Gracchi brothers
The Gracchi brothers were two brothers who lived during the beginning of the late Roman Republic: Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus. They served in the plebeian tribunates of 133 BC and 122–121 BC, respectively. They have been received as well-born and eloquent advocates for social reform who were both killed by a reactionary political system; their terms in the tribunate precipitated a series of domestic crises which are viewed as unsettling the Roman Republic and contributing to its collapse.
Tiberius Gracchus passed legislation which established a commission to survey Roman public land, reassert state claims to it, and redistribute it to poor rural farmers. These reforms were a reaction to a perceived decline in Italy's rural population. A decade later, Gaius Gracchus' reforms, among other things, attempted to buttress Tiberius' land commission and start Roman colonisation outside of Italy. They also were far more broad, touching on many topics such as assignment of provincial commands, composition of juries for the permanent courts, and letting of state tax farming contracts. Both brothers were killed during or shortly after the conclusion of their respective tribunician terms.
More recent scholarship on the Roman economy has viewed the Gracchi agrarian reforms as less impactful than claimed in the ancient sources. It is also clear that the vast majority of their reformist legislation was left intact rather than repealed. Some modern scholars also connect the agrarian reforms to degrading Rome's relations with its Italian allies and the Social War, as the reforms were a reassertion of Roman claims on public land that had been for decades largely occupied without title by Rome's Italian allies. Gracchan claims of Italian rural depopulation also are contradicted by archaeological evidence. The impact of the violent reaction to the two brothers, however, is of substantial import: it set a dangerous precedent that violence was an acceptable tool against political enemies.
The Gracchi exerted a substantial influence on later politics. They were viewed alternately as popular martyrs or dangerous demagogues through the late republic. They were also portrayed as social revolutionaries and proto-socialists during the French Revolution and afterwards; in that vein, they motivated social revolutionaries such as François-Noël "Gracchus" Babeuf and opposition to enclosure in Britain. Scholars today view these influential socialist comparisons as unapt.
Background
Transmitted from the ancient sources, the traditional view on the state of rural Italy in the second century was one of substantial decline. Modern survey archaeology, however, from the 1980s onwards has shown that it "has been much overstated" and that the narrative connecting military service to the decline of the yeomanry, moreover, "has to be rejected". Indeed, "impressive methodological advances that have been achieved in survey archaeology have... done much to undermine the credibility of earlier claims concerning the spread of slave-staffed estates and the survival or otherwise of subsistence-oriented smallholders".Rural conditions, 159–33 BC
Difficulty in and resistance against conscripting men is reported through the second century BC, starting in the Third Macedonian War and continuing through Roman campaigns in Spain from 151 BC. Roman censuses – which were conducted largely to tally men for conscription – starting in 159 BC also began to note a reduction in the free population of Italy, falling from 328,316 in 159–58 BC down to a low of 317,933 in the census of 136–35 BC. Politicians reacted to these constraints by securing volunteers for service; Gracchan agricultural policy was meant to reverse this population decline and minimise the impacts of conscription.While the census reported a fall in the number of citizens, leading to difficulties in drafting men for service, this did not necessarily imply an actual fall in the population of rural Italy. Because the easiest way to dodge the draft was not to self-report to the censors, no actual decline in population is necessary to explain those census results. Moreover, the censuses of 125–24 BC and 115–14 BC, indicate large and rapid increases which are incompatible with any actual decline in Italian rural populations.
Archaeological evidence of small farms attested all over Italy in the second century and the general need for free labour during harvest time has also led scholars to conclude that "there are no good grounds for inferring a general decline of the small independent farmer in the second century". The Gracchan narrative of rural population decline through 133 BC – "long since... shown to be false" – likely emerged not from a general and actual decline in rural free-holding, but rather, generalisation from a local decline in coastal Etruria where commercial slave plantations were dominant. And while Gracchan observations of rural poverty were likely true; this, however, was not a result of slave-dominated plantations crowding out poor farmers, but overpopulation under Malthusian conditions.
In rural areas closer to Rome, the rising population alongside the effect of partible inheritance dividing farms into smaller and smaller plots made many family farms unviable. The high demand for agricultural land near Rome, due to its closeness to produce markets, motivated those farmers to sell their small plots to rich men, either moving or engaging instead in wage labour, which large farms especially needed during the harvest. The economic situation in the years prior to 133 BC was also abnormally negative: a pause in the construction of public buildings meant there was little construction work to be found at the city and prices for food were also inflated due to an ongoing slave revolt in Sicily, a major grain exporter.
Public land
The Roman conquest of Italy from the fourth century BC onwards meant that the republic held legal rights to large swaths of land taken from the subjugated Italians. This ager publicus however was not heavily utilised by the Roman state or its lessors. Rather, the state simply let the defeated Italians continue to work the land, regarding this arraignment as "a sort of beneficium to the allies". In essence, while Rome acquired nominal title to these lands, the Italians were permitted de facto to use them while also profitting from the influx of booty and wealth from Roman conquest.The traditional narratives in the ancient sources which described the emergence of commercial Latifundium on the public land itself is also largely unattested to by the archaeological evidence in this period. Moreover, evidence indicates that the ager publicus was largely located outside of the traditional farmlands close to Rome and instead located in non-Roman Italy closer to the Italian allies. Public land redistribution was therefore necessarily at the expense of the allies, who would be evicted from ancestral lands still occupied.
Early life of the Gracchi
Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus was born 163 BC. His younger brother Gaius was born 154 BC. They were the sons of the Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus who had been consul 177 and 163 BC as well as censor in 169 BC. He had triumphed twice in 178 and 175 BC. Their mother was Cornelia, the daughter of the renowned general Scipio Africanus, the hero of the Second Punic War. Their sister Sempronia also was the wife of Scipio Aemilianus, another important general and politician.Tiberius' military career started in 147 BC, serving as a legate or military tribune under his brother-in-law, Scipio Aemilianus during the campaign to take Carthage during the Third Punic War. Tiberius, along with Gaius Fannius, was among the first to scale Carthage's walls, serving through to the next year. A decade later, in 137 BC, he was quaestor under the consul Gaius Hostilius Mancinus in Hispania Citerior. The campaign was part of the Numantine War and was unsuccessful; Mancinus and his army lost several skirmishes outside the city before a confused night-time retreat led them to be surrounded on the site of a camp from a prior campaign in 153 BC. Tiberius negotiated a treaty of surrender, aided in part by his father's positive reputation built during a praetorship in 179–78 BC; Tiberius' treaty, however, was later humiliatingly rejected by the senate after his return to Rome.
Reforms
Reform and obstruction were not unheard of prior to 133, the year of Tiberius' tribunate. Tiberius' land reform proposal was also not entirely novel. In 140 BC the consul Gaius Laelius Sapiens had proposed similar legislation. However, amid opposition from the senate and after a military crisis diverted his attention elsewhere, the proposal was withdrawn.In 139 and 137 BC, laws had been passed to create and extend the secret ballot in legislative and judicial votes before the assemblies. These bills were likely justified as means to preserve voters' independence and prevent corruption: both social pressure and financial compulsion would be more difficult if voters' ballots could not be so easily tracked. They were also likely a necessary conditions for the Gracchan programme since they insulated the assemblies from elite control. For this reason, the historian Harriet Flower in the 2010 book Roman Republics, demarcates a new phase of the republic at 139 BC.
Opposition was also not unheard of but had been resolved amicably. A tribune vetoed the lex Cassia tabellaria in 137, with the support of one of the consuls, but under pressure from the highly influential Scipio Aemilianus gave way.
The ancient historians, especially Plutarch, viewed the Gracchan reforms and brothers as a single unit. Modern scholars have started to view them separately and in their own political contexts.