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Six. License to Kill
- University of Texas Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
liCeNse to kill In a book about the relationship between homicide and political power, the killings of Roman tribunes and their supporters, starting with the death of Tiberius Gracchus in 132, hold a particularly profound place. In 133 B.C.e., Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio, nominally a private citizen but in fact a powerful man in Roman government, led a band of senators into the tribal assembly and participated in the killing of two hundred Roman citizens, including the tribune of the plebs—a Roman official by the name of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus .The homicide of Tiberius Gracchus and its manyconsequences led to attempts to legitimize instances of homicide so that certain Roman officials could protect the res publica by killing those they considered dangerous to its safety. This attempt at legitimizing such killings was a decree of the senate known to modern scholars as a senatus consultum ultimum (scu). But the Romans demonstrated great ambivalence about it,1 neither completelyaccepting the concept of justifiable homicide for the protection of the res publica nor ever able actually to outlaw it. In this ambivalence is reflected Roman attempts to negotiate political power in the context of a rapidly expanding territorial empire. In particular, discourse surrounding the justification, or lack thereof, of the scu seems to reflect the notion of diffuse versus centralized power in Roman government. The attitude toward these homicides remained ambivalent throughout the republic. To demonstrate that the attitude of the Romans toward justifiable homicide for the protection of the res publica was ambivalent, and to determine the reasons for this, I examine the incidents of such homicides, paying particularattention to fouraspects: the repercussions for those magistrates who killed Roman citizens allegedly for this reason, the occasional hesitancyof magistrates to employ the decrees of the senate for killing, the laws written to forbid such acts and the extent of their effectiveness, and the six 110 murder was not a Crime wording of the decrees themselves. By examining the killing of Tiberius, the creation of the so-called scu for the elimination of Gaius Gracchus, and the subsequent use of this final decree of the senate, we will see that legalization of homicide by Roman officials was just as absent from the Roman world as making murder illegal. tiberius graCChus When Tiberius Gracchus, a tribune of the plebs, was becoming politically powerful in arguably unethical and certainly unprecedented ways in the Roman world, many Roman senators feared his ever-increasing powerand believed he was behaving tyrannically.2 Plutarch, describing the debate in the senate that preceded the death of Tiberius, states that someone reported to the senators that he saw Tiberius in the tribal assembly asking for a crown. Because monarchy was an anathema to the Romans, when Nasica heard this, he: ὁ δὲ Nασικᾶς ἠξίου τὸν ὕπατον τῇ πόλει βοηθεῖν καὶ καταλύειν τὸν τύραννον (“demanded that the consul should come to the rescue of the state and put down the tyrant”).3 The presiding consul, P. Mucius Scaevola, refused, saying that he would not use violence or put a citizen to death without a trial, and Nasica “thereupon sprang to his feet and said: ‘Because the chief magistrate betrays the res publica, you who wish to save the laws, follow me.’” With a crowd of senators and others with him, he went to the tribal assembly, and a fight ensued in which hundreds of Romans died, including Tiberius, who was beaten to death with sticks by Publius Satyreius, one of his colleagues in the tribunate, and by Lucius Rufus.4 The moment before Tiberius’ death he was allegedly seeking to dramatically alter the structure of republican government. Even though this is likely to have been slander against Tiberius, the attack on him was justified in some people’s eyes by the possibility that he was making the claim to absolute power. Furthermore, his political machinations leading up to this meeting of the assembly threatened the balance of power created by the system of patronage by which Roman government functioned. They also threatened the relative power of the senate (over the tribunate and over the people) by asserting control over the monies from Pergamum. Control of the financial resources of the provinces was supposed to be the purview of the senate.5 By deposing a colleague in the tribunician college, Tiberius also assumed a political power beyond any tribune before him. Furthermore, he discussed this arguably unconstitutional act in terms of [54.166.223.204] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:54 GMT) 111 liCense to Kill the rights of the...