Lives. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus

Commentary

“…However, this came at the tail-end of a lengthy history of political violence starting in 133, when the tribune Tiberius Gracchus's controversial legislation to divvy up public land for the benefit of the landless (with the good of the Roman army in mind: at this point, only men in possession of a certain amount of property could serve in the army) ended in the death of Tiberius and some 300 followers in a minor bloodbath on the Capitol when the senior senator and pontifex maximus ('chief pontiff') Publius Scipio Nasica led a mob of senators there to disrupt Tiberius's dubiously legal re-election as tribune. 81 Further political violence took place in 121, when Tiberius's younger brother Gaius Gracchus, who had followed in Tiberius's political footsteps and was seeking to be tribune for the third time, was slaughtered along with his allies in somewhat more organised fashion by the sitting consul, L. Opimius; 82 then in 100, the tribune L. Appuleius Saturninus and the praetor C. Servilius Glaucia were lynched in the Curia Hostilia, despite promises of safe conduct from the sixth-time consul and sometime popularis Gaius Marius. 83 In 91, the murder of the popularis tribune M. Livius Drusus by persons unknown added to the various tensions that gave rise to the Social War, which we hesitate to call a civil war only due to a quibble of semantics: it was fought between Romans and their Italian allies (the socii), rather than between Roman citizens.…”

“…someone who did not hold a public office), raised an army from his father's veterans in Picenum and joined Sulla (along, it must be said, with several other privati with private armies). 12 This proved to be a winning move, since Sulla won: Pompey divorced Antistia, married Sulla's stepdaughter Aemilia (already pregnant by her own divorced spouse, Aemilia died shortly afterwards in childbirth), 13 and was given a string of commands against Marian generals on the run in Sicily (82), Africa (81) and Spain (77-71). (Cicero glosses these appointments in § § 28-30 of the set text).…”

Stoics, Cynics, and the Spartan Revolution

“…Agis fell, not because Agesilaus procrastinated in dividing land, 3 but because land division meant expanding the citizenry to include deserving aliens, 4 which the old Spartans realized would reduce themselves to equality whereas previously they had the "poor white's" consolation of being Spartans though destitute. Accordingly, they welcomed back the reactionary King Leonidas 5 and allowed his clique to lynch Agis, his mother, and his grandmother. Cleomenes divided the land and expanded the citizenry only after murdering the ephors, exiling the opposition, and assuming quasidictatorial powers.…”

“…4 Obviously the final phrase is a pun on nomos (law) and nomos (pasture) and in no sense a relic of an early radical tract by Zeno. 5 His herd are not Stoic communists but similes of humanity's subjection to a common Natural Law which was the essence of Stoicism and scientifically reinforced by astral determinism. Though at times Zeno may have written more radically than he acted, 6 the Stoa was the most conservative of the philosophic schools, partly because of its patronage by the well-to-do and partly because natural law concepts easily justified the established order.'…”

Tiberius Gracchus, land and manpower

“…37 It is, however, clear that in offering his land allotments Gracchus was responding to a widely felt need. Before Gracchus announced his law, numerous posters are said to have appeared calling on him to recover the public land for the poor, 38 and, once the law had been…”