Gracchi Land Reforms
Two brothers tried to redistribute Roman public land to landless citizens, and both were murdered by senators. The problem was real and everyone admitted it. Rome's conquests had produced enormous quantities of publicly owned land, which the rich occupied in defiance of legal limits and worked with enslaved captives, while the smallholders who filled the legions came back from years of campaigning to find their farms sold and drifted into the city. That threatened the army, because property qualifications governed who could serve. Tiberius Gracchus was elected tribune in 133 BC and proposed enforcing the existing limit of 500 iugera and distributing the surplus in small inalienable plots. When a fellow tribune vetoed it, he had the assembly depose him, which was unprecedented; when he sought a second consecutive tribunate to protect himself from prosecution, that was unprecedented too. A group of senators led by the pontifex maximus beat him to death with furniture in the street along with some 300 followers. His younger brother Gaius took the tribunate in 123 BC with a much wider programme — subsidised grain, colonies, roads, courts taken out of senatorial hands, and eventually citizenship for Italians — and was more formidable. The senate passed its first emergency decree against him in 121 BC, and he died in a grove across the Tiber, killed by a slave at his own request, with 3,000 supporters executed afterwards. The land commission continued working for years, so the reform partly happened. What did not survive was the convention that Roman political disputes were settled without killing.
- Category: Political
