished off the gladiators. Pompey and everyone else is really starting to believe he's great.