4 - Rome and Italy: The Social War

Summary

The relationship between Rome and the Italian allies reached a turningpoint with the agrarian proposal of Ti. Gracchus in 133 B.C. For, as the historical tradition represented by Book 1 of the Civil Wars of Appian reveals with great clarity, it is at this moment that there emerged an ‘allied problem’ with political and institutional dimensions. The resumption by the Roman state of ager publicus which had been occupied more or less legally by Italian as well as by Roman possessores probably involved a breach of the treaties which bound Rome and the allied states. Even if it is not possible to say whether the resumption of ager publicus affected particularly lands occupied by Italian possessores, it is clear that the links between the upper classes of Italy and Rome, which had become ever closer in the course of the two generations which followed the Hannibalic War, were gravely compromised.

The serious economic and social consequences of the agrarian law for the upper classes of Italy were an implicit contradiction of a policy on the part of Rome which had up to that point set out to guarantee the supremacy, viability and acceptability of the ruling classes of the communities of Italy in the context of those communities, and hence their position as representatives of the communities vis-à-vis Rome. The intervention of Scipio Aemilianus (ch. 3, p. 74) only succeeded in part in healing the breach; and the diminution in the importance of the agrarian problem after C. Gracchus did not mean that trust once gone could be restored. It is disputed whether the prohtarii of the Italian communities were eligible for the distribution of the ager publicus which had been resumed by the agrarian commission; whether they were or not, this would have had implications for the social tensions within the Italian, and indeed Latin, communities. We have no other evidence for these tensions, but we can be sure that they will have been no less serious than those within the Roman state and we may legitimately suspect that they will have been even more serious, for a variety of reasons, notably the continued existence of local taxation, long suspended at Rome; this is indeed the impression which the Italian perspective on the crisis given by Appian can and should suggest. The case of the revolt of the Latin colony of Fregellae in 125 B.C. is emblematic.