"Then the poor, who had been ejected from their land, no
longer showed themselves eager for military service, and neglected the bringing
up of children, so that soon all Italy was conscious of a dearth of freemen,
and was filled with gangs of foreign slaves, by whose aid the rich cultivated
their estates, from which they had driven away the free citizens”.
Plutarch
Alphen, Netherlands. 12 August. Britain stands on the precipice of perhaps its greatest constitutional
crisis since the 1688 Glorious Revolution, which is quite an ‘achievement’ for
Britain’s appalling political class given Britain does actually have a written
constitution. Its new Prime Minister,
Boris Johnson, is not the idle dolt some suggest he is. As an Oxford historian,
anyone who survived an Oxford Classics course has my grudging respect. Still,
Prime Minister ‘Boris’, as he seems now to be universally known, may well pause
and consider one story from the classics he so loves, that of Tiberius. Like
Tiberius, Boris is a patrician siding with the populace against his own class
on an issue of utmost gravity for Brexit is not just about Britain’s membership
of the EU, it is ultimately about who runs Britain.
In 133 BC, Rome was in
tumult as it stood on the verge of bankruptcy due to expensive wars, with its
people threatened with starvation. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, son of
Gracchus, and grandson of Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Carthage, and an
aristocratic tribune of the people, proposed a land bill that attacked Patrician
corruption and promised the re-distribution of resources away from the
aristocracy in favour of the plebians, particularly those in rural areas. Critically,
Tiberius chose to ignore Patrician privilege and convention by seeking the
support of the ‘people’ and against his peers in the Senate, which in the Roman
Republic had long held the right to approve all proposed legislation before it
went before the plebs.
The simple, but dangerous
question Tiberius posed was who should the Roman Empire benefit – Patricians or
people? To be fair, Tiberius’s bill was not asking for much, simply that the
great landowners make the state-owned public land they held on trust available
to the plebs. Tiberius believed such a
move would not only improve food production but by enfranchising more plebs re-establish
the link between farm ownership and military service which had long been the essential
‘contract’ for service in Rome’s legion.
The Patricians would have
none of it and Rome descended into anarchy over Tiberius’s ‘New Deal’. In spite
of their undoubted power, as exercised through the Senate, it was nominally the
Roman people who were ultimately sovereign – Senatus Populusque Romanus! And, only the people, or rather their
tribunes, could vote on laws in the Assembly. Rome faced the prospect of a New
Deal land deal or a no deal, which would have automatically removed large
swathes of land long held by the aristocracy.
On the day of the
critical vote Tiberius had not reckoned for his erstwhile friend, and fellow
tribune, Marcus Octavius. When the presiding magistrate called for voting to
begin, Octavius, shouted ‘veto’, effectively halting the vote. Desperate to be
seen as one of the aristocracy, and himself a landowner, Octavius’s loyalty had
been bought by aristocrats in the Senate. What ensued thereafter was political
stalemate as Tiberius repeatedly tried to introduce his bill and Octavius
repeatedly vetoed it. Worse, Octavius simply refused to budge, even though
Tiberius offered to compensate him for any land lost under the bill. When that
failed Tiberius simply blocked all state business from being enacted until
Octavius lifted his veto and the land bill was passed.
Matters came to a head at
a meeting of the Plebeian Assembly when Tiberius moved to strip Octavius of his
office, something which had never before been done in the history of the
Republic. Such was the tension that civil strife beckoned, which forced Tiberius
to suspend the vote and make one final plea to Octavius to lift his veto. He
refused, and only escaped alive from a vengeful mob because of the protection
afforded him by Tiberius’s own bodyguard. Octavius was deposed and Tiberius’s
New Deal land bill entered into Roman law.
From the outset, the
Patricians stymied the law by using the Senate to refuse the necessary funding
to enact it. They also mounted a smear campaign against Tiberius, suggesting his
only interest was power, not the people. That he was a would-be Dictator, determined
to overthrow the Republic and declare himself king. Thereafter, Tiberius tried
to remove the Senate’s traditional control over foreign and economic affairs, and
directly usurped its authority when he seized a major bequest to Rome to fund
the Lex Sempronia Agraria. Tiberius
knew he would face a criminal case once his tenure as a tribune expired, so he
sought to stand again, which was also unconstitutional, and simply fuelled the
rumour that he was power-crazed.
For Tiberius to be
re-elected he would need to rely on the rural voters who supported him. He
would also have to return to Rome, which he had fled for fear of Patrician
assassins. Unfortunately for Tiberius it was harvest time and most of his rural
base had returned to tend their crops. Faced with no other option but to return
to Rome he approached the Forum and began to climb the Capitol. As he did so Nasica
rose in the Senate to denounce Tiberius as a Dictator and declared an emergency,
and left with his followers and slaves to ‘save’ the Republic. Upon finding Tiberius they clubbed him to
death. His brother, Gaius, requested the return of Tiberius’s body so he could
be buried as befitted his rank. The aristocratic Senate refused and the bloody
corpse of Tiberius was, instead, tossed into the Tiber.
The tragedy of Tiberius
revealed the extent of decay within the Roman Republic. The tragedy of Brexit
has revealed the decay within Britain. For me, one of the many heart-breaking
causes of such decay in my once great country is the nature of the divide that
separates its people. Too many of those who believe, as I do, that it is not in
the British interest to walk away from institutions vital to Britain’s national
interest, also no longer believe in Britain as a power. Too many of those who
believe Britain should leave the EU do so because of an entirely misplaced
notion of patriotism, allied a complete misunderstanding of the workings of
twenty-first century geopolitics works. For me, Britain can both be a major
power and remain inside the EU, to leverage greater strategic influence, for
the well-being of its people, and to stop the Patricians in Brussels who do
seek barely-accountable power in the name of ‘Europe’.
There is, of course, a
big ‘if’ to my thinking, which Boris Johnson’s rambunctious premiership has
outed, the supine nature of London’s elite establishment. Too many of those who no longer believe in
Britain as a power also hold positions of power and responsibility in London.
Senatus Populusque
Britannicus?
Julian
Lindley-French
