Plutarch

The tribunates of Tiberius and Gaius Sempronius Gracchus mark the beginning of an era of civil turmoil

Tiberius, however, was nine years older than Gaius,* which meant that their public careers were separated in time and was the main reason for their failure: they did not achieve prominence at the same time, so they could not combine and realize the potential the two of them together had for being an irresistibly powerful force.

a short time this edict did check greed and help the poor, and they stayed on the land they had rented, with each person occupying the plot of land he had originally held. Later, however, their rich neighbours began to transfer the leases to themselves under fictitious names, and then ended up by blatantly owning most of the land in their own names. The dispossessed poor lost any interest they might have had in performing military service, and could not even be bothered to raise children, with the result that before long all over Italy there was a noticeable shortage of free men for hire, while the place was teeming with gangs of foreign slaves, whom the rich used to cultivate their estates instead of the citizens they had driven away.

sooner had Tiberius been appointed tribune,* however, than he made a determined assault on the heart of the problem, at the urging, according to the majority of my sources, of Diophanes the orator and the philosopher Blossius. Diophanes was an exile from Mytilene, while Blossius was a native Italian, from Cumae, who had become a close friend of Antipater of Tarsus in Rome, and had received the signal honour of having Antipater address his philosophical writings to him.* Some people also claim that Cornelia was at least partly responsible, because she often told her sons off for the fact that she was known in Rome as Scipio’s mother-in-law, but not yet as the mother of the Gracchi.

But the powerful men of Rome were deeply concerned about all these measures and were afraid of Tiberius’ growing influence,

Besides Tiberius, over three hundred people lost their lives. They were clubbed or stoned to death; not one was killed by a sword.*

His election went ahead without a hitch, and he immediately began to raise an army.* Contrary to law and custom he enrolled a large number of paupers, and even slaves, when previously commanders had refused to take such men, but used to dispense arms, on the same principle as they dispensed any other honour, only to those who deserved them by virtue of their standing in society, since it was believed that a person’s wealth was a token of his commitment.* But this was not the chief thing people found offensive about Marius; even more irritating to the leading men in Rome were the speeches he delivered, shot through with arrogant and abusive disrespect. He used to cry out that he had carried off the consulship as booty snatched from the effete high-born and wealthy members of society, and that if he wanted to show off to the people of Rome, he would display the wounds on his own body rather than the tombs of corpses and the portraits of other people.* He would often mention the military commanders who had met defeat in Africa—namely, Bestia and Albinus*—and describe them as men who, for all the eminence of their families, had no talent for war and had come to grief because of sheer ignorance. Then he would ask his audience if they did not think that he was closer to the kind of descendant even the ancestors of these unfortunate commanders would have prayed for, seeing that it was not nobility of birth that brought them distinction, but their courage and splendid achievements. These speeches of his were not mere empty posturing; there was a definite purpose to his desire to make himself hated by the men of power, because the enjoyment the common people took in hearing insults hurled at the senate, and the way they invariably took the boastfulness of a person’s words to be a measure of his self-assurance, kept inspiring him and encouraging him not to spare the notables of Rome, if he wanted to be popular.*

Solon held the office of archon and enacted his reform of the Athenian constitution in 594 BC.

Plutarch’s (and our) only contemporary written sources were Solon’s poems, collected by scholars long after his death, and the preserved text of his laws. Though the poems are known to us only in fragments, some found only in this Life, Plutarch had access to many complete poems—he notes, for example (8), that the Salamis poem ran to one hundred lines, although he only quotes the first two—

Plutarch cites a number of laws known from no other source