Forerunners of the Gracchi

Abstract

The tribunate of the plebs, according to a statement that Marcus Cicero puts into the mouth of his brother Quintus, was an office born in sedition and destined to create sedition (‘in seditione et ad seditionem nata,’ Leg. III, 19). There were two major periods of sedition. The first, the time of strife between patricians and plebeians, lasted from the birth of the tribunate in the early fifth century to the Lex Hortensia of 287 B.C. The second is usually dated from the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 to the dictatorship of Caesar, a time when the tribunate was repeatedly an instrument of revolution, now accompanied by violence. The general view is that in the century-and-a-half between these two periods the tribunes, except in the time of Gaius Flaminius, were in accord with the Senate and were indeed agents of senatorial rule.