John Briscoe

Supporters and Opponents of Tiberius Gracchus

Although a considerable amount of work has been devoted to the identification of the supporters and opponents of Tiberius Gracchus, the central feature of the prosopographical picture that emerges has not been given the attention it deserves. For Tiberius Gracchus, whose mother was both the sister of the adoptive father of Scipio Aemilianus and the niece of Scipios natural father, and whose sister was married to Aemilianus, found his most notable noble supporters among those who were political opponents of Aemilianus. In the context of Roman politics as they operated in the pre-Gracchan era, that is a very remarkable situation, and one that merits further investigation. For if it is the case that Tiberius Gracchus broke away from his inherited connections to join the political opponents of those connections, it is worth asking what consequences and repercussions this action had. We might expect to find persons who could be put into the following categories: ( a ) other former supporters of Aemilianus, who joined Gracchus in his break-away, ( b ) friends of Aemilianus who remained loyal to him, ( c ) opponents of Aemilianus who would not accept the Gracchan programme, and ( d ) opponents of Aemilianus who supported Gracchus. What follows is an attempt to define the membership of the various categories. I restrict myself to this process of identification: I am not here concerned with the larger question of the extent to which the motives of those who supported Gracchus were purely factional and how far they genuinely backed the Gracchan programme. On these, and many other matters, one will naturally turn now to Badians exhaustive survey in the first volume of Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt .

Q. Marcius Philippus and Nova Sapientia

‘Nova ea minus placebat sapientia’: that was the view that the ‘veteres et moris antiqui memores’ took of the diplomatic activity of Q. Marcius Philippus and his colleagues during their embassy to Greece and Macedonia in 172/1. For once we have evidence of a definite division in the Senate on a matter of policy, and if the political groupings established by prosopographers are to have any meaning beyond mere manoeuvring for office, it should be possible to discover the protagonists on each side, and to trace the division in the Fasti . Such an inquiry should make it possible to write a coherent political history of the years leading up to the Third Macedonian War. It has long been recognized that the decade after 180 was a period of sharp disagreement among the nobiles , but no satisfactory interpretation of the whole period between 179 and the end of the Third Macedonian War has yet been given. In this paper I shall attempt an analysis of the problem in two sections: firstly I shall discuss the diplomatic career of Q. Marcius Philippus and some related questions; secondly, I shall try to relate the conclusions of the first section to the political history of Rome in the 170s.