Breaking the Roman Republic: The Tragedy of Tiberius Gracchus
- Paul D. Wilke
- 2 days ago
- 20 min read
Introduction: How to Break a Republic by Trying to Save It
The beginning of the end of the Roman Republic began with the best of intentions. A fiery young aristocrat named Tiberius Gracchus (c. 163–133 BCE) set out to reform a corrupt system that had become monopolized by the wealthy. He would know—he was one of them, born into one of Rome’s most illustrious families. He could have played it safe. That would have been far easier.
In one turbulent year as tribune, Tiberius upended Roman politics by using the traditionally cooperative People’s Assembly in unprecedented ways to challenge the Senate’s authority. In the process, he bent and broke the rules, stoking popular anger and engaging in populist demagoguery to intimidate foes and push through a controversial legislative agenda.
He paid with his life. The threatened Senate retaliated in kind in what became an escalating duel that culminated in murder. Rome would never be the same. Up to that point, tradition (mos maiorum) and an intricate yet fragile system of checks and balances guided the Republic, maintaining stability for centuries.
Not anymore. Whereas negotiation and peaceful compromise marked the Republic’s golden age (287–133 BCE), now the zero-sum equation of you win or you die became the new reality. From then on, political institutions increasingly served the ambitions of personalities rather than the Republic itself. In the aftermath of his death, more radical demagogues began appearing—ruthless men like Saturninus, Sulpicius, and Clodius Pulcher, to name a few.
Soon came the response: ambitious elites—Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Crassus, Lepidus, Antony, and Octavian—were no longer senators serving their country but also warlords. They had no choice. A loyal army became the ultimate bargaining chip, a safeguard against the mob and each other.
No republic can endure that kind of tension for long, and Rome’s was no exception.
Of course, Tiberius didn’t know it would all play out like this. It appears he tried to do what was best for all Romans, not only the rich of his own class. To the average modern reader, he sounds like someone looking out for the little guy by proposing reforms that would give the poor a renewed stake in their country's future.
There’s something appealing about Tiberius—at least at first glance—that contrasts with a smug Senatorial aristocracy-turned-plutocracy that preached Republican virtues while hoarding all the best farmland and wealth.
However, this story isn’t black and white, with easy heroes and villains. As usual, the truth is more complicated. It’s a tale of brinksmanship, escalation, inflexibility, and the shattering of long-standing political conventions. Tiberius responded to unyielding resistance from the Senate by wielding power in the Assembly with a reckless ends-justify-the-means approach that pushed Rome’s institutional checks and balances beyond the breaking point.
We can trace the origins of the Republic’s eventual demise from here, decades before Julius Caesar was even born. After Tiberius’s murder, violence began occurring with dizzying regularity, sending a once-flourishing republic into a death spiral that ended almost a century later, when Octavian—the last apex killer standing—made his final kill: the Republic itself.
This is the origin story of Rome’s long fall into tyranny.
Rome: A Rotten Republic?
“No sword was ever brought into the assembly, and no Roman was ever killed by a Roman, until Tiberius Gracchus, while holding the office of tribune and in the act of proposing legislation, became the first man to die in civil unrest, and along with him a great number of people who had crowded together on the Capitol and were killed around the temple.” - Appian, The Civil Wars
It was 137 BCE, and Tiberius Gracchus was headed north to Spain to take up his quaestorship. On his way through northern Italy, He noticed something troubling.
Plutarch writes, “...he observed the deserted state of the country, and that the cultivators and shepherds were foreign slaves and barbarians…” (1)
Here we see the hidden social cost of Rome’s rapid expansion in the second century BCE.
The first two Punic Wars (264–241 and 218–202 BCE) transformed Rome from a regional Italian power into the dominant force in the western Mediterranean. After defeating Carthage again in 202 BCE, Rome's legions surged eastward, conquering Greece, Macedonia, and parts of Asia Minor. After Hannibal, no other state remained strong enough to stand in Rome's way. By 146 BCE, with the razing of Carthage and Corinth, Rome had become a Mediterranean superpower.
These conquests flooded Italy with enormous wealth and masses of slaves, most of whom ended up in the hands of the wealthy, who built vast estates (latifundia) worked by slave labor. These operations were more streamlined and profitable than free labor. Markets soon became saturated with cheap imported grain, which drove down prices and made life harder for Italy’s peasant farmers. They struggled to compete in this new economic reality (2)
Wealth inequality emerged as a growing source of social tension. Landless peasants drifted into the capital seeking work, forming a volatile urban proletariat. In short, the city now had all the ingredients for political combustion, just waiting for the right demagogue to ignite it.
But the wealthy weren’t only buying up farms. They exploited the system in more subtle ways. Rome owned vast amounts of ager publicus—state-owned land acquired through conquest, mainly in Italy. Traditionally, it was distributed at a discount to poorer citizens so they could start small family farms. However, by the 130s BCE, a great deal of it remained undistributed or illegally occupied.
The laws governing the allocation of the ager publicus were weak and not often enforced. Over time, the rich seized much of it for themselves (3). What should have gone to a new generation of yeoman farmers was swallowed up by elites, sometimes through distressed sales, but often simply by squatting and daring anyone to stop them (4). Until Tiberius came along, that was a pretty safe bet.
By Tiberius's time (130s BCE), legions had fought in Spain, Africa, Macedonia, Greece, and Asia Minor. Campaigns, particularly in plunder-poor Spain, were grueling and often dragged on for years, keeping these citizen-soldiers away from their properties. The old seasonal model—campaigning in summer, harvesting in fall—was gone. Upon return, they found their farms overgrown, derelict, and deep in debt. With insufficient capital to start over, many gave up, sold what little they had to eager profiteers, and moved to Rome in search of work.
Tiberius was seeing the culmination of a decades-long trend. Where the countryside had once been dotted with small, Roman-owned farms, each one raising a new generation of Romans to serve in the legions, now stood enormous slave-run plantations (5).
The rich got richer. The poor got screwed. Same as it ever was.
Crucial for our story, many of these land-grabbing elites were Senators—scions of Rome’s ruling class and self-proclaimed guardians of Republican virtues. In other words, the ones entrusted to protect the public good were also those most eager to profit from it.
For almost two very successful centuries, the Senate had been the most powerful institution in the Republic, deferred to and respected by everyone in Rome’s political system. But power and money had corrupted it by the 130s BCE. Also, gross mismanagement of Rome’s conquests eroded the Senate’s aura of competence and opened the door to challengers (6).
The era of Senatorial supremacy began to fall apart with Tiberius Gracchus. He had decided that radical changes were required, starting with land reform. He didn't intend to quit until it passed and he could see it implemented. There would be no blind deference to the Senate’s authority as before.
If Tiberius could do this through negotiation and compromise—the old-fashioned way—great. But if not, he was ready to exploit every legal and legislative loophole, no matter how sketchy. Maybe this was the reckless idealism of youth. Maybe he really was the aspiring tyrant his enemies accused him of being afterwards. Either way, it didn’t matter. He planned to change the status quo, one way or another.
Tiberius Gracchus as Tribune: Weaponizing the Popular Assembly
After returning from Spain in 133 BCE, Tiberius stepped into the one role that might challenge Rome’s ruling elite: the tribunate. At around thirty years old, and having just served as quaestor, which qualified him to enter the Senate, his election was a logical next move up Rome's ascending ladder of magistracies: the cursus honorum.
The tribunate arose centuries earlier to protect the plebeians from patrician abuse. Only plebians qualified to serve as tribunes. Over time, it evolved into a powerful office with extraordinary legal powers: tribunes could propose legislation, veto almost any public act, and shut down government functions. They were sacrosanct—legally untouchable while in office.
Tribunes were elected solely by plebeians and served as their institutional voice. According to historian Anthony Everitt, the purpose of the tribuneship was to "promote popular sovereignty and public accountability" (7). That meant they represented the People—that is, the non-patrician citizens of Rome who made up the vast majority of the population.
This included a broad spectrum, from poor farmers and the urban unemployed to well-connected elites like Tiberius himself. The Gracchi family, though ancient and prestigious, was plebeian, making Tiberius eligible for the tribunate, even as his pedigree placed him among Rome’s elite aristocracy.
But for all its potential, the tribunate rarely rocked the boat. Most tribunes were ambitious young aristocrats using the office as a stepping stone. Ten were elected each year, and any one of them could veto the others. This built-in check ensured that consensus, not confrontation, remained the norm. Playing nice with the Senate was also smart politics. Part of that playing nice was getting the Senate's pre-approval for any measures the tribunes meant to pass.
Tiberius had other ideas. He viewed the tribunate as more than a box to tick on his way up the cursus honorum, but as a platform for far-reaching reforms. He understood the tribunate's revolutionary potential—and how few written laws actually limited its power. His target was Rome’s land crisis and the wealth inequality exacerbating it.
This issue had been festering for years. A reform attempt by Tribune Gaius Laelius in 140 BCE collapsed under Senate opposition. Laelius had played nice and backed down. Tiberius would not.
His Lex Agraria proposed reclaiming public lands illegally held by the wealthy and redistributing them in small plots to landless citizens. To soften resistance, he included compensation for those losing property—a moderate strategy that Plutarch admired: “Never was a measure directed against such wrong and aggression conceived in more moderate and gentle terms…” (8).
The proposal animated the poor, who poured into the city to vote for it. At long last, they had found a champion. Standing on the Rostra, Tiberius appealed to them with soaring rhetoric that highlighted the injustice of it all: “The wild beasts of Italy have their dens and hiding-places, but the men who fought and died for Italy have no place to rest... they die with the title of lords of the earth, without possessing a single clod to call their own” (9).
Popular support surged, and Tiberius appeared poised to pass the bill. He had backing from several key senators, including one of the consuls, most notably his father-in-law Appius Claudius Pulcher, who was princeps senatus, and two highly respected senators and brothers, the jurist Publius Licinius Crassus Mucianus, and Publius Mucius Scaevola, who was one of that year's two sitting consuls (10). Those were some big guns to have on one's side.
Nevertheless, most of the Senate bitterly opposed the plan. Why? Self-interest, most likely. Many of them had been farming on the ager publicus for generations. Financial compensation wouldn't be enough. Land represented true wealth, and they meant to keep it (11).
Typically, Senate resistance would have doomed the bill, as it had Laelius’s. But Tiberius did something extraordinary: He bypassed the Senate altogether and went straight to the People’s Assembly. That was unprecedented, though technically legal. Nevertheless, it was a major breach of mos maiorum, Rome’s unwritten code of political conduct.
After all, the Senate was dead set against his bill while the people were overwhelmingly in support. Ignoring the Senate kept the momentum toward his goal, though at a cost, as we'll see. He also had almost all the tribunes.
Almost.
One tribune, Marcus Octavius, an ally of the Senate, stood in his way, saying he would veto the proposal. That was his right. Remember, a single tribune could veto any bill and prevent it from becoming law. Tiberius was furious. To be so close and thwarted by one man impeding the will of the many was infuriating.
He tried persuasion, flattery, and even offered to reimburse Octavius with his own money for the land he stood to lose. Nothing worked. But Octavius’s stubborn defiance also broke with mos maiorum. According to historian Mike Duncan, "There was no question that if the Lex Agraria came to a vote, it would pass by an overwhelming margin. When past tribunes had levied vetoes against popular bills, they withdrew it after expressing their symbolic disapproval—but no one had ever permanently defied the people’s will" (12).
When it became clear that Octavius wouldn’t budge, Tiberius escalated by packing the forum with supporters and introducing a bill to remove Octavius from office. This was the Roman equivalent of a constitutional crisis. No tribune had ever been removed by popular vote. As usual in Rome's informal system of governance, no specific law forbade it, yet no one had ever dared to do such a thing either. It would set a terrible precedent.
When the vote came, and the bill was about to pass, Tiberius dramatically paused to give Octavius one final chance to withdraw his veto. He might still save himself. Surrounded by a hostile crowd baying for his blood, Octavius, to his credit, held firm and refused. He could also have vetoed the deposition bill, but likely would have been torn apart by the mob.
“Accordingly the law was passed, and Tiberius ordered one of his freedmen to drag Octavius from the rostra, for Tiberius employed his own freedmen as officers; a circumstance which made the spectacle of Octavius dragged from the rostra with contumely still more deplorable. At the same time the people made an assault on Octavius, and though the rich all ran to his assistance and disengaged him from their hands, it was not without difficulty that he was rescued and made his escape from the mob" (13).
A line had been crossed. What was once an office meant to safeguard the Republic now became a weapon of political warfare. Tiberius claimed that a tribune who defied the people’s will ceased to be a true tribune. But this was pure populist and partisan rhetoric. Like any savvy demagogue, he had shaped the people’s will to push through his own agenda.
The veto existed to slow things down and to prevent exactly this situation, to force consensus, and to neutralize radical demagogues from steamrolling laws that would provoke further conflict between the orders. That was the point of the veto having such power. Now, it was dead. The secret was out: there was a way around it.
Tiberius Escalates, the Senate Responds
With Octavius out of the way, Tiberius passed his Lex Agraria and established a three-man land commission to enforce it. Unsurprisingly, he appointed himself, his brother Gaius, and his father-in-law, Appius Claudius.
But the Senate still had some leverage: it controlled the purse strings and refused to fund the commission. Without money, the land redistribution was dead on arrival.
Then fate intervened. King Attalus of Pergamum died and willed his kingdom and its treasury to Rome.
According to the Greek historian Polybius, foreign policy, the sending and receiving of embassies, and the collection and disbursement of revenues fell completely under senatorial control. Polybius even added: "All these matters are in the hands of the senate, nor have the people anything whatever to do with them" (14).
That seems pretty clear, doesn't it? The Senate expected to manage the windfall.
However, Tiberius had other plans.
He passed a law diverting Pergamum’s inheritance to fund his commission. He argued that "The People," not a room full of corrupt senators, should manage the state's money. And since the language in Attalus's will left everything to "the people of Rome," Tiberius argued that this was strong enough justification to overturn another precedent and intercept the money to fund his land reform bill.
Make no mistake: this represented a naked power grab, an attempt to shift the center of authority from the Senate to the Popular Assembly. By doing this, Tiberius had shattered yet another old convention - and this was a big one - by appropriating a core senatorial prerogative.
The Senate seethed but did nothing yet. They were still playing by the rules, though not for much longer.
But fortune's wheel was beginning to turn away from Tiberius. His removal of Octavius to pass the Lex Agraria had come at a steep political price. Put quite simply, a populist needs to be popular with the people. Once the spell breaks and the aura fades, a populist demagogue becomes extremely vulnerable. That was the case for Tiberius,
According to Mike Duncan, "Until Tiberius took this fateful step [deposing Octavius], he still enjoyed a great deal of support from his fellow tribunes and senatorial backers. But this reckless assault on a fellow tribune made Tiberius toxic to the naturally conservative elite" (15). Moreover, there were whispers that he aimed to make himself king - a deadly rumor in Rome, where even the suggestion of monarchy might get you killed (16).
A former consul, Titus Annius, challenged Tiberius one day in the Senate: Had he not disgraced a fellow tribune, despite his sacred status? Had he not stretched the laws beyond their traditional use just to pass a bill? And at what cost? Senators roared their approval at this challenge. Unnerved, Tiberius fled the chamber and rallied his supporters. He demanded that Annius appear before the people and justify the accusations made against him. The point, of course, was to intimidate him into silence.
Annius went as ordered. Then, with both of them standing before the crowd, Annius asked Tiberius a loaded but fair question that must have been on many people's minds:
“If you intend to deprive me of my rank, and disgrace me, and I appeal to one of your brother tribunes, and he shall come to my aid, and you shall then fall into a passion, will you deprive him of his office?” Plutarch says Tiberius, usually bold and eloquent and with a clever retort, was left speechless (17).
Annius had a point, and it resonated. The crowd began to waver. Sensing he was losing the people, Tiberius adjourned the Assembly. The next day, he regrouped and tried again with a clever argument that even Robespierre would have been proud of: 'Didn’t the People elect Octavius? Therefore, shouldn’t the People be able to remove him? What was wrong with that?' It was slick populism - pandering to the crowd - but also a preview of the logic that would haunt Rome for the next century.
Tiberius had already trampled several customs. Public opinion appeared more divided as his term neared its end. His popularity was waning. That was a problem. Once out of office, he’d lose his legal immunity and face the wrath of his enemies. Therefore, he decided to run for reelection, yet another unprecedented move that was frowned upon, and broke mos maiorum (yet again!), even though it was technically legal.
Tiberius argued he needed the tribune's immunity to protect himself and to safeguard his legislative achievements. But rural voters, who were his key constituency, didn’t show up in Rome to vote this time. Turnout was weak. As voting began, someone raised a procedural objection about Tiberius running for consecutive terms. Voting stopped. Chaos ensued. The Assembly adjourned. That night, Tiberius feared assassination and had his followers camp outside his house for protection. His paranoia would prove justified. The tide was turning against him.
When voting resumed the next day, fighting broke out between rival mobs. The Senate met in an emergency session. The consul Mucius Scaevola, one of the original architects and supporters of Tiberius's land reform, refused to use force, as was his right as a sitting consul, citing a lack of legal authority.
The Senate, undeterred by this quaint appeal to the rule of law in a time of existential crisis, formed a lynch mob, led by none other than Rome's chief priest (pontifex maximus), Scipio Nasica, who proclaimed, "Let those who would save our country follow me!" A large group of senators and their retainers grabbed whatever makeshift weapons they found—clubs, stones, bench legs—and marched on the Capitoline, where Tiberius and his supporters had gathered.
The two mobs collided, and a furious melee ensued. Unarmed, Tiberius’s followers soon gave way and fled. Some three hundred were killed, including Tiberius himself, who was beaten to death near a temple by a very distinguished mob of senators-turned-gangsters. In true gangster style, his corpse was thrown into the Tiber that night like garbage. No trial. No burial. No law to justify what had happened. Just brute force.
Ancient historians would mark this as a turning point, seeing it as the beginning of the end for the Republic. Yes, Tiberius shattered precedents—but the Senate went further. Not only had it murdered a sitting tribune like a gang of street thugs, it had also defied a sitting consul’s decision not to authorize force to resolve a political dispute.
Cicero called it “the first outbreak of civil strife in Rome that resulted in the bloodshed and murder of citizens since the expulsion of the kings” (18). He would himself be a victim of that same cycle of civil violence a few decades later.
Appian lamented: “This foul crime, the first perpetrated in the public assembly, was not the last, but from time to time something similar would always occur” (19).
Plutarch also recognized the shift: “This is said to have been the first disturbance at Rome since the abolition of the kingly power, which ended in bloodshed and the death of citizens. All previous disputes, though they were neither trifling nor about trifling matters, were settled by mutual concession: the nobles yielded through fear of the people, and the people yielded from respect to the Senate” (20).
Tiberius had undoubtedly employed legally dubious tactics that strained the Republic’s informal rules to the breaking point. But the Senate crossed its own line, and then some.
While Tiberius used physical intimidation and procedural brinkmanship to get his way, he had never sanctioned outright violence. He did not cross that line, though one could argue he provoked his enemies until they were willing to do anything to rid themselves of this upstart nuisance.
But the Senate, that bulwark of republican tradition, broke tradition to save tradition—a contradiction that would prove fatal to its credibility in the long run. Killing a tribune violated sacrosanctity, once considered inviolable for all Roman magistrates. Tossing Tiberius's body into the river only deepened the desecration. It set a grim new precedent.
After the adrenaline rush of mass murder passed, the Senate seemed to recognize how precarious the situation had become. It chose to tread carefully to avoid provoking further unrest. The Lex Agraria was left intact. It was also funded by the Pergamum inheritance, just as Tiberius had intended.
A new land commissioner was quietly appointed to replace him. His brother Gaius remained on the commission and would take up his brother’s cause a few years later. His tenure ended in even greater bloodshed, including his own death and the massacre of some 3,000 followers, after the Senate once again chose violence over compromise.
Violence was now woven into Rome’s political fabric.
It was a shocking preview of what the next century of Roman politics was going to look like. Indeed, it would get far worse.
Final Thoughts
Only a few years before these events, the Greek historian Polybius wrote a glowing account of the Roman Republic. As an outsider looking in, he marveled at Rome’s grandeur. His native Greece had just fallen to Rome, not the other way around. After that defeat, he was sent to Rome as a hostage.
Brilliant, cultured, and charismatic, Polybius made the most of an unpleasant situation by quickly working his way into the upper echelons of Roman elite society, becoming a trusted tutor and advisor to the powerful Scipio family. Not bad.
In his view, Rome had achieved what no Greek city-state ever did: a stable, mixed constitution. It harmoniously blended monarchy (two consuls), aristocracy (the Senate), and democracy (the Popular Assemblies). Its genius lay in balance—no one part could dominate because all depended on the others. “It is impossible,” Polybius wrote, “to find a better political system than this” (21).
Indeed, it had worked so well for over 150 years. One can forgive him for not seeing how unstable it was as floods of corrupting money poured into Rome. In retrospect, we know that Polybius was witnessing the Republic at its apogee, when its power was blindingly obvious for all to see while the slowly spreading rot still remained invisible.
Nothing symbolizes how blindingly obvious this must have seemed than the fact that Polybius stood beside Scipio Aemilianus as Carthage burned in 146 BCE. Oh, how Rome must have looked invincible at that moment! So triumphant! Behold, the superpower, the conqueror of the world! Roma Invicta! Sure, he dutifully recorded how Scipio wept at the scene, thinking that Rome might someday suffer the same fate, but surely not anytime soon. What could go wrong with Rome on such a winning streak?
A lot, as it turned out. Foreign enemies wouldn’t bring down the Roman Republic. No, the Romans did that to themselves. The chaos with Tiberius began only a few years after Polybius wrote his glowing account of Rome’s government. Don’t get me wrong: he was an amazing historian, one of the best ancient sources we have on Republican Rome, but he was no prophet.
This was an inflection point. There was a time before Tiberius when political disputes were resolved within the system, and a time after, when they were often resolved with swords and daggers and heads on spears and mutilated bodies tossed in the Tiber. In a strange way, both sides were ultra-conservative in that they were trying to uphold a Polybian ideal of Roman greatness. The Senate was trying to defend it; Tiberius was trying to restore it. Both reached for the past but ended up poisoning the future.
All it took was one man willing to rewrite the unwritten rules for some short-term political gain. Tiberius was that man. I suppose the road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that. And it happened over something as bland as agrarian reform. Bland to us, maybe, so many centuries later.
Yet Tiberius had tapped into a seething discontent over wealth inequality and senatorial corruption. Most of the ancient sources are sympathetic with his cause, if not with his methods. In breaking centuries-old customs, he provoked the Senate to do the same. And what emerged afterward was something much darker. Politics became a blood sport, and violence provoked violence, which provoked further violence, etc.
Those were the new norms.
Rome, it turned out, wasn’t so exceptional after all. No republic is, if it endures long enough. If there’s any lesson here for us today, that is it. A functioning republic governed by the rule of law cannot be taken for granted. Laws and norms only work when all the major players abide by them. Otherwise, they are nothing but pieces of paper. What looks strong and stable on the surface can quickly unravel when compromise and negotiation are exchanged for a more zero-sum, win-at-all-costs approach to politics. When one side does that, the other will too. You can bet on it.
After Tiberius, the delicate balance was gone. Compromise gave way to coercion. His brother Gaius would be the next casualty. Within a generation, civil wars became routine. Warlords roamed the countryside while demagogues whipped up angry mobs in the capital.
The first century BCE was a slow-motion collapse. Occasionally, the Senate tried to slam on the brakes and claw back control in a desperate effort to turn back the clock to more stable times. But it was too late. The Republic’s ruling class had become like scorpions in a bottle. Only one could survive.
That turned out to be Octavian, who won the last civil war and put the Republic out of its misery.
By then, it was a mercy killing.
Endnotes
1 - Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives, Tiberius Gracchus, Book IX.
2 - Charles Freeman, Egypt, Greece, and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean, 400).
3 - Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives, Tiberius Gracchus, Book VIII.
4 - David Shotter, The Fall of the Roman Republic, 31.
5 - Anthony Everitt The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World’s Greatest Empire, 352–353.
6 - Freeman, 399–400.
7 - Everitt, 354.
8 - Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus, Book IX.
9 - Ibid.
10 - Duncan, 24-25.
11 - Ibid., 26.
12 - Ibid., 30.
13 - Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus, Book XII.
14 - Polybius. The Complete Histories of Polybius. Book VI.
15 - Duncan, 31.
16 - Plutarch Tiberius Gracchus, Book XIV.
17 - Ibid.
18 - Edward J. Watts, Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny, 90.
19 - Appian, 10.
20 - Plutarch Tiberius Gracchus, Book XX.
21 - Polybius, Book VI.
Works Cited
Appian. The Civil Wars. Penguin Books, 1996.
Duncan, Mike. The Storm before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic. PublicAffairs, 2018.
Everitt, Anthony. The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World’s Greatest Empire. Random House Publishing Group, 2012.
Freeman, Charles. Egypt, Greece, and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean. Second ed., Oxford University Press, 2004.
Plutarch. Plutarch’s Lives (Volumes I and II). Kindle Edition. ed.
Polybius. The Complete Histories of Polybius. Translated by W.R. Paton, Kindle ed., Digireads.Com.
Russel, Amy. “The Tribunate of the Plebs: Between Compromise and Revolution.” A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic, Wiley Blackwell, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Hoboken, NJ, 2022, pp. 260–274.
Shotter, David. The Fall of the Roman Republic. Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2005.
Steel, Catherine. The End of the Roman Republic 146 to 44 BC: Conquest and Crisis. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.
Watts, Edward J. Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny. Basic Books, 2018.
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Paul Wilke
Dry Grove, Illinois 19 April 2025