Tiberius Gracchus

Killed in 133 BCE in Rome by a mob of senators and their clients, the first major political bloodshed in the Republic for centuries.

Overview

Tiberius Gracchus, tribune of the plebs, pushed an agrarian law to redistribute public land to landless citizens, alarming great landowners whose estates depended on occupation of the ager publicus. He bypassed the senate, deposed a fellow tribune who vetoed the law, and sought reelection, moves opponents called an attempt at kingship. During an electoral assembly a group of senators led by the pontifex maximus Scipio Nasica, armed with chair legs and clubs, beat him and some three hundred supporters to death near the Capitol. His body was thrown into the Tiber. The killing broke a deep taboo against political murder in Rome and set the precedent that resolved disputes by violence, the path that ended in the civil wars and the fall of the Republic.