The Ownership of Roman Land: Tiberius Gracchus and the Italians

Abstract

The agrarian law of Tiberius Gracchus is on any reckoning a significant piece of legislation in the history of the later Roman republic, and it is a measure of our ignorance of that critical period that it should still be possible to ask who he intended its beneficiaries to be without any immediate prospect of a clear answer. This is of especial concern because the problem affects not only the interpretation of Gracchus himself, and the evaluation of the sources for the period, but also our estimate of the whole complex of attitudes and actions which make up the turbulent half-century which followed his death in 133 B.C.In so far as there is any agreement among modern scholars, opinion has favoured the view that Roman citizens alone were intended to profit from the law. I wish to suggest here firstly that the connection between land distribution and citizenship is more intimate and more complex than has sometimes been realised, and also that an inclusion of non-Romans among the beneficiaries of Gracchus' law may explain certain puzzling features in the historical tradition about the law itself and its aftermath.