The legal rationale of the Lex Agraria was simple: the five-hundred-iugera prohibition would be strictly enforced. Anyone caught occupying ager publicus over the legal limit would be forced to relinquish the excess back to the state. The excess could then be divided up into small manageable plots and redistributed to landless citizens. Since the whole point of the reform was to rebuild the class of small holders, the bill stipulated that the newly created plots could not be broken up and sold. The authors of the Lex Agraria did not want to hand a plot of land to a poor man just so he could turn around and sell it back to a rich man.25
Somewhat counterintuitively, the senators crafting this piece of radical reform legislation were not backbench agitators, but rather some of the most powerful men in Rome. The group was led by Tiberius’s father-in-law, Appius Claudius Pulcher, who was princeps senatus. Joining him were a prominent pair of brothers: the wealthy jurist and scholar Publius Licinius Crassus Mucianus and Publius Mucius Scaevola, one of the most respected legal theorists of his generation. There were other prominent senators and rising young nobles surrounding Claudius’s group of reformers; among them was Tiberius Gracchus.26
For historians, one of the most controversial aspects of the Lex Agraria is whether the authors intended only Roman citizens to qualify for allotments or whether the noncitizen Italian Allies also qualified. The Italians provided much of the manpower for the legions and Tiberius himself was personally anxious about their plight, “lamenting that a people so valiant in war, and related in blood to the Romans, were declining little by little into poverty and paucity of numbers without any hope of remedy.” But whatever the original intent, there is no evidence the Italians were ultimately included in the redistribution program. It seems an obscure point, but the fight over the Lex Agraria was an early test of Roman willingness to treat the Italians as equals. It was a test they failed.27
Historians also still argue about the motivations of the authors of the bill. Maybe they were acting on high-minded principle and simply wanted to restore the citizen-farmer and rebuild the manpower reserves of the legions. But it could also be that the law was cynically designed to add thousands of new clients to the political networks of its authors. Traditionally, the man tasked with distributing land absorbed the families that benefited onto his client rolls. And it is here that we might also detect the source of the intransigent opposition to the bill. Because what the Lex Agraria proposed to do was take all the miserable tenants attached by default to their landlords and transfer their political allegiance to the Claudian faction—an intolerable shift in the balance of senatorial power.28
A piece of legislation this controversial and far-reaching was not drafted on a whim. Claudius, Scaevola, and Mucianus would have spent years carefully picking through Roman law, laying out how the survey process would work, and who would arbitrate contested claims. But once the law was written they simply had to wait for the right time and the right person to introduce the bill. And for that, Claudius had his eye on his talented young son-in-law Tiberius, who was now trying to recover from the shame of the Numantine Affair.
WHILE THE AUTHORS of the Lex Agraria waited for the right time to introduce their bill, the unpopular war in Spain continued. After the Senate rejected Tiberius’s treaty, two more years of inconclusive fighting followed—more men dead, more farms ruined, more families dislocated—all for no discernable gain or purpose. The people of Rome were getting fed up, so just as they had done during the war against Carthage, they turned to Scipio Aemilianus to end the war once and for all. But they faced a similar problem to one they had faced back then: Aemilianus was tecÚically prohibited from running. During the Carthaginian war fifteen years earlier, the problem was that he was too young. Now the problem was that a law had been passed barring a man from serving more than one consulship in his career. But just as the Assembly had voted an exemption that allowed Aemilianus to stand for the consulship of 147, they exempted Aemilianus from the prohibition on multiple consulships. He was duly elected for the consulship of 134.29
With his ability to secure special treatment from the Assembly, the career of Aemilianus became a prototype for ambitious politicians in the years to come. Aemilianus showed how easy it was to manipulate the mob to serve personal ambition—inducing them to suspend inconvenient rules. But that was not the only dangerous example Aemilianus set. During the campaign for the consulship of 134, he promised to raise new recruits from his own extensive client network. The Scipione were a major center of political gravity in Rome, and many friends and allies readily agreed to accompany Aemilianus to Spain—among them Tiberius’s younger brother Gaius. Raising a personal legion of four thousand men, Aemilianus was able to depart for Spain without the need for forced conscription. This was, for the moment, a welcome answer to an emergency situation, but it also set the precedent of a powerful noble raising a personal army from his own client network—an army whose loyalty to the powerful noble might outweigh their loyalty to the Senate and People of Rome.30
From the perspective of Claudius, though, all Aemilianus’s departure for Spain meant was that a formidable political opponent would now be absent from Rome for at least a year. With his biggest rival out of the way, Claudius wasted no time dispatching his son-in-law Tiberius Gracchus to ram through the Lex Agraria before anyone could stop it.
WITHIN MONTHS OF Aemilianus’s departure for Spain, Tiberius Gracchus stood for the tribunate. The office was slightly beneath his standing, and had the Numantine Affair not darkened his prospects, it is likely Tiberius would have moved right on to an aedileship to set up his inevitable runs for praetor and consul. But given that he had to overcome the shame of the debacle in Spain, he could use his year as tribune to boldly vault back to the forefront of Roman politics.
Before Tiberius took office, the Claudian reformers floated the contents of the Lex Agraria to their senatorial colleagues, but met with incredulous resistance. After occupying the ager publicus for many years, these wealthy landowners had come to regard the public land as their personal property. They had invested in it, improved it, used it as collateral for loans, given it away as dowries, and bequeathed it to their heirs. The authors of the bill wrote a number of concessions to lessen opposition: offering compensation for the ager publicus seized, giving clear title to the five hundred iugera that remained, making allowances for larger families to hold more land. But even with these concessions, a large faction in the Senate planned to resist the bill no matter what. To have their land confiscated and handed over to the shiftless rabble was simply out of the question.31
With the majority of the Senate hostile, the Claudians elected to break with mos maiorum and have Tiberius present the bill directly to the Assembly without giving the Senate a chance to register their opinion. There was no law stating that a bill must be presented to the Senate before it was introduced in the Assembly—it was simply the way things had always been done. Tiberius’s provocative gambit set everyone on edge. Shortly after taking office in December 134 Tiberius appeared before the Assembly and announced his intention to pass a law redistributing ager publicus from the rich to the poor.32