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

by Mike Duncan

BY 129, ONLY young Gaius Gracchus remained of the original land commissioners. Tiberius had died on the Capitoline Hill and his successor Mucianus had been killed in Asia. Mucianus’s seat was filled by Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, the friend of the Gracchi who had helped drive the hated Nasica out of Rome. Now in his mid-thirties, Flaccus was gearing up for a run at the consulship when he joined the commission. Then in 129, the old princeps senatus Claudius died and his seat went to Gaius Papirius Carbo, the tribune who had introduced the secret ballot law in 131 and clashed with Aemilianus over the legacy of Tiberius’s death. Where once the Gracchan faction had been run by eminent elder statesmen, it was now in the hands of young firebrands.42