a proceeding that was base and scandalous to the Romans. "But," says Plutarch, "the relations and friends of the soldiers . . . came flocking to Tiberius, whom they acknowledged as the preserver of so many citizens."5
Tiberius Gracchus's initial decision to retire as a soldier and enter public life was marked from the first by controversy because he stood for election as tribune with a formal land reform program. Plutarch describes the background for the program as the great fund of public lands acquired by Roman conquest and dispersed among politically powerful (patrician) landowners. This is vital to an understanding of Tiberius Gracchus's career. With so much land at their disposal, landowners imported slaves to work it and achieved such economies of scale that they drove down farm prices and forced small farmers, unable to compete on price, either to become the equivalent of sharecroppers by affiliating with large owners of adjacent lands or to get out of the market altogether. While the twentieth century eye may see this as ordinary capitalism at work, the fact was that such practices in the second century B.C. directly contradicted a fourth century law (the Licinian Rogations).6 The agrarian laws, as they were also known, provided that only parts of conquered territory (up to 500 acres per person)7 be sold at public auction, while other parts be rented to small farmers at nominal rates. Over many decades, patricians would either buy adjacent plots of land in others' names or simply take over lands that smaller farmers could afford neither to defend nor work.
Why Tiberius Gracchus focused on land reform is touched on by Cowell. After Plutarch, he cites the "often told" story of his journey from Rome to Spain, when he "was appalled by the emptiness of once rich Etruria as he went on a journey from Rome to Numantia in the year 137 B.C."
Roman farmers had been displaced and the few human beings he
enc...