The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

by Mike Duncan

The legal rationale of the Lex Agraria was simple: the five-hundred-iugera prohibition would be strictly enforced. Anyone caught occupying ager publicus over the legal limit would be forced to relinquish the excess back to the state. The excess could then be divided up into small manageable plots and redistributed to landless citizens. Since the whole point of the reform was to rebuild the class of small holders, the bill stipulated that the newly created plots could not be broken up and sold. The authors of the Lex Agraria did not want to hand a plot of land to a poor man just so he could turn around and sell it back to a rich man.25 Somewhat counterintuitively, the senators crafting this piece of radical reform legislation were not backbench agitators, but rather some of the most powerful men in Rome. The group was led by Tiberius’s father-in-law, Appius Claudius Pulcher, who was princeps senatus. Joining him were a prominent pair of brothers: the wealthy jurist and scholar Publius Licinius Crassus Mucianus and Publius Mucius Scaevola, one of the most respected legal theorists of his generation. There were other prominent senators and rising young nobles surrounding Claudius’s group of reformers; among them was Tiberius Gracchus.26