Sublime

By a convenient coincidence, King Attalus III of Pergamum had died in 133 BCE, and – combining a realistic assessment of Roman power in the eastern Mediterranean with a shrewd defence against assassination by rivals at home – he had made ‘the Roman people’ the heir to his property and large kingdom in what is now Turkey. This inheritance provided

And it was this problem that Tiberius determined to solve when he was elected a tribune of the people for 133 BCE. He straight away introduced a law to the Plebeian Assembly to reinstate smallholders by distributing plots of Roman ‘public land’ to the poor.

Tiberius Gracchus

Tiberius Gracchus

Unlike his elder brother, Gaius somehow succeeded in being elected tribune twice. But, in murky circumstances, he failed to be elected again for 121 BCE. In that year he resisted the efforts of the consul Lucius Opimius, a diehard who became something of a hero to the conservatives, to cancel much of his legislation. In the process he was killed,

In 133 BCE, the votes for the next year’s tribunes were slowly being delivered on the Capitoline Hill when the posse invaded. A battle followed, in which Tiberius was bludgeoned to death with a chair leg. The man behind the lynch mob was his cousin Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio, an ex-consul and the head of one of the main groups of Roman

Gaius Gracchus

Tiberius proposed to restrict their holdings to a maximum of 500 iugera (roughly 120 hectares) each, claiming that this was the old legal limit, and to parcel out the rest in small units to the dispossessed. It was a typical style of Roman reform, justifying radical action as a return to past practice.