26 Facts About Tiberius Gracchus

Tiberius Gracchus had served in the Roman army, fighting in Africa the Third Punic War and in Spain during the Numantine War.

Tiberius Gracchus was, from birth, a member of the Roman Republic's aristocracy.

Tiberius Gracchus had celebrated two triumphs during the 170s, one for the victorious establishment of a twenty-year-long peace in Spain.

Tiberius Gracchus was brought up by his mother, who dedicated herself after the elder Tiberius Gracchus' death to her children's education.

Appius was a major opponent of the Scipios, a family with which Tiberius Gracchus was related in his maternal line.

Mancinus then sent Tiberius Gracchus to negotiate a treaty of surrender.

Tiberius Gracchus offered no forceful support for the treaty and seems to have distanced himself from it; it was proposed to send Tiberius Gracchus in chains along with Mancinus, but that proposal was defeated.

Tiberius Gracchus' stubbornness was motivated in part by his need to recover politically from the affair with the treaty.

Benefitting the poor was not the only goal of his legislation: Tiberius Gracchus intended to reduce the level of inflammation in the city by moving the poor into the countryside while endowing those people with the necessary land to meet army property qualifications and reverse apparent population decline.

Tiberius Gracchus was not alone in his views: he was supported by one of the consuls for the year, his father-in-law Appius Claudius Pulcher, Publius Licinius Crassus Mucianus, and other younger, junior senators.

In Plutarch's account, Tiberius Gracchus proposes a bill with various concessions, which is then vetoed by Marcus Octavius, one of the other tribunes.

Tiberius Gracchus tries various tactics to induce Octavius to abandon his opposition: offering him a bribe and shutting down the Roman treasury, and thereby, most government business.

Octavius insisted on maintaining his veto against his constituents; Tiberius Gracchus' response was to unconstitutionally depose Octavius.

Tiberius Gracchus had extra-constitutionally bypassed the senate by bringing the without its consent; Octavius similarly extra-constitutionally attempted to obstruct the manifest will of the people by veto.

Tiberius Gracchus proposed using the bequest to finance the land commission, which triggered a wave of opposition.

One of the former consuls brought a lawsuit against Tiberius Gracchus arguing the deposition of Octavius violated magisterial collegiality and was a dangerous precedent which a sufficiently powerful tribune could exploit to bypass all checks on his power.

Tiberius Gracchus' proposal usurped senatorial prerogatives over finance and foreign policy, breaking a major political norm.

Senators feared that Tiberius Gracchus intended to appropriate Attalus' bequest to hand out money to his personal benefit.

The deadly opposition to Tiberius Gracchus' reforms focused more on his subsequent actions than on the reforms themselves.

Scipio Nascia, after being brought up on the charge of murdering Tiberius Gracchus, was sent on a convenient delegation to Pergamum, where he died the following year.

Personally, the killing of Tiberius Gracchus caused a greater break between Scipio Aemilianus and his Claudian and Gracchan relatives, especially after Scipio Aemilianus approved of Tiberius Gracchus' murder.

The impact of Tiberius Gracchus' murder started a cycle of increased aristocratic violence to suppress popular movements.

Tiberius Gracchus's death suggested that the republic itself was temperamentally unsuited for producing the types of economic reforms wanted or hypothetically needed, as in Tiberius' framing, by the people.

However, Tiberius Gracchus' actions did not mark him as an enemy of the senate seeking to destroy its authority: he sought a traditional career in the senate and irresponsibly engaged in excessive popular indulgences to further his career.

The senate's continued pursuit of Tiberius Gracchus' supporters entrenched polarisation in the Roman body politic, while at the same time endorsing private use of violence to enforce or suppress a group, even a majority, of fellow countrymen.

Contrary to Appian's claims about how Tiberius acted to give Rome's Italian allies land, there are no seeming indications that Tiberius Gracchus' reforms helped them in any way.