Quote Originally Posted by moonburn View Post
when adressing cesar and the late republic one should remember that they had a precedent to draw uppon with scared the upper classes tremendously wich was the sulla dictatorship

altough sulla´s laws where mainly passed on to try and protect the senate and the upper classes it was also the upper classes who suffered the most by sulla´s persecution wich costed the lives of many patricians and made many others poorer

so when people see cesar reaching to power they fear he might become a new sulla while men as pompey wich weren´t of noble birth (was instead a selfmade man) could reach those powers since they would not use to to persecute the nobles but instead use that power to get accepted into their circle (pompey´s marriage to julia and later on to another high ranking roman woman)

also cesar had already promissed lands to his legions and the lands he had his eyes on where public lands that several senators where using for their own benefit (or so i heard in a romance novel) so those senators where not interested in cesars triumph or they risked loosing their source of income (wich again gave points to the populares because of miss apropriation of public resources again by the patricians like it had happened so many times where patricians had stolen wealth from roman allies or subjagated lands)

also cicero was the only nuovo homi of the republic for decades because he was instrumental in stopping the catalinian revolt where once again a man of noble birth tryed to take over because he was denied his acess to places

this time in history is amazing cause you can see a very large amount of great thinkers playing their chess games to try and get the upper hand using all sorts of plans (altough in the end, as always, it was the dude with the best army who won)
And....all these things are intimately linked. As Rome progressed out of Italy (after defeating Carthage) the armies were on campaign for longer; their lands were not worked by them. Their families either went bust or were forced to sell their small-holdings in order to survive. Landed aristocracy became richer, gaining huge tracts of land - and encroaching upon public land which they had no legal right to. They started to use slave labour to work the fields, and so even the prospect of working the land for the landed aristocracy was denied the landless men of Rome.

The Roman army at this time wasn't a paid, standing army, it was made up of citizens, based upon their wealth. As more and more families were thrown off their land there were fewer and fewer men wealthy enough to serve in the army. Various schemes were attempted in order to retain Rome's military strength; the limit on wealth required was lessened, for example. What Tiberius Gracchus saw was the underlying problem - the huge, slave-worked conglomerate farms of the wealthy aristocracy. So he attempted to re-distribute land, including some of that public land encroached upon (illegally) by the aristocracy. That aristocracy, however, made up the majority of the Senate, and they were not about to agree to giving up their profits. So, Tiberius used the gambit of the Plebian assemblies and his powers as Tribune to force through those changes.

The power of the wealthy enators was too much, however, for these land reforms to work and so Marius introduced a new way of paying armies; the General would pay them - through plunder and with land at the end of the soldier's tour of duty; a 'pension scheme' if you like. Of course, that meant that the soldiers in any General's army had more stake in the General's success than in any wider notion of Rome's success. Sulla's army was devoted to Sulla, for it was Sulla - not the Roman state - upon whose benefaction their prosperity relied. It should be noted also, that when Sulla first marched against Rome there is a strong likelihood that a number of his soldiers had recently been fighting against Rome in the Social Wars. What Marius did, quite without thinking it through I believe, was introduce the client relationship that he so detested within the political institutions of Rome (hence his narrowing of the voting passages, to stop intimidation of voters) into the establishment of the armies of Rome.

Had Marius's reforms of the army been just a little different (such that the State of Rome was responsible for re-settling the soldiers, eg) then Sulla, Caesar, Augustus may never have come about.