From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome from 133 B.C. to A.D. 68 (4 page)

Reflection on the existing number of histories of Rome might well raise doubt about the desirability of adding to them. But since research does not stand still and its more assured results often take long to reach the handbook, there may be a place for a brief account of this period which lays no claim to originality of interpretation but which attempts to benefit from the work of recent years and to put the reader on the track of some of this for further study. I am conscious of the risks involved in trying to include much in small compass, but presentday production-costs suggest that an author owes a debt of reasonable brevity to both publisher and reader. If some of my younger readers should feel that this book might profitably have been still shorter, I can only assure them that I have tried to be ever mindful of a phrase of Cicero: ‘ut brevissime potui’. The purpose of the Notes that I have included is manifold. I hope that they may help to temper the dogmatism inevitable in a book of this kind, to give some indication of the sources and of some of the problems that they raise, to afford the slightly more advanced student a few hints about where to seek further information, and by no means least to give some clues to the immense obligations that I owe to modern writers. As this debt is very wide, I cannot define it in detail here, but I would mention in particular both the individual contributors to volumes IX and X of
Cambridge Ancient History
, and the work of my friend, the late Professor M. Cary whose generous help and wise advice in the field of ancient history I have enjoyed for over thirty years. I am greatly indebted also to another friend and colleague, Professor A. Momigliano, for his kindness in reading through the typescript of this book and for his helpful suggestions: it is hardly necessary to add the time-honoured note that this kindness does not involve any suggestion of his concurrence with any of the views expressed in it or responsibility for any of its shortcomings.

H. H. S.

January 1958

In this new edition I am glad of the opportunity to correct some misprints and errors of the first, and I am most grateful to friends, reviewers and some unknown correspondents who have been kind enough to draw my attention to some of these. In order not to disturb the pagination of the text, changes in this part of the book have been kept down to a bare minimum. It is for this practical reason that I have not availed myself of the suggestion made by some reviewers that schoolchildren would have found it useful if a number of technicalities had received fuller explanation and if Latin phrases had been translated; it may be hoped that where this need exists it may lead them to make enquiries of their sixth-form teachers or else to turn to the fuller histories or encyclopaedias (as
The Oxford Classical Dictionary
). In the Notes, I have tried to take fuller advantage of work done in the last four years. If the additions are greater for the period 133–70 B.C., this is a tribute to the work of Dr E. Badian, whose
Foreign Clientelae
and numerous articles have made such a deep impact on the study of these years.

H. H. S.

September 1962

I am glad, at the request of the publishers, to have this opportunity of trying to keep this book reasonably up-to-date. For practical reasons, as in earlier revisions, I have made relatively few changes in the text but considerable additions in the Notes.

In this latest edition I have also added a Chronological Table and a Select Bibliography.

H. H. S.

February 1970
April 1975
July 1981

From the Gracchi to Nero
has become the most popular book on Roman history in the anglophone world since Gibbon’s
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. In the fifty and more years since its first publication in 1959, the year that Scullard was promoted to Professor of Ancient History at King’s College London, it has been through four revised editions (1963, 1970, 1976 and 1982) and numerous reprints, and has sold tens of thousands of copies. Although it has not been revised since Scullard’s death in 1983 and several competitor volumes have since appeared, it still leads the field as the book on their shelf to which teachers, students and the general reader turn for a clear and sensible introduction to any episode in the story of the central two hundred years of Roman history from 133 B.C. to A.D. 68. How do we explain its success, and what has been its impact?

The success is easy to explain:
From the Gracchi to Nero
fills a large need and does it very well. In 1959 and still today school and university syllabuses focus on the pivotal periods of the fall of the Republic and establishment of the Principate. Although Hannibal and Hadrian lie outside the book’s chronological range, it efficiently covers the most generally familiar events of Roman history and the best known figures including Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, Marius and Sulla, Pompey and Caesar, Cicero and Cato, Mark Antony and Augustus, and the emperors Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero. Here in one compact volume of 500 pages, notes and indices included, we have it all.

While the chronological centrality is important, the deeper reason for this book’s vibrant longevity lies in its qualities as a general introduction or textbook. Like Scullard himself, it bears a quiet air of authority. As is attested by the bibliographies for ‘Ancient history to A.D. 500’ which he compiled for the
Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature
from 1949 to 1968, Scullard was a
dedicated reader of modern scholarship on ancient history. His knowledge of Roman history, both the ancient evidence and modern debates, was broad and deep. In each new edition the footnotes were meticulously updated, and the text amended where he judged it necessary, which was not frequent. Despite his learning, however, Scullard had the knack of not assuming too much of his readers, and
From the Gracchi to Nero
is mostly open to those with no prior knowledge of Rome (although it is curious that Scullard left some citations in Latin through to the 1982 edition). Its clarity and authority also owe much to his avoidance of polemic and disavowal of originality of interpretation: the book, like the man, is unfailingly modest and polite. The writing too is concise and clear, excepting the occasional overpacked sentence, in itself a monumental achievement which is now all the more outstanding amid the often linguistically untidy products of word processors. And so the reader is quietly, even unconsciously, persuaded of the dispassionate reliability of Scullard’s narrative and judgments.

The question of impact, that is the view of Rome which the book has propagated, is more complex. Because
From the Gracchi to Nero
was presented by Scullard in its Preface as a ‘handbook’ and has been used as such, it has received no critical notice from other historians after the few and brief reviews of the first edition, even though Scullard himself noted in the Preface that writing a handbook inevitably involved ‘dogmatism’. In fact
From the Gracchi to Nero
, which he sub-titled
A History of Rome from 133 B.C. to A.D. 68,
completed a whole history of the rise and fall of the Republic and its metamorphosis into the Principate. It had been preceded by his
A History of the Roman World 753–146
B.C., first published in 1935, on the basis of which he was that year appointed Reader in Ancient History at King’s College London. This earlier history, a volume of similar size and structure, was almost as popular, with re-editions in 1951, 1961 and 1980. The unity of conception of the two works was recognized in their joint translation into Italian as a two-volume
Storia del mondo romano
(1983), for which Scullard himself cut out the now unnecessary background sections in the first chapter of the second work. A third element in the equation is Scullard’s
Roman Politics 220–150
B.C. (1951, second edition 1973), which had developed out of his doctoral dissertation on Scipio Africanus. This was his principal overtly theoretical contribution to the interpretation of Roman history and its ideas underpin the approach to Roman political history adopted in the two handbooks between which it was first published.

Scullard’s project to record the history of the Roman Republic ‘from the foundation of the city’ (
ab urbe condita
) would have made obvious sense to a Roman, although most would not have seen its concision as a virtue. So too would his focus on political and military history – to which his chapters on social, economic and cultural developments, while important, are subordinate
– and his conviction that the central issue of Republican history was political morality. Noting Rome’s dominance of the Mediterranean world by 146 B.C. and the killing of Tiberius Gracchus in 133, Scullard begins
From the Gracchi to Nero
with the rhetorical question, ‘She was gaining the whole world: must she at the same time lose her own soul?’. The question is adapted from a quotation from Warde Fowler on changes in Roman religion, which Scullard had cited on the penultimate narrative page of the earlier history, ‘Rome gained the world and lost her soul’.

Scullard’s overview of Roman history is grounded in early twentieth-century liberalism. Rome’s destiny was to unite Italy and bring peace and prosperity to its empire. The senate’s refusal to address the grievances of Rome’s Italian allies was ‘criminally short-sighted’, and although Scullard asserts that the allies’ revolt in 91 B.C. was for independence, he saw no need a page later to explain their rapid acceptance of Roman citizenship; this was a necessary step for Romans and Italians to form a nation. Rome’s overseas conquests, whose motivation is more fully discussed in his earlier book, are presented as necessary to maintain and extend peace, prosperity and, where it was lacking, civilization. Roman aggression and brutality, although usually noted, are underplayed. Some statements use revealingly modern names: the need for intervention in the Balkans, and Caesar preventing the Germans from flooding across the Rhine so that Gaul could be civilized and eventually become France. Rome’s Mediterranean and European empire is often referred to as ‘the world’, for which Rome had taken on ‘responsibility’. The undeniable maladministration under the late Republic was rectified by Augustus who instituted fair taxation based on censuses (no mention of the novel and hated poll-tax) and made governors ‘salaried professionals’ who were promoted for ‘efficiency’ (only the salary might pass scrutiny). The emperors Tiberius and Claudius and Nero’s advisers, Seneca and Burrus, are all praised for promoting the well-being of the provinces.

Scullard’s view of Roman politics was conservative. The Republic fared best when controlled by the Senate, the repository of experience and ‘political wisdom’. Although also part of the elite, to Scullard the Equites formed a ‘Third Estate’ which represented business interests and sought greater political power in the late Republic to further their sectional interests. The people are damned throughout as an ‘unrepresentative’ urban mob, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘unworthy to govern’. The Republic therefore fell in 60 B.C. when the so-called First Triumvirate ‘backed by armed force, by the urban populace and by many of the Equites, imposed their will on the State and destroyed the power of the Senate’. The crisis of the late Republic was one of moral leadership: ‘could (Rome) produce sufficient men of insight and goodwill who would persuade both the governing class and people to face squarely the pressing problems of the day?’

In the middle Republic men like Scipio Africanus and the elder Cato had competed to provide such leadership, building up factions of supporters; thus a few families had ‘shaped the destiny of Rome and the world’. Factions around leaders continued into the late Republic, and indeed into the Principate, although in
From the Gracchi to Nero
Scullard did not have space to analyse them as he had in his
Roman Politics
(and anyway others had done the job for Caesar and Augustus). But upper-class politics became polarised between Optimates and Populares, whom Scullard introduces as individuals choosing different ways, oligarchic and populist, to achieve personal aims, but later tends to treat as obstinate ideological groupings with the Optimates defending traditional senatorial dominance at any cost. Scullard’s Republic fell because of personal ambitions which exploited rather than sought to solve the problems Rome faced. A number of leading Romans are praised for trying to address the problems, such as Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus and Julius Caesar, or to encourage a unity of purpose among the upper classes, such as Cicero. Augustus’ achievement on both fronts is grudgingly recognized (‘not a man of genius’), but also the cost which was replacement of the Republic by a thinly disguised autocracy. Thereafter emperors are judged, as they are in the Roman elite tradition, by their willingness to respect and work with the Senate, although the underlying and inevitable trend was towards absolutism. The key virtue now becomes ‘stable government and sound administration’, more to the benefit of the empire than Rome: ‘although it was too late to save the Republic, Augustus at least saved the provinces’. The broad view tacitly echoes that of the third-century Greek senator Cassius Dio whose history of Rome includes our only, albeit incomplete, ancient narrative of the period from 133 B.C. to A.D. 68.

For the political and military narrative a new Scullard would insert the evidence from new inscriptions such as those illustrating the turbulent annexation of the province of Asia around 130 B.C. or the record of the senate’s decision in A.D. 19 to acquit Calpurnius Piso of poisoning Germanicus but condemn him for treason. There is a considerable literature since 1982 to digest on topics including the nature of later Republican politics and the monumentalization of the Augustan regime. More difficult to integrate would be the enormous volume of work on socio-economic aspects, much drawing on the boom in archaeology of private life. When first published
From the Gracchi to Nero
was almost ahead of its time in devoting chapters, two each for the Republic and Principate, to economic and social life and art, literature and thought. Scullard was aware of the growing archaeological evidence, and his discussion of the agrarian law of Tiberius Gracchus, although we would not now use the term
latifundia
, is still a useful survey of the problems. However, these chapters buttress Scullard’s narrative: culture is part of the nation-building process, and socio-economic development the product of good
government. The broad sweep of socio-economic history, including the political ‘problems’ which the late Republic’s inadequate leadership failed to solve, were not part of Scullard’s conception of the purpose of his books. For issues such as the economic and demographic impact of Roman militarism and imperialism, the cultural and political background to the Social War and its effects, changes in social structures and attitudes, the expansion of Rome into a megalopolis, religious developments including the introduction of ruler worship, whether and how ‘Romanization’ of the provinces occurred, and so on, the reader must turn elsewhere. But for a succinct and sensible narrative account – with due awareness of its presuppositions – of the fall of the Republic and emergence of the Principate, still one of the great stories of world history,
From the Gracchi to Nero
remains without peer.

Dominic Rathbone
Professor of Ancient History
King’s College London