Tiberius Gracchus – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

This week, we’re going to talk a bit about the brothers Tiberius (trib. 133) and Gaius (trib. 123-2) Gracchus, the famous Roman reformers of the late second century. There’s actually a fair bit to say about both of them, so we’re going to split this treatment over two weeks, talking about Tiberius this week and Gaius next week.

Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ tribunates – both of which ended with them being killed (I think it is perfectly fair to say ‘murdered’) – typically occupy a position in survey coverage of the Roman Republic as the inciting incident that begins (if not quite causes) the collapse of the Republic itself, the first outbreak of violence in Roman politics, the first escalation in a spiral that would lead to the repeated outbreak of civil war in the first century. And that is certainly how they were understood in antiquity; both Plutarch and Appian make this claim (App. BCiv. 1.17; Plut. Ti. Gracch. 20.1). And in part because the sources (again, Plutarch and Appian) frame the Gracchi quite positively and in part, to be frank, because their reforms are generally ‘left-coded’ in a university environment that is inherently sympathetic to left-coded things, the Gracchi tend to come across to students as righteous reformers killed by foolish, hidebound and greedy reactionary Roman senators. And that is, to be fair, a potentially valid reading (if employed with some caveats).

But it is also generally the only reading students get and it is not the only valid reading of the evidence we have. So for this week, I want to complicate the Gracchi, presenting a some of the details that often get left out of introductory surveys. In particular, we’re going to discuss the problems that Tiberius Gracchus’ key law, the Lex Sempronia Agraria was designed to solve and I am going to argue that Tiberius was attempting to solve a problem that didn’t exist (though he couldn’t have known it), a view which is now quite common in the scholarship but almost entirely absent in how we tend to teach the Gracchi.

But more to the point, I am going to argue that Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ behavior did, in fact, violate the norms of the Republic and that it was not entirely unreasonable for the senatorial elite to conclude these men, in their unrestrained and nakedly ambitious approach to politics, represented a real threat to the Roman political order and that they might be aiming for something approaching a ‘soft coup’ in the context of a political order whose features – including the democratic ones – worked through an unwritten constitution of norms (what the Romans called the mos maiorum, “the customs of the ancestors”), which both brothers actively undermined. The claim that the Gracchi threatened to make themselves tyrants was not an empty claim and that is the dark reflection of their role as well intentioned reformers.

In short, then, if the only version of the Gracchi you have encountered is that of the near-saintly, then martyred proto-progressive reformers, that’s not quite the complete picture (and the left-coding of their ideas is decidedly anachronistic). Naturally, in trying to complicate this picture, I am essentially taking the position of prosecutor, so this ‘take’ is going to be far more negative on the Gracchi than how I would, say, teach them in class or, indeed, how I regard them myself.

So the way we’re going to approach this problem is first to discuss the problem that Tiberius Gracchus thought he was addressing (and some of the issues there), before walking through the means he used to push forward the Lex Sempronia Agraria. Then I want to look at some of the wide-ranging laws proposed by Gaius Gracchus to assess the degree to which those laws cohere and ways we might understand his program and actions, potentially rather more negatively.

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(Bibliography Note: If you have access to it, it is hard for me to do better than Sakia Roselaar’s Oxford Bibliography entry for “The Gracchi Brothers.” As Roselaar notes, however, this is an area where – for the general reader – the bibliography that exists is unsatisfactory. The main problem is that, in English at least, there has not been a sustained monograph on the Gracchi in English in quite some time and during that time, as we’re going to see, the scholarship on some key issues, particularly the underlying conditions the lex Sempronia Agraria was supposed to be addressing, has changed significantly. Consequently, while the standard reading in English tends to be Boren, The Gracchi (1986) and Stockton, The Gracchi (1979), both pre-date those shifts. Works in other languages (Gabba’s treatment in Storia di Roma vol. 2 (1990) or Perelli, I Gracchi (1993)) are more recent, but also don’t capture those shifts. Meanwhile, among scholars, nearly everything about both brothers is the subject of at least some debate, often quite a lot of debate. The result is, at the moment, somewhat unfortunate: there really isn’t, to my knowledge, a good place for a beginner to get an up-to-date treatment of the Gracchi, short of reading the older works, then reading a lot of articles (often in difficult to obtain publications, many not in English) to catch up on the debates. Needless to say, an up-to-date accessible monograph covering both brothers and presenting the points of contention about them is desideratum.)

The Sources and Tiberius Gracchus’ Background

Now I should note at the outset that our sources for the Gracchi are not what we might like. Tiberius Gracchus’ year as tribune was in 133 and the late second century is a period where our best sources largely cut out. Polybius, of course, was writing in the 140s and so is unavailable for later events. Livy, always useful, did write the history of this period, but it is lost save for extremely brief summaries of his books known as the Periochae. Instead, we’re reliant primarily on Plutarch and Appian. Both sources are writing much later, in the second century AD and are writing in a context where we might question if we’re getting an entirely straight narrative. As I’ve noted before, Plutarch’s biographies in his Parallel Lives (of which there is one for Tiberius Gracchus and one for Gaius Gracchus) are intended to be moralizing essays rather than straight historical accounts and Plutarch is not above bending the truth to fit his narrative; he also tends to leave out details if they don’t fit his narrative.

Meanwhile, as D.J. Gargola has noted, Appian is also bending his account of Tiberius Gracchus’ reforms, in particular by presenting the Lex Sempronia Agraria as an entirely traditional, convention response to a pressing crisis. But in fact, the provisions of the Lex Sempronia Agraria were not traditional: no similar law (save for a reenactment by Gaius Gracchus) – had ever or would ever be passed in Rome and the legal precedent that Appian presents as providing the foundation for Tiberius’ law appears to be at least substantially an anachronistic invention. Meanwhile, the crisis Appian thinks Tiberius Gracchus thought he was addressing probably didn’t exist in the form he understood it.

But that’s what we have, so it is what we must work with. And we should note that both Plutarch and Appian are quite favorable to the Gracchi, even though both men were clearly very controversial in their day. So in a sense this is a reverse of the situation we had with Cleopatra, where we had to contend with relentlessly negative sources: here the sources are broadly positive.

So, on with what we know.

Tiberius Gracchus was elected tribune in 133. His election was already unusual in that he seems to have run on something like a program (land reform, which we’ll get to); Romans generally ran on character and background rather than promising specific political actions if elected, so this was unusual. Part of the reason for it was doubtless that Tiberius Gracchus’ political fortunes were in difficulties. Now we should note here that while Tiberius Gracchus was a plebian (that is, not a patrician) that doesn’t make him a political outsider: Tiberius Gracchus was not remotely a political outsider or poor man or lacking in influence. His father (also Ti. Sempronius Gracchus) had been consul in 177 and 163 and censor in 169; his father (or grandfather) was consul in 215 and 213. Our Tiberius Gracchus’ mother, Cornelia, was the daughter of P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus, the man who defeated Hannibal. Tiberius Gracchus was born into substantial wealth and influence, the sort of man whose eventual political ascent was almost guaranteed.

(Indeed, it was so guaranteed that he gets to bend the rules and hold many of his offices early. He’s quaestor at just 26, which implies that he started his military service at 15 or 16 instead of the normal 17, doing so as a military tribune, not a common soldier. I do think this is relevant to understanding Tiberius Gracchus: this was a man born with a silver spoon and a carefully paved, flat-and-easy road to power and influence laid out for him by his family and his political backers, the most notable among whom was his key supporter Scipio Aemilianus (destroyer of Carthage and shortly Numantia).)

Except. Except he got wrapped up in something of a nasty foreign policy scandal during his year as quaestor, when he was assigned to the amazingly named but less amazingly capable C. Hostilius Mancinus who as consul in 137 was supposed to deal with Numantia in Spain. Mancinus blew it and got his army effectively trapped and sent Tiberius – his quaestor and the next highest ranking Roman present – to negotiate to get his army out. Tiberius did this, but the whole thing caused a great stink and a scandal at Rome (Roman armies are supposed to go down fighting, not negotiate shameful retreats!). Indeed, the Senate was so enraged they rejected the treaty and instead sent Mancinus, bound in chains, to the Numantines as part of a ritual process by which his treaty was disowned. Tiberius doesn’t get packed off to Numantia, but some of the political stink does rub off on him, so while he’s connected enough to get elected as a plebeian tribune in 133, he must know he needs a big second act to get his political career back on track, or he may never reach the consulship. That context – a political insider who had a golden ticket but must now win it back, rather than an outside without connections – is important for understanding the reaction he is going to get.

The Supposed Land Crisis

The issue Tiberius Gracchus seizes on is land reform and both Plutarch (Ti. Gracch. 8.1-3) and Appian (B Civ 7-8) present similar visions of the problem he thought he was addressing. When Rome had expanded in Italy, it had often taken land from defeated enemies, some of which was resettled or sold, but some of which was kept as ‘public land’ (ager publicus), leased out by the state at very favorable rates. By the late second century, Tiberius Gracchus and others are observing two conjoined facts: on the one hand, the number of Romans eligible for conscription (the assidui) has begun to decline. On the other hand, the city of Rome itself is increasingly full of landless poor looking for labor and hoping for some option that will give them a chance at land.

What they assume is taking place is that the wealthiest Romans – who have, in fact, grown fantastically wealthy from Rome’s overseas wars – have used that wealth to acquire most of the land, either buying up the small freeholds of smaller Roman farmers or getting the leases for that public land. Meanwhile, the Roman small farmer class does most of Rome’s fighting and so the assumption – by Appian – is that these guys are being ground underfoot by heavy military deployments, although as best we can tell, military deployments in the 150s, 140s and 130s are substantially lighter than those from 218-168 (but they’re also in less profitable, more difficult places like Spain, put a pin in that). Those wealthy Romans then work the land not with free laborers, but with slaves, because Roman conquests – remember, we’re at the tail end of Rome’s ‘iron century’ of conquests from 264 to 148 – have brought enormous numbers of enslaved laborers to Italy. Those poor Romans, now displaced, have no land and flock to Rome and are no longer liable for the Roman census.

Except notice the data points being used to come up with this story: the visible population of landless men in Rome and the Roman census returns. But, as we’ve discussed, the Roman census is self-reported, and the report of a bit of wealth like a small farm is what makes an individual liable for taxes and conscription.

In short the story we have above is an interpretation of the available data but not the only one and both our sources and Tiberius Gracchus simply lack the tools necessary to gather the information they’d need to sound out if their interpretation is correct.

All of which now, at last, brings us to the scholarship of the last several decades which has, by and large, concluded that Tiberius Gracchus probably misunderstood the nature of Roman social and economic problems in the late second century and as a result applied the wrong solution. The initial problem is that the above model assumes a basically stagnant Italian population: you’re just shifting people around, not generating new people. But survey archaeology shows growing urban centers and new land coming under cultivation, suggesting a modestly rising population, a conclusion reinforced by demographic modeling which recognizes the likely marked decline in military mortality in the back half of the second century. Moreover, the vast expansion of villa estates we ought to be seeing in this period really only comes later, in the first century BC and the first two centuries AD; there’s some expansion (and these patterns are very regionalized) but not enough to explain what we’re being told is happening. Those observations, emerging in the 90s and early 2000s, provided the necessary evidence to vindicate the theory advanced by J.W. Rich in the 1980s that the problem was quite different than Tiberius Gracchus understood, in part to explain the one curious fact we could always see about Tiberius’ land reforms, which is that they happened, they went ahead as planned and also they didn’t fix the problem.

Instead what is happening is this: Roman military deployments had, for a long time, been massive. Rome had careened from the major Samnite Wars (343–341, 326–304, and 298–290) to the high-casualty Pyrrhic War (280-275) to the much higher casualty First (264-241) and Second (218-201) Punic Wars. But the big wars of the early second century had involved a lot more winning and thus somewhat less dying (deaths from disease always outweighed combat losses, but Roman armies are smaller from 201-168, so less disease death too), while after the Third Macedonian War (171-168), Rome doesn’t have any more peer-opponent wars left to fight and so the number of men under arms declines again after 168 and especially after 148. Roman society was thus structured to sustain itself in a situation where military mortality for males was high. And then it dropped.

But recall the average Roman farm is small, so what you have now are suddenly a whole bunch of second and third sons who between 350 and 201 would have gone off to fight and died (or their elder brother would have) but are now alive, but can’t possible inherit the family farm because they have a living brother and the farm is much too small to split further (or to support an entire second nuclear family unit). Where do they go? Well, to Rome, of course, where they want what Rome has done in the past to deal with this sort of problem: the foundation of new Roman communities (colonies) where they can have land. But there isn’t any Italy left to conquer (Rome controls all of it) and we aren’t yet to founding Roman colonies overseas, so not only is the mortality much lower (and so you have more of these guys) the traditional release valve is stuck. So they’re piling up in the one place that there is meaningful amount of wage labor available (the city of Rome), where they are very visible to the Roman ruling elite.

Meanwhile, Elder Brother-Who-Lived is back on the farm and should, in theory, still be eligible for call-up. But whereas in previous decades he could hope to get sent to fight in places like Greece or Italy or against Carthage where the rewards in loot from defeating wealthy enemies were substantial, in the 130s, the main problem was Numantia: a Celtiberian community perched in a particularly troublesome hillfort in a relatively poor, difficult part of Spain. Campaigns to take the place often failed (see above) but even if they succeeded, there would be little real loot. Moreover, a lack of success made the wars deeply unpopular. Elder Brother doesn’t want to get drafted to go fight in Spain, it’s just not a good bargain for him (unlike earlier wars).

But he has a solution: the census is self-reported. While his younger brothers are in Rome looking for work, he can just not report the farm on the census (or not report his military aged son), understating his wealth to drop below the qualifying requirement for military service. Because the Roman census pays functionally no attention to such men – the capite censi (those counted by their heads) – Elder Brother’s household almost seems to vanish in the census returns and the number of men liable for conscription ticks down by one.

And so you have falling census returns, combined with crowds of poor Romans in the city of Rome, but without it necessarily having anything to do with ager publicus or lost farms. And this is, we think, probably what is happening: surely there is some elite villa-estate expansion and some replacement of freeholding farmers with enslaved workers on that land but in fact the problem the Romans are facing is classic land scarcity with a growing population, but they don’t know that’s the problem because draft-resistance appears in the census as population decline and the census is all they have.

But you can see immediately the problem for Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform: while there is certainly some ager publicus to redistribute (to the great annoyance of the elites holding it), they’re not enough, because the core of this problem isn’t changing land use patterns (more villas, less small farms) but rising population creating economic strain at the bottom (while, it is true, imperial expansion creates vast almost unimaginable amounts of wealth at the top).

But we’re actually not quite done with problems, there’s one more: not all of the ager publicus was being farmed by Romans. Quite a lot of it seems, instead, to have been in the hands of local Italians – the socii. This is another convenient simplification by Appian and Plutarch, a product of them both writing in the imperial period long after citizenship had been extended across Italy. But that hasn’t happened yet. So any law to redistribute ager publicus would mean taking land from the socii who were currently using it for a land-giveaway in which only Roman citizens will be eligible.

You may well imagine that doing something like that might really damage relations with the socii and also fundamentally change the ‘bargain’ by which the Roman alliance system functioned, as before Tiberius Gracchus, the socii seem to have been eligable to settle in Roman colonial foundations on conquered land, but they will not be eligible to get land in Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform bill.

You can quickly flip ahead to the year 91 to see how that turns out in the long run.

Tiberius Gracchus’ Tribunate (133)

Tiberius Gracchus’ proposal to fix this problem was the lex Sempronia Agraria. The law proposed to enforce a legal but long ignored limit on the holding of ager publicus, restricting individuals to holding just 500 iugera (c. 311 acres), with the state revoking the leases on the remainder and using the reclaimed land to then provide small plots for free to the Roman poor, with a rider that these plots could not be sold (to avoid them being reconsolidated into elite estates).

And here it is worth noting that kind of government the Romans had to understand the response. The Roman Republic had written laws but no written constitution – instead, the rules for office holding, for conducting the business of the Senate, for running the assemblies and so on were all customary: the Romans governed themselves in accordance with what they called the mos maiorum, “the custom of the ancestors.” In a sense then, certain practices, if practiced long enough, became a sort of law-of-tradition to themselves and of course one of those customs – practiced at this point for, at minimum around 150 years – was the continual leasing of large amounts of ager publicus to the point that the leases were treated as a form of ownership: people used that land as security for loans, they built houses on it, they buried their parents on it and so on. Because the leases were presumptively renewable and had been for decades if not centuries, under the mos maiorum, the holders of ager publicus had long considered the land theirs. And of course the upset parties are rich and powerful, so their opposition was significant and meaningful, politically.

In brief, the way this plays out is that while Tiberius Gracchus does have significant popular support for his motion (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 9.1), much of the elite are opposed. He draws up a quite conciliatory version of the law, which proposes to compensate the holders of large amounts of ager publicus for their lost leasing rights and to then give them the remainder of their leased land (so they needn’t fear a second lex agraria and a third and a fourth and so on), but according to Plutarch in the face of continued elite opposition, shifts back to a less conciliatory version of the law (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 10.3). The resistance to his law centers on another tribune, Marcus Octavius, himself a large holder of public lands, who plans to veto the law and uses his own powers as a tribune to disrupt the process (along with some fairly clear shenanigans by some of the wealthy, like trying to hide the voting urns to prevent a vote on the law and so on).

Now there are a few things to note at this juncture in the story. First, there being ten tribunes, it must never have been very hard to find a tribute willing to gum up the passage of a given law, but that, traditionally, this was a tactic of delay, rather than a hard-stop the way Octavius is using it. At the same time, with real public momentum to make this law happen, one could easily imagine simply waiting Octavius out – he only has one year in office. Except. Except that, remember, Tiberius Gracchus needs a big victory in his tribunate to get his political career on track, a consideration that was clearly significant (thus the reason we’re informed of his quaestorship; we usually don’t know much about even very significant figure’s time in junior offices!). That consideration, I think, serves as important context for Tiberius’ decision to escalate every time he encounters resistance: he cannot afford to simply be the prelude to someone else passing this law: he needs to pass it himself.

The normal method for ‘deconflicting’ two magistrates with opposing vetoes like this was to go to the Senate, which Tiberius Gracchus, hoping his influential supporters would carry the day, did. Instead, according to Plutarch (Ti. Gracch. 11.2) the Senate was merely no help, whereas Appian (BCiv 1.12) describes the Senate as openly upbraiding Tiberius, a strong negative response. Now under the mos maiorum, that would be the end of it: the authority of the Senate (the auctoritas senatus) ought to be so intense that when the Senate speaks in one voice and says, “not right now” then you desist. Remember that in the Roman conception, the Republic is a partnership of sorts between the Senate and the People (the S and the P in SPQR), rather than a situation in which the Senate is purely subordinate to the popular will: if the Senate is strongly opposed, that is supposed to be a veto point that is respected.

But remember: Tiberius Gracchus cannot, politically, desist. He must push through because his political career requires a victory this year. Note that the cause does not require a victory in 133; there is nothing to stop another tribune in 132 from trying to advance the same bill or a more limited or different version of it. But Tiberius Gracchus’ career absolutely requires success in 133. So instead of desisting, he escalates.

He now breaks clearly with the mos maiorum and plans to take his law directly to the people against the advice of the Senate. Octavius is obviously a problem – he’ll veto anything Tiberius Gracchus tries to do – so Tiberius Gracchus introduces a law to depose Octavius from office. The Roman Republic doesn’t have anything like impeachment, there is no framework to remove someone from office. Instead, the way the Republic works is that all of the offices are held for short duration (one year) and while tribunes and office holders with imperium are immune from prosecution while in office, they can be prosecuted the moment they leave office for any crimes they committed. There is no framework for booting out a tribune like this; the remedy in the customary Roman system is to make sure the next year you elect tribunes who support the idea and try to pass it then. But that remedy doesn’t work for Tiberius Gracchus.

So Tiberius Gracchus passes the law deposing Octavius and then has him dragged from the speaker’s platform (the rostra) and now we have a problem. Because of course Octavius’ supporters are going to view this law itself as illegal and invalid: tribunes are, you will recall sacrosanct, so it’s not clear they can be deposed and it is very clear they cannot be assaulted or dragged. Violating the sacrosanctity of a tribune is, at least notionally, a capital offense and a severe violation of religion and if you think that Tiberius Gracchus’ legal basis for all of this is rubbish, you think he just did it twice. Of course, Tiberius is also a tribune, so you can’t attack him now, but once his year is done, you are probably planning to haul him in to court and let a jury decide if what he did was legal or not.

In any case, with Octavius removed, Tiberius passes his land reform bill. The law provided for a three-man commission to handle the assessment of what public land was held in excess and then to hand it out. Tiberius Gracchus names as those commissioners himself, his brother and his father-in-law (Appius Claudius Pulcher (cos. 143)). Needless to say, that is a set of commissioners which does not inspire a lot of confidence that the commission will be uncorrupted by politics, a point we’ll get back to in just a moment.

In the meantime, the Senate looked to exert its traditional prerogative over state funds (as it advised the quaestors who superintended the treasury) to hamstring the new commission, but Tiberius Gracchus took advantage of the recent death of Attalus III, King of Pergamum. Attalus had notionally willed his kingdom ‘to the Roman people’ – he had no clear heirs and so perhaps thought by this act to get the Romans to pick one of his relatives to run the kingdom, thus avoiding a damaging civil war – but instead Tiberius, getting the news early, rushed to pass a law annexing the kingdom and using the windfall to fund his commission. The law passes, but this is a breach both of the Senate’s traditional power over state finances, but also its very important role managing Roman foreign policy.

What I want to note in this sequence which is important for understanding what comes next is that Tiberius Gracchus has just demonstrated that, so long as he remained popular, he could use the powers of the tribunate to essentially run the Roman state from the tribune’s chair. Tiberius has now forced not merely a domestic land issue, but also a finance issue and a foreign policy issue over the objection of the Senate and another elected tribune, essentially running roughshod over all of the customary limits intended to keep any one Roman politician from coming to dominate the Roman political system.

Of course if you were an opponent of Tiberius Gracchus, you could at least tell yourself that this is all bad, but at the very least, Tiberius Gracchus will be out of office next year, as it was contrary to custom to run for any office immediately after holding it. Indeed, it was unusual to hold basically any office more than once, save for the consulship (and even then, only for very successful consuls and never multiple years in a row). Those limits are customary but everything about the Roman Republic is customary; if you discounted the mos maiorum, there wouldn’t be any republic left. You’d instead expect that Tiberius would go back to being a senator for a few years while planning his shot at the praetorship – during which he’ll have to survive a series of court battles over the legality of his actions.

So even if he is doing potentially outrageous, dangerous things, at least he’ll be gone in a year, right?

The Elections for 132

So Tiberius Gracchus announces he intends to run for the tribunate for 132 and all hell breaks loose.

When the day for the election comes, there’s evidently a dispute among the tribunes over if Tiberius Gracchus can even run (App. BCiv. 1.14), which Tiberius may not have been winning, while the voting crowd got rowdy and there seem to have been difficulties in carrying out the vote (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 17-18). At the same time, the Senate met at the Temple of Fides, on the Capitoline right by where the voting would have been taking place, trying to figure out what to do about the impending chaos. They’d be aware that fights were breaking out in the voting below and that the crowd was getting out of control (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 18.1) and perhaps rumors that the elections had been disrupted and that Tiberius Gracchus had declared himself a tribune anyway (App. BCiv. 1.15).

In the Senate meeting, the senators, led by Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio (cos. 138; pont. max. 141-132) demanded the consuls take action, fearing that Tiberius Gracchus was attempting to overthrow the state. Reportedly, the consul present (Publius Mucius Scaevola, cos. 133 and a supporter of Gracchus) responded with prevarication (Plut. Ti Gracch. 19.3) saying he’d throw out the results of the vote if it was illegal, but perhaps not specifying if that meant he’d rule Tiberius himself an unlawful candidate. Scipio Nasica, perhaps assuming that this sort of prevaricating inaction was intended to let Tiberius ‘steal a march’ and make himself tribune anyway, instead pulled up his toga (‘capite velato‘ (“with head veiled”), a gesture indicating he was embarking, in his office as Pontifex Maximus, on a religious ritual (in this case a ritual murder) and lead the Senate out (presumably with many of their clients) as a mob to stop Tiberius Gracchus.

That mob of senators, with makeshift weapons, met an equally makeshift mob around Tiberius Gracchus (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 19.1) and in the resulting street battle with clubs and fists, Tiberius Gracchus is killed.

And on the one hand, I think it’s easy to see how this gets simplified down to the easy narrative of the martyred reformer in a classroom environment: Tiberius Gracchus proposed a law to help the poor which would have mildly inconvenienced the rich and they killed him for it. And that’s not wrong but it is incomplete.

Consider the matter from the perspective of another senator or even just a regular Roman who didn’t support Tiberius Gracchus.

Tiberius Gracchus had spent the first half of 133 demonstrating that if you were willing to exceed the customary limits on the power of the tribune, that so long as you were popular and charismatic, it was possible to subvert the entire state. In short, Tiberius Gracchus had done a six-month practicum on how to rule the Roman Republic as a tyrant with just the powers of a tribune. If that sounds absurd, let me remind you that the legal basis for the domestic powers of the Roman emperors will be a simple grant of tribunicia potestas – the powers of the tribunate. It was a very powerful office, constrained by the customary sense of its limited objectives and purpose and the assumption that unless the tribunes were acting as a body on behalf of the people, that they would be deferential to the Senate.

Now Tiberius Gracchus’ land commission was going to grind into gear, handing out free land (and equipment and supplies to build farms on it) to Roman citizens. Under Roman social customs, those citizens will have become, by that act, clients of Tiberius Gracchus – or of the other two commissioners, who are, I should note, his brother and father-in-law – so Tiberius Gracchus is about to use state funds to mint thousands of voters who are, by the bonds of Roman culture, loyal to him – they will be bound by Roman honor culture, to vote for him.

Now if Tiberius Gracchus intended to follow the traditions of Roman office holding, that might not be too bad. His charisma, clients and influence might or might not get him out of the tough legal fights ahead, but even if he survived the inevitable trial for deposing Octavius, he’d be at most one more influential Roman, one of several: he’d win the praetorship and the consulship easily, sure, but get one year of each, cycling back into the Senate where his voice would carry a lot of weight, but hardly be the only voice. He would be a figure of the sort of influence of his own patron, Scipio Aemilianus.

All of which is why I think that violence only breaks out when he tries to run for a second term. Tiberius Gracchus had, of course, just demonstrated how powerful a tribune could be who was willing to use those powers to the fullest and then by declaring his intention to run for a second consecutive term, his intent to potentially never give up this power. And there were ten spots for the tribune: the chances of denying a figure as popular as Tiberius Gracchus – with a built in mass of new clients who are honor-bound to support him – were basically non-existent. Having breached the no-consecutive-office-holding norm once, there was no reason he couldn’t keep running and keep winning.

Which would mean Tiberius Gracchus running the state from the tribune’s chair, immune from prosecution, permanently.

And then you have the event itself, where Tiberius’ supporters – as the voting is prepared to get underway and the tribunes and senate are trying to figure out if Tiberius even can run – get violent. Appian and Plutarch tell us that when the magistrates (with their lictors, who carried the fasces, the emblems of state authority) tried to stand in Tiberius’ way into the voting space (on the grounds that his candidacy might be illegal – something that was being actively debated by the tribunes, you will recall), his supporters seized their fasces and broken them, beating them and forcing them from the voting place with such violence that many of the other tribunes flee and it is in that context that the Senate is hearing rumors that perhaps Tiberius has deposed the other tribunes or declared himself tribune without an election (App. BCiv. 1.15) or – worst yet – (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 19.1) that he had motioned to his head to demand a crown, they panic that what is in fact happening is a coup, that Tiberius is intending to seize extra-constitutional power.

Because if you were going to do it, this is exactly how you would do it. Indeed, as the Roman senators could hardly have been unaware by this point, this was the standard way for tyrants to seize power in Greek poleis.

And I think that’s important to understand what we’re told next, which is that the Romans themselves were, in the moment, deeply divided about what had just happened. Some, we’re told, mourned deeply, but equally Appian reports rejoicing (App. BCiv 1.17). According to Plutarch (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 21.4), Scipio Aemilianus – Tiberius Gracchus’ most important supporter, off besieging Numantia in 133 – when he heard of Tiberius Gracchus death, responded with a line of Homer (Ody 1.43), ὡς ἀπόλοιτο καὶ ἄλλος, ὅτις τοιαῦτά γε ῥέζοι, “So too may perish utterly, any other who does such things.” That quip, we’re told, cost Scipio Aemilianus much of his favor with the people, but it is striking coming from a man who was one of his strongest backers and yet concluded at Tiberius Gracchus’ death that he should have been killed for what he had done (and so too any who tried again after him).

Remembering Tiberius Gracchus

Now even in this run-down, it is not hard to see the Tiberius Gracchus most students will recognize: the well-meaning reformer who saw a problem – the poor being crushed underfoot – and aimed to solve it and when his solution ran afoul of the elite he was murdered for it.

But there is another Tiberius Gracchus.

The Tiberius Gracchus who misdiagnosed a non-existent problem and then proposed a solution that, as we’ll see next week, didn’t do much to solve that problem (notably, the Lex Sempronia Agraria was not repealed after Tiberius’ death, but staffed, funded and allowed to go forward) but did set up an even more significant future crisis. This he may have done because he cared deeply about the poor but equally he may have done it because he was an extremely elite Roman himself whose door to power and influence – once wide open and easy – was swiftly swinging shut and such a dramatic political agenda was necessary to save his career, the republic be damned (a motive, I will note, that Plutarch admits to hearing rumored, Plut. Ti. Gracch. 8.6). Meanwhile, contrary to Appian, the reform he proposed was hardly traditional, but a radical revision of how the Roman state redistributed land to its citizens, one which would play a part in degrading the Roman relationship with the socii.

In that pursuit – again, of a misguided reform that would not solve the problem it did not understand – Tiberius Gracchus ruptured the (unwritten) constitutional structure of the Republic, demonstrating that one could use the powers of the tribunate combined with a committed body of followers to effectively run the Roman state out of the tribune’s assembly (the concilium plebis) in defiance of the Senate and even, if necessary, in defiance of other tribunes. It is worth not forgetting that Marcus Octavius who Tiberius Gracchus deposed was every bit as elected as Tiberius.

And then, there really is no way around saying it: Tiberius Gracchus does everything one would do if he was planning to set himself up as a tyrant. Having stocked his land commission with a committee of himself and his relatives, he runs for a second term in violation of custom to his powerful office while his supporters deploy as a mob chasing other officials away from the voting. This is, to be clear, what the pro-Tiberius Gracchus sources tell us (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 19.1; App. BCiv 1.15).

None of which should be taken as a defense of Marcus Octavius or Scipio Nasica. In this moment, as in subsequent moments, the conservative Roman aristocracy of the Late Republic demonstrates its great flaw: it would sacrifice everything in order to compromise nothing. There were obvious off-ramps that could have been taken in this confrontation which do not seem to have been attempted. Tiberius Gracchus’ earlier, more conciliatory version of the law fell by the wayside, but also once the agrarian law was passed the Senate could have signaled that they would not countenance its repeal, removing the public justification Tiberius had for running again (to protect the law that had passed). It’s not clear to me if Tiberius Gracchus would have taken such a deal, but it would have been revealing of his motives either way.

Instead, Scipio Nasica takes a bad situation and makes is much worse. One of the great counter-factuals of this moment, of course is what if Scipio Aemilianus had been in Rome instead of besieging Numantia: a supporter and friend of Tiberius Gracchus but evidently also alarmed by his actions, one wonders if Aemilianus could have used his tremendous popularity and influence to broker a less violent, destabilizing resolution.

Appian renders his judgement on Tiberius Gracchus that he died, “on account of an excellent proposal he pursued with violence,” putting the final blame not on Scipio Nasica but on Tiberius Gracchus, and of course we must again note that Appian is, in fact, fudging his details to make Tiberius’ proposal look more reasonable and traditional than it actually was.

Tiberius Gracchus was not an uncomplicatedly positive reformer figure, but a messy political figure whose actions would have been dangerous even had they succeeded, whose motivations are at best dubious and who shook the republic to its foundations in pursuit of a poorly thought out reform to address either a problem which didn’t exist (the land crisis) or existed for only one man (Tiberius Gracchus’ political career). Curse the folly of Scipio Nasica, but praise Tiberius Gracchus only with caution and caveats.

As, we’ll see, will be even more true for his less compromising, more violent and fiery brother.