Roman History Turning Points of Essay

2. What were the military, social, and economic events that led to the Gracchan land reforms (discuss one event each of military, social, and economic)? How did the Gracchi attempt to resolve these problems (discuss three)? How effective were they?

When Tiberius Gracchus was elected tribune, the social structures that had nourished the Republic as it developed from an independent city-state were already breaking down. The consolidation of public land under the emerging latifundia system had turned roughly 7% of the population (Last, 1932a, p. 9) into indigents as displaced peasant farmers flooded Rome and other cities, only to find demand for their labor limited at best. Meanwhile, the army was starving for recruits as the traditional citizen military class proved too small to police the vast Roman frontier and quell slave revolts closer to home. Finally, relations with the Italian and even the Latin allies had become increasingly strained.To resolve the most pressing of these problems, the Gracchi established a commission to break up large estates founded on public property, compensating the former owners and distributing the land to the urban poor (thus removing them from the towns and giving them at least the theoretical means to support themselves). This land would also become available as a reward for military veterans, while proposed reforms to the militia aimed to further expand the army's pool of viable recruits.

Gaius Gracchus widened his brother's land and military policies into something like a popular revolution, providing grain subsidies for the poor and equipment for army recruits, founding new colonies, and shifting the balance between the landed classes. By this point, resentment surrounding the land reforms among the allies further eroded relations within Italy, and Gracchus proposed to.....