In 133 BC a tribune of the plebs proposed to give public land to the poor, and by the end of the year he and about three hundred of his supporters had been beaten to death in the streets of Rome.
The previous lesson set out the problem the Gracchi thought they were solving: public land occupied by the rich, a shrinking pool of men who qualified for the legions, and a city filling with citizens who had votes and nothing else. This lesson is about the attempt and its consequences, and the consequences are not mainly about land. What changed in these twelve years is the answer to the question of how a Roman political dispute ends.
Tiberius and the land bill
Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus was not an outsider. His father had been consul twice and censor, his mother Cornelia was the daughter of the man who beat Hannibal, and his sister was married to Scipio Aemilianus, who destroyed Carthage. He was as close to the centre of the aristocracy as a Roman could be.
His bill, passed in 133 BC, revived the old limit on holdings of public land: 500 iugera per man, about 126 hectares, with an extra 250 for each of two sons. The excess reverted to the state and was distributed in small inalienable plots to landless citizens, administered by a commission of three with the power to decide what was public land and what was private, which in a country with no land registry was the real power in the bill.
Nothing in it was legally novel. Public land belonged to the Roman people, a limit on its occupation had a respectable pedigree, and the assembly could pass what it liked. What was novel was the procedure. Tiberius took the bill straight to the plebeian assembly without the customary prior discussion in the Senate, and when a fellow tribune, Marcus Octavius, vetoed it, he put a motion to the assembly to remove Octavius from office, and carried it.
Example. Was the deposition of Octavius legal? Set out the strongest case on each side.
For it: a tribune exists to represent the plebs, the plebs are sovereign in their own assembly, and an officer who blocks what the plebs demand has abandoned his function, so the body that elected him may unelect him. Tiberius argued exactly this, and no statute forbade it. Against it: the tribunate's whole value lay in an unconditional veto protected by sacrosanctity, and a veto that can be removed by the majority it obstructs is not a veto at all. The deposition therefore destroyed the office in order to use it. Both arguments are good, which is the point. The Roman constitution had no court and no text, so a genuinely new question had no answer beyond what one side could carry, and by the end of the year the answer was being decided with clubs.
Now you. Tiberius later stood for a second consecutive tribunate, and his enemies said this proved he wanted permanent power. What was he actually facing?
Answer
Prosecution. A tribune was inviolable while in office and an ordinary citizen the day after, and Tiberius had deposed a colleague, bypassed the Senate and directed the people to spend a foreign king's bequest, any one of which would support a charge. Standing again was the only way to keep his immunity and his commission alive. This is the trap the constitution set for every reformer after him: annual office plus personal liability means that a man who makes serious enemies in one year must either win the next year's election or face them without protection, and it is the same logic that puts Caesar at the Rubicon eighty-four years later.
The killing
Two other acts made the collision certain. Attalus III of Pergamum died and left his kingdom to Rome, and Tiberius proposed that the assembly, not the Senate, should decide how the money was used, which touched the Senate's oldest practical monopolies, finance and foreign affairs. Then he stood for re-election.
On election day the Senate met, and the consul refused to act. Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, the chief priest, called on those who wished to save the Republic to follow him, and led senators, their clients and their slaves, armed with broken furniture, into the assembly. Tiberius and some three hundred others were killed and their bodies thrown into the Tiber.
Two features of that afternoon matter more than the deaths. The men who did it were not a mob but the governing class in person, and no court ever tried them. And the justification offered was not a law but a necessity: the Republic was in danger, and a citizen might act. Every political killing for the next hundred years appeals to that formula.
What the killing did not undo
Note what did not happen next. The land commission was not abolished. It kept its three members, kept its power to rule on what was public land, and went on distributing plots for years, which is why the census jumped by 75,913 between 131 and 125 BC. The Senate had killed the man and kept the law.
That is worth sitting with, because it defines the quarrel. If the land bill had been the intolerable thing, it would have been repealed the moment its author was dead, and repealing a law was easy. What had been intolerable was the method: a tribune who went round the Senate, deposed a colleague, disposed of a foreign bequest and looked like staying in office. The governing class could accept losing a policy and could not accept a rival centre of authority, and every crisis in the rest of this course has that shape.
Gaius, and a programme instead of a bill
Gaius Gracchus was elected tribune for 123 BC, ten years after his brother's death, and held the office two years running. Where Tiberius had one measure, Gaius had a system, and it is the most coherent legislative programme anyone attempted under the Republic.
He restored and extended the land commission and founded colonies, including one on the site of Carthage. He built roads with milestones. He passed a grain law under which the state sold wheat in Rome at a fixed price of 6 and one third asses a modius, in rations of five modii a month. He moved the collection of the Asian taxes to a contract sold at Rome, which handed the richest province in the empire to the equestrian companies. He took the extortion court away from senatorial juries and gave it to equestrian ones. He legislated on the levy, forbidding conscription under seventeen and requiring the state to supply clothing. And he proposed to extend Roman citizenship to the Latins and Latin rights to the other Italian allies.
Read as a whole, the programme is an attempt to build a coalition that the Senate could not break: the urban plebs held by grain, the rural poor by land, the equestrians by the tax contract and the courts, the soldiers by the levy law, and the Italians by citizenship. It is the first Roman politics that looks modern.
Example. A modius of wheat is about 6.55 kg. Work out what a monthly ration of five modii actually provided.
Five modii is about 32.8 kg a month, which is 1.09 kg a day. Wheat runs at roughly 3,340 kcal a kilogram, so the ration supplies about 3,650 kcal a day, against an adult man's requirement of something like 2,800. The ration therefore fed one adult comfortably and a family not at all, which is exactly right for its purpose: it was drawn by the male citizen, in person, in Rome, and it subsidised the household rather than supporting it. Note also what it was not. The grain was sold, not given, at a fixed and below-market price, and the free distributions that Roman moralists later denounced are a development of the 50s BC, not a Gracchan invention.
Now you. Gaius's citizenship proposal was defeated, and the sources say it cost him support among the very voters who had backed everything else. Why?
Answer
Because the Roman plebs were being asked to share what made them privileged. Every benefit in the programme, the grain price, the land, the colonies, was a benefit of citizenship, and doubling the number of citizens divided them among more people and diluted the value of an urban voter's ballot in the tribes. The consul Fannius is reported making precisely that argument, that Italians would take the seats at the games and crowd the assemblies. It is the central weakness of the popular politics of the late Republic: the poor citizens of Rome were, in relation to Italy and the provinces, a privileged interest, and a politician could be the champion of one or the other but rarely of both.
The final decree
Gaius failed to be elected for a third year, and in 121 BC his opponents moved to repeal his colony at Carthage. In the disorder that followed, a servant of the consul Opimius was killed, and the Senate passed a resolution asking the consuls to see that the state took no harm.
That formula, later called the senatus consultum ultimum, was new. It did not declare martial law, since the Senate had no power to do that, and it did not suspend any right, since it was formally only advice. What it did was announce in advance that the Senate would treat the killing of a citizen by a magistrate as legitimate. Opimius raised armed men, stormed the Aventine, and killed Gaius and some three thousand of his supporters, many of them after the fighting, without trial. He was later prosecuted and acquitted.
Everything about the device is characteristic of the Roman constitution. It is not a law. It creates no power. It works entirely by telling a magistrate what the men who will judge him afterwards think, and it worked because the same class supplied both the magistrate and the jury. It was used again against Saturninus in 100, against Catiline's associates in 63, and against Caesar in 49, and the argument about whether it could authorise the killing of citizens without trial ran until the Republic ended: Cicero was exiled in 58 for the executions of 63 and recalled the year after.
Example. In what sense did the events of 133 and 121 BC change the constitution, given that no law was passed either time?
They changed the set of moves available. Before 133 a political dispute at Rome ended in a vote, a veto, a delay or a prosecution, and the participants expected to keep meeting. After 121 the repertoire included killing, done by men who suffered nothing for it, justified by an appeal to necessity that the Senate had formally blessed. That is a constitutional change in every sense that matters, even though nothing was written down. It also worked in both directions: a reformer now had to expect violence, which made his own resort to it reasonable, and made a bodyguard a normal part of a political career. Within forty years both sides have private armies.
Now you. Roman politicians of the following century are often labelled populares or optimates. Given what the Gracchi did, why is it wrong to treat these as parties?
Answer
Because they name methods, not organisations. A popularis worked through the tribunate and the assembly, over the Senate's head; an optimas worked through the Senate and its informal controls. There was no membership, no programme, no whip and no continuity, and the same man could use either technique in different years: Sulla, who ended his career dismantling the tribunate, held his first command through a popular vote, and Caesar, the great popularis, was a patrician whose closest concern was his own career. The labels describe the route a politician took to power, and taking one route rather than the other is a tactical choice about where the votes are. Reading them as parties imports a nineteenth-century structure the Romans did not have.
Where this leaves the Republic
The Gracchi are usually described as failures, and the description needs qualifying. The land commission distributed land on a scale the census records. The grain law survived and grew. The equestrian juries and the Asian tax contract lasted for decades and made the equestrian order a permanent player. The citizenship proposal was defeated in 122 BC and enacted in 89 after a war.
What failed was the attempt to do it inside the constitution. The Gracchi proved that a determined tribune with a popular measure could beat the Senate in a vote, and that the Senate would respond with force it could not be punished for. Both lessons were learned by everyone.
The next crisis came from the other direction. Rome's wars in Africa and against the Cimbri went badly under senatorial commanders, and the man who fixed them, Gaius Marius, solved the recruiting problem this lesson began with by simply abolishing the property qualification. What that did to the relationship between a soldier and his general is the next lesson.