Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland Page A

class. It was a balancing act that required enormous skill. If the tribunate was always regarded with suspicion by the more conservative elements in the nobility, then that was in large part because of the unique temptations that it offered to its holders. There was always a risk that a tribune might end up going too far, succumbing to the lure of easy popularity with the mob, bribing them with radical, un-Roman reforms. And, of course, the more that the slums swelled to bursting point, and the more wretched the living conditions for the poor became, the greater that risk grew.
    It was two brothers of impeccable breeding, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who finally made the fateful attempt. First Tiberius, in 133 BC , and then Gaius, ten years later, used their tribunates to push for reforms in favour of the poor. They proposed that publicly held land be divided into allotments and handed out to the masses; that corn be sold to them below the market rate; even, shockingly, that the Republic should provide its poorest soldiers with clothes. Radical measures indeed, and the aristocracy, unsurprisingly, was appalled. To most noblemen, there appeared something implacable and sinister about the devotion of the Gracchi to the people. True, Tiberius was not the first of his class to have concerned himself with land reform, but his paternalism, so far as his peers were concerned, went altogether too far and too fast. Gaius, even more alarmingly, had a consciously revolutionary vision, of a republic imbued with the values of Greek democracy, in which the balance of power between the classes would be utterly transformed, and the people, not the aristocracy, would serve as the arbiters of Rome. How, his peers wondered, could any nobleman argue for this, unlesshe aimed to establish himself as a tyrant? What struck them as particularly ominous was the fact that Tiberius, having finished his year of office, had immediately sought re-election, and that Gaius, in 122 BC , had actually succeeded in obtaining a second successive tribunate. Where might illegalities such as these not end? Sacred as the person of a tribune might be, it was not so sacred as the preservation of the Republic itself. Twice the cry went up to defend the constitution and twice it was answered. Twelve years after Tiberius was clubbed to death with a stool-leg in a violent brawl Gaius, in 121, was also killed by agents of the aristocracy. His corpse was decapitated, and lead poured into his skull. In the wake of his murder three thousand of his followers were executed without trial.
    These eruptions of civil violence were the first to spill blood in the streets of Rome since the expulsion of the kings. Their grotesque quality vividly reflected the scale of aristocratic paranoia. Tyranny was not the only spectre that the Gracchi had raised from Rome’s ancient past. It was no coincidence, for instance, that Gaius died on the spot most sacred to the plebeian cause, the Aventine. By taking refuge there, he and his supporters had deliberately sought to identify their cause with that of the ancient strikers. Despite the fact that the poor failed to rise in his support, Gaius’ attempt to stir long-dormant class struggles struck most members of the nobility as a terrifying act of irresponsibility. Yet the reprisals too filled them with unease. Head-hunting was hardly the practice of a civilised people. In the lead-weighted skull of Gaius Gracchus an ominous glimpse could be caught of what might happen were the conventions of the Republic to be breached, and its foundations swept away. It was a warning that temperament more than fitted the Romans to heed. What was the Republic, after all, if not a community bound together by its shared assumptions, precedents and past? To jettison this inheritance was to stare into the abyss. Tyranny orbarbarism – these would be the alternatives were the Republic to fall.
    Here, then, was one final paradox. A system that encouraged a gnawing