The presidency of Donald Trump has renewed and heightened political violence in the United States.  American society has always been violent, particularly to people of color, women, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community.  So we want to be careful to suggest that the violence we are seeing is somehow new or unprecedented.  Yet we also want to be careful to suggest that this is merely the same as always and there is nothing to be alarmed at.  As I’ve written in previous posts, human history reveals chaos and violence as often as it reveals peace and civility. In recent days and weeks, the events in Portland and Kenosha reveal the potential for this violence to spiral out of control. The shooting of Jacob Blake followed by the murder of several protesters at the hands of Kyle Rittenhouse should be a shock to us.  Equally shocking should be the support Rittenhouse has received from around the country, including from our president, who has only encouraged this violence by refusing to denounce it, just as happened after Charlottesville in 2017. 

History has lessons to teach us about how a society can become overwhelmed by violence.  While there are many kinds of examples we could choose from, the Romans as often provide a compelling witness.  We are not the Romans, but we share some similarities with them which make them a useful study.  The Romans are valuable teachers for us because of both the endurance of their civilization and the change over that time to their political institutions.

Rome was founded as a monarchy on April 21, 753 BCE, as tradition has it.  Kings held sway for 244 years and ruled rather effectively during that time until Tarquinius Superbus (the Arrogant), Rome’s last king and a model tyrant, was driven out.  After Tarquinius’ son violently raped Lucretia, the wife of a leading citizen, the Roman people, led by Lucius Brutus (the Liberator), drove out the kings and established a republic.  If this sounds familiar – a monarchy descended into tyranny overthrown and replaced with a republic – it should.  We can see the same process at work in U.S. history.  Just as the Romans, we have experienced tyranny and had the courage to stand up against it to create a representative form of government.  The Roman Republic endured for 460 years from 509 BCE until 49 BCE – nearly twice as long as the United States has existed as a country – and for those 460 years, year in and year out, the Romans held elections, and took votes, and campaigned, and freely argued for the best course of action.  But after 460 years of republican traditions, the Roman Republic came violently and yet almost imperceptibly to an end.  For those concerned about the maintenance of a free republic, Rome is a master teacher.

The year 133 BCE should have been a year of great triumph for Rome.  Scipio Aemilianus had taken Numantia, thereby solidifying Rome’s control of central Spain (it had already subdued the southern and eastern portions).  The same year, Attalus III, king of Pergamum in Asia Minor (modern-day western Turkey), bequeathed his wealthy kingdom to Rome; this was a gift of immense fortune that was acquired without a single casualty.  Yet 133 BCE is typically not remembered for these auspicious events, instead 133 BCE is most remembered for being the year Tiberius Gracchus’ body was found floating dead in the Tiber River along with the bodies of his supporters. 

The tribune of the plebs and his adherents had been beaten to death on the Capitoline Hill, Rome’s most sacred space.  Despite the pleas of Gaius Gracchus, Tiberius’ brother, the conservative faction of the senate which had incited the violence refused to surrender the body for burial. Adding to their abuse, they dragged the dead down to the riverside and threw their bodies into the Tiber, a final reminder of what would happen to those who defied their wishes.  Tiberius’ murder was all the more vicious because as a tribune his body was sacrosanct – to violate his body physically was a crime not only against a fellow citizen but also against the gods.  For the first time under the Republic, not since the expulsion of the kings nearly 400 years earlier, Romans decided that political violence was the answer to their disagreements.  No one involved in the events surrounding the murder of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BCE could have understood the full ramifications of their actions.  This act of political violence ushered in over one hundred years of strife, upheaval, and civil war until the centuries’ old traditions of the Roman Republic yielded to the autocracy of the Roman Empire.

Tiberius Gracchus was from a prosperous Roman family that had demonstrated its competence and patriotism over several generations.  It was no surprise then that Tiberius Gracchus was elected to the office of tribune of the plebs, a magistracy that had the special charge of looking out for the masses of poorer Roman citizens.  Although the office was not the highest rung on the Roman political ladder, it did come with great power; tribunes (there were ten elected every year) could veto senatorial decrees and legislation from the other assemblies and they could preside over the plebeian assembly, which could pass its own laws.  Tiberius came to this office at a time when Rome could no longer ignore some of the pressing demands that had been lingering for a generation or two.  Most acutely, the Romans were getting short on citizens who owned land; this was significant because to serve in the Roman army one needed to be a landowner – the thinking being that if one owned land one had a stake in defending Rome and likely had the funds necessary to purchase military weapons and equipment.  Although Rome had fought many protracted and successful military campaigns abroad throughout the 3^rd and 2^nd centuries, such as in Greece, North Africa, and Spain, Rome still did not have a professional standing army.  Therefore, if Romans were to field armies, they would need more landowning citizens. 

As tribune, Tiberius Gracchus had the idea that the solution to this problem was to grant land to Roman citizens.  But where to find it?  Over the centuries, as Rome conquered the Italian peninsula, much of the land was taken over as the public property of Rome.  As the land was lying fallow, many landowners simply began to cultivate this public land.  Tiberius Gracchus took the radical notion to redistribute this public land to the landless.  Needless to say, this was controversial.  Those who had been cultivating and profiting from the public lands resisted this redistribution.  Tiberius got nowhere with his proposal in the senate, many of whose members were the wealthy landowners cultivating public lands. 

Here it is necessary to point out several things.  First, the senate did not respond to Tiberius’ proposal with a counter-proposal that would have addressed the dilemma Rome was now facing; rather than focusing on the common good, the senate focused on maintaining its own power.  Second, rebuffed by this traditional avenue of political debate and consultation, Tiberius Gracchus recognized and acted on the recognition that a Roman magistrate did not have to consult the senate; it was merely tradition.  The assemblies of the Roman people were the legislative bodies, and Tiberius Gracchus was confident that they would support his legislation.  So Tiberius Gracchus took the extraordinary measure of side-stepping the authority of the senate and went directly to the people; this act was not illegal, but it was a highly provocative move.  The people passed Gracchus’ legislation.  At the end of the year, Tiberius Gracchus sought re-election, something that was discouraged; though again not illegal, Roman politicians did not seek re-election to the offices they just held, as this was a violation of the principle that one held office for only one year, a traditional check on the power of office-holders – there were no incumbents.  This was too much for the Roman system to bear all at once.  At the assembly in which the election was to be held, Tiberius Gracchus and hundreds of his supporters were murdered by a mob of senators, who then threw the bodies into the Tiber River.  This massacre was the first political violence on such a large scale since the founding of the Republic.  

Though the violence quickly ended – there was no corresponding retaliation – the murder of Tiberius Gracchus was a loss of innocence for the Romans.  From 133 BCE until the fall of the Republic, political violence once unleashed became a regular part of Roman politics.  Roman political violence manifested itself in several ways.  Sometimes political violence resulted in the assassination of a political opponent, such as when the tribune Marcus Livius Drusus was assassinated in 91 BCE.  Sometimes it resulted in mass violence, as when Gaius Marius and Cornelius Cinna massacred the supporters of Cornelius Sulla in 87 BCE.  And at other times even in outright civil war, as when Cornelius Sulla marched on Rome, defeated his opponents in pitched battle, declared himself dictator, and drew up a proscription list, all of which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Romans; those on the proscription lists could be brutally murdered and their property confiscated, from which rewards were paid to the assassins.  The assassination of Tiberius Gracchus was merely the first and represented the violence of elites against the opposition who wanted reform.  The other two types of violence, outright civil war with organized armies marshalled against each other and violence between citizens organized in gangs or quasi-paramilitary groups, I will discuss in parts II and III.

The last century of the Roman Republic was a legacy of violence.  It had started as a response to the political reforms of Tiberius Gracchus and ended in outright war.  The suffering was immense.  Political violence became the way Romans addressed political problems.  Once it had become an acceptable part of Roman life, the Romans were unable to imagine a way to stem it except through the power of an autocrat.

Democracy as a system, and each round of elections, is a kind of low-level civil strife.  Political opponents hurl insults at each other; citizens line up on either side of the political parties.  People march for change, donate money to political organizations, and write their opinions in the press.  There can be an ugliness to all this, but there is also the beauty that all of this is done with little or no violence in functioning democracies.  This low-level civil strife is a sign that democracy is at work; a society that outlaws and smothers opposition is a totalitarian regime.  We want there to be loud, yet peaceful, voices in our political life.  Such had been the case in Rome for almost 400 years.  Yet there is a line, which we do want to walk close to, but which we dare not cross, and that is the line between strong words spoken with conviction and violent acts that have been inspired by hateful rhetoric. 

We are at such a point in our nation where we have come up dangerously close to this line and have stepped over it a couple of times, as recently as in the last week.  The easy availability of assault weapons has made possible violence against fellow citizens.  In fact, we have seen the ratcheting up of violence by individual citizens.  Examples abound: in 2017 on a streetcar in Portland, Jeremy Joseph Christian knifed three individuals who intervened when he verbally attacked two young women with racist and Islamophobic insults (New York Times 2/21/20); James Fields killed Heather Hyer at the protests in Charlottesville (New York Times 6/28/19); and in El Paso Patrick Crusius killed 22 people in an anti-immigrant attack (The Guardian 8/9/19).  Undoubtedly, by the time you are reading this newer examples will be available.  These acts have been accomplished by individuals acting on their own impulses, but there was enough firepower in Charlottesville to kill many people.  Moreover, the president has encouraged such violence.  At a campaign rally in Florida on May 9^th 2019, the president, ostensibly there to give support to hurricane victims, asked those attending, “But how do you stop these people?” referring to migrants.  A voice from the crowd shouted, “Shoot them!”  Trump laughed and said, “Only in the Panhandle, you can get away with that statement. Only in the Panhandle!”  The audience erupted in cheers (USA Today 5/9/19).  The emotional fervor at Trump rallies forewarn of the possible organized violence to come.  If we do not draw back from the line separating healthy democratic debate from outright violence, we may find, as the Romans did, that deadly violence will either become a customary part of political life or peace will come only with an autocrat who will put a stop not only to the violence but also to democratic debate.

Photo credit: Eugene Guillaume, The Gracchi (Les Graques), 1853, Musée d’Orsay, from Wikimedia Commons.