Plems Romana, page 10
This did not endear Camillus to the plebs. However, he pointed out that the property of Veii surely included the land, and one-tenth of the value of that could be paid into the treasury, presumably by those who bought it. The money thus withdrawn was used to buy gold, to be turned into a mixing bowl for Apollo at Delphi.
Unfortunately, not enough gold could be found! But the (wealthy elite) women of Rome solved the problem by offering all their gold ornaments to be melted down. They were rewarded by being allowed to drive around in four-wheeled carriages during games and festivals, and in ordinary carriages at other times.
C. 390 BC: A SECOND ROME?
In an attempt to settle the plebs’ demand for land, the government proposed offering two acres each to 3,000 plebs willing to settle in territory captured from the Volsci. But it was pointed out that much richer and better-cultivated land was available in Veii. So why not send half the plebs and half the Roman Senate there and set up a substate of Rome?
The patricians would have none of it: if plebs and patricians were in constant conflict in Rome, the same would happen in Veii. And what if captured Veii became even more powerful under Romans than it had been before? With some (wealthy?) plebeian tribunes joining the senators in opposing it, the idea was dropped – but it would not go away.
It was Camillus who moved the dial on the argument by saying that he would like nothing more than to see the town he had captured thronging with people, to remind him of what he had achieved. On the other hand, surely it was clear that Veii’s defeat proved the gods had abandoned the town, and it would be quite wrong to see it repopulated.
When the proposal was again put to the people, it was defeated not by threats or by force, but by appeals to the plebs not to desert Rome – their native city with its gods and all its holy places – nor to be driven into exile to a city that had been its bitter enemy. What Roman would ever want to live on captive soil, or exchange victorious Rome for vanquished Veii?
Thus the proposal was defeated, and the Senate was so pleased with the result that it granted every plebeian three and a half acres of land from Veii’s surrounding territory.
THE SCHOOLMASTER OF FALERII
Camillus was then sent to deal with the town of Falerii, which had supported Veii. Since its army refused to engage in open combat, Camillus ravaged its territory and siege operations began.
As it so happened, the schoolmaster of the children from the most important families of the town used to take them for a walk every day for play and exercise. One day, he walked them straight into the Roman camp and, presumably in the hope of a reward, offered them to Camillus, pointing out who they were and saying that the town was now at his mercy.
Camillus accused him of an outrageous act of treachery, telling him that war had its laws, as peace did, and Romans fought their wars with respect for the common bonds of humanity: they had come to fight men, not children. The schoolmaster was stripped naked and had his hands tied, and the children were given sticks with which to beat him back into the town.
The result was that the people of Falerii immediately sued for peace. They sent an embassy to Camillus, saying that his honourable behaviour had persuaded them that they would live better under Rome than under their own government. They told him that the gates of the city were open, and arms and hostages were there to be taken. Falerii was also punished with a fine to cover the cost of the Roman army’s pay for a year, which relieved Rome’s people of the war tax.
PLEB POWER: A SUMMARY OF GAINS
449 BC:
The plebs could demand that a triumph be celebrated.
448 BC:
Patricians were co-opted as plebeian tribunes; the consuls were replaced by 3–6 ‘military tribunes’ with consular authority, from both patricians and plebs alike (in the event, consuls did pop up now and again).
445 BC:
Mixed marriage between patricians and plebs was made legal.
VI
THE COMING OF THE GAULS AND DESTRUCTION OF ROME:
390–350 BC
At this time, a pleb named Caedicius told an official that he had heard a voice at night instructing him to inform the officials that the Gauls were coming. This was brushed aside. At the same time Camillus, who had been in mourning for his son, was charged with mishandling the plunder from Veii. He consulted his friends and allies and made the decision to go into exile, expressing the hope that, if he had been wrongly accused, the gods should punish Rome. And they did.
Wave upon wave of Gauls began crossing the Alps to look for land in which to settle. Rumour had it that this outlandish collection of warriors with their bizarre weapons had already defeated several Etruscan legions by the time they camped outside the city of Clusium, which immediately asked Rome for help.
Rome sent an embassy, and the Gauls made their demand: they wanted land and, if they did not get it, they would fight for it. The Romans asked what justice there was in that – and what were the Gauls doing in Etruria anyway? – to which the answer came that ‘all things belonged to the brave who carried justice on the point of their swords’. The Roman embassy agreed with them, drew their swords and massacred the envoys. But that was a dreadful crime, completely against the law of nations. It meant war.
A Roman army was quickly assembled, but it was hopelessly outnumbered, disorganized and tactically out-thought by the Gallic leader Brennus. Half of the army fled behind the security of the walls of Veii; the other half fled back to Rome, pursued by the Gauls, and took refuge in the Citadel, a defensible spur of the Capitoline ridge.
390 BC: ABANDONING ROME:
A PLEB TO THE RESCUE
The situation was desperate. It was decided that the younger soldiers, with their wives and children, should join those in the Citadel – where food and weapons had been gathered – and that the Vestal Virgins should remove all the sacred objects and take them to safety, far away from Rome. Those who could flee should do so, and the old should be left to their fate, in which the Senate agreed to share (Latin senatus derives from senex, ‘old man’, compare ‘senile’). The Vestal Virgins buried in the ground what they could not carry, divvied up everything else between them, and made for the bridge over the Tiber.
A pleb, Lucius Albinus, seeing the Vestals struggling along with Rome’s most sacred objects, told his wife and children to step down from the cart in which he was taking them to safety and allow the Vestals and their sacred property on board. In that way, they all made their escape.
VESTAL VIRGINS
Vesta was the goddess of the hearth, the centre of the home, and was located in a specially built sanctuary where burned the sacred, eternal fire (cf. Swan Vesta matches) – the symbol of Rome’s permanence. The Vestal Virgins – chosen from the age of six – had to tend it and ensure it never went out. In 420 BC, one Vestal, Postumia, was put on trial for a sexual offence, but, as it emerged, quite wrongly: all she had done was dress rather well and talk rather more freely and amusingly than a woman in her position should.
One other duty of the Vestals was to look after the fascinum (basic meaning ‘evil spell, bewitchment’, root of our ‘fascinating’), i.e. an erect phallus – or, just to be clear, a huge model of one. It was supposed to avert evil. The Vestals lived in a considerable degree of comfort and were allowed to drive around in carriages. They were deeply respected.
THE FATE OF THE ELITE
Although some sources say that Servius surrounded Rome with a protective stone wall, that is not the case. If it had been, the Gauls would never have got past it (it was built soon after, in 378 BC). As it was, they found the city unguarded and deserted, with most inhabitants having fled. They roamed about in wonder, breaking into the poorer houses, which had been locked – unlike the open doors of the homes of the elite.
The Gauls felt a sense of awe as they looked into those wealthy houses, where patricians awaited their fate, dressed in their full official regalia and seated in their courtyards – august, majestic, silent and calm, ‘like statues in some holy place’. But then one of the Gauls touched the fashionably long beard of Marcus Papirius, who smashed his ivory staff down on the Gaul’s head – and the butchery began.
Note the fact that the houses of the elite were open. Of course they were. In normal times they would be entertaining all manner of people and dealing with all manner of problems for most of the day – from plebs to the great and good: guests, clients, friends, business partners. But not on that day.
CAMILLUS TO THE RESCUE
It was inevitable that news of this assault would reach Camillus, to whom a message was relayed that the remaining senators had made him dictator: he should take whatever action was needed. He immediately called on Rome’s allies to come to the rescue of the besieged city, and commandeered the troops who had taken refuge in Veii. He made a number of surprise attacks on the Gallic forces in the area, who were suffering from hunger as well as disease – situated as they were on the low, unhealthy, malaria-ridden grounds between the ridges of Rome.
SAVED BY THE GEESE
At one stage of the siege of Rome, the Gauls discovered a rocky path that led up to the top of the Citadel. After one of their men had checked out the route, they made the ascent. The terrain being what it was, it was not easy, and their weapons had to be passed from hand to hand as they pushed and pulled each other up the cliff, but they were not heard by the Roman guard or even the guard dogs. The Romans were saved by Juno’s sacred geese, used for taking auspices, whose honking and clapping wings aroused the guard Marcus Manlius. He used his shield to knock backwards the one Gaul who had made his way up. As the man fell back down, he took a number of other Gauls with him. The rest of the Roman guard then woke up, and soon every Gaul had been sent tumbling down to the bottom of the cliff.
Eventually an armistice was agreed, with those besieged in the Citadel in Rome also at the end of their tether. The Gauls were bought off at the price of 1,000 pounds of gold. The Roman commander noted that the Gallic weights were heavier than the standard ones and remonstrated with Brennus, who threw his sword onto the scale with the words ‘Vae victis’ (‘Anguish for the vanquished!’).
This procedure, however, was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Camillus. He ordered the gold to be taken back and told the Gauls to leave, denying that any agreement had been made. Battle in the ruins of the city at once broke out, and the Gauls were driven out – their camp taken and army annihilated.
REWARDS AND PUNISHMENT
The guard who had failed to spot the Gauls climbing up the Citadel was punished by being thrown off the Tarpeian Rock (p. 24). Every year from then on, in commemoration of the event, Juno’s sacred geese were carried around in litters on gold and purple cushions – a way of honouring Juno as well as the geese – while guard dogs were executed on the Capitoline, as a warning always to stay on the alert.
WHAT NEXT FOR ROME?
Rome had been saved by the skin of its teeth, but what next? Since Rome was in ruins, and there had been much talk of some Romans moving to the magnificent city of Veii, just ten miles away, some of the tribunes argued that this would be the sensible option for the whole city. It took a passionate speech by Camillus, surrounded by the Senate, to dissuade them from that option.
He reminded the people of Rome’s long history, especially its gods who had made their home there and the temples and sacred rituals established in their honour. He praised its location – its place in the middle of Italy, its ridges, the river connecting the city to the sea, the sea itself and the trading opportunities it provided for them (though it was not so near Rome as to present a threat from foreign fleets) – as well as its age, and Rome’s success in defending itself against local enemies; and then there were all the indications from earliest times that Rome would be the seat of empire and master of the world.
Not everyone was persuaded by his words. But after Camillus had finished, as the Senate began debating another issue, soldiers returning from guard duty and passing through the Forum were ordered to halt, and the centurion said, ‘We may as well stop here.’ The Senate heard these words and took them as an omen, of which the milling crowd expressed its approval.
REBUILDING ROME
Livy tells us that the reconstruction of the city was not well planned. The state provided the tiles for roofing, and everyone was invited to cut timber and quarry stone for the buildings, which had to be completed within a year. It was all done in a great hurry and buildings were put up anywhere and everywhere, with property rights simply ignored.
The result was that the ancient sewers, which had originally been designed in a straight line following the original streets, now ran under people’s houses, and the whole place looked like a squatters’ settlement, not a properly planned city.
It would take Nero’s rebuilding of Rome after the great fire of AD 64 – some 450 years later! – to get that particular area of Rome shipshape.
A SUMMARIZING INTERLUDE
The plebs had to a degree been successful in being granted land on which to settle and farm. They had also gone some way to ensuring a political say in the running of the Roman state.
But the one problem that had not been solved was that of debt. So, it is easy to understand that the seizure of the wealthy city of Veii, for example – which controlled some 200 square miles of territory, of which Rome probably took up to 140 square miles – encouraged the plebs even more in their determination to get their fair share.
There was no let-up in the fighting in the region. The Gallic sack of Rome egged on Rome’s traditional rivals to take advantage of what they saw as a weakening of Rome’s strength. Camillus was up to the task of reorganizing the Roman army and he soon dealt with attacks by the Volsci and Aequi – before turning his attention to Sutrium, an ally of Rome, which was under siege by the Etruscans. A huge number of captives were taken, and raised very large sums on the slave market.
In the course of these various wars, a number of towns came over to Rome’s side; their inhabitants were admitted to citizenship and land was allotted to them. Meanwhile the Romans who had earlier settled in Veii were summoned back to Rome because they were needed for the rebuilding of the city. Despite the grumbling about this, a date was fixed for their return, with the threat of the loss of their rights if they did not do so. The result was that the rebuilding of Rome went on at pace, the state helping with the costs, and within a year the city was fully habitable. At the same time, work started on public buildings.
The tribunes raised the question of distributing among the plebs the land taken from the Volsci, but everyone was so hard at work rebuilding Rome that they could not turn their minds to the problem, and, even if they had been able to, in the circumstances they would have had no means of filling it with livestock.
385–384 BC: MARCUS MANLIUS’
ATTEMPTED COUP
Manlius was the heroic soldier who had started the rout of the Gauls when they made an assault on the Roman troops defending the Citadel. Deeply envious of Camillus, he became the first patrician to actively take up the plebeian cause and work in concert with the plebeian tribunes.
While he was, of course, well aware of the problems of the distribution of land, he was also alert to the problem of debt among the plebs. This had been compounded by the rebuilding of Rome, which had left the plebs in even greater debt than usual, on top of the threat of chains and imprisonment. Manlius’ possibly revolutionary ideas and the threat of war against a much-enlarged Volsci army, supported by the Latins and Hernici, spelled trouble. The Senate therefore appointed Aulus Cornelius Cossus dictator to deal with both crises. He first dealt with the external threat, and the war against the Volsci was won.
EXPANDING THE ARMY
Livy wonders how it could have been possible for the Volsci, who had been beaten so regularly by the Romans, to have enlarged their army so effectively. Recruiting successive generations of young men in between the wars? Recruiting from different clans? Or from areas deserted by Livy’s time, inhabited once by free Romans, including plebs, but now only by slaves? (In Livy’s time, Rome was a city of about a million people, which had drained the countryside of inhabitants.) Of course, the answer might simply be that the numbers of enemy troops were vastly exaggerated.
But Manlius was provided with an excuse for raising the debt issue when a centurion, well known for his military service, was hauled off for debt. He and his supporters intervened, and he spoke about the arrogance of the senators, the ruthlessness of the moneylenders, the misfortune of the plebs and the centurion’s plight.
Manlius paid off the centurion’s debt in full and released him. The centurion showed his scars from a succession of wars, explaining how he had tried to restore his ruined home and that, though he had paid off his debt many times, the interest on the loan had overwhelmed him. He committed himself to supporting Manlius.
Manlius responded by putting his own farm in Veii up for auction, saying that he would use the proceeds to ensure that no one else suffered the fate of the centurion. To the anger of the plebs, he added that the patricians were secretly hoarding Gallic gold that should have been held in the public treasury. Manlius did not tell them where it was hidden, but said that he would tell them in good time.
The dictator was summoned, and before a tribunal of the Senate and people the dictator instructed Manlius to say where this gold was hidden. Manlius accused him and the senators of being perfectly able to pay off people’s debts as he had done, but because he did not answer the question he was arrested and taken off to prison. The plebs held their silence, because the order had come from the dictator.
