Then · the record

Begin in 133 BC, during the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, with public land gathered behind borrowed names. Plutarch says rich neighbours shifted rentals to themselves “by means of fictitious personages,” then openly held most of the land after driving out poorer occupants. Tiberius took up an agrarian law and, before a crowd at the rostra, framed his appeal around “the wild beasts that roam over Italy”: each had a lair, while the men who fought and died for Italy had “the common air and light” but no land of their own. That political struggle reached the Capitol, where senators and attendants advanced with clubs, staves and splintered benches. Tiberius was struck down and more than three hundred others were killed by sticks and stones, not swords. Plutarch calls it the first Roman sedition since the kings to end in citizens' blood.

Across the last three centuries of the Republic, conquest and diplomacy made Rome the capital of a vast territory acquired piece by piece. Governing it demanded a major military commitment, while the gulf widened between citizens who profited from Rome's new wealth and citizens who were impoverished. The strain generated social breakdown, political turmoil and the Republic's eventual collapse. Rome passed through a long and bloody series of civil wars, political crises and civil disturbances, culminating in Julius Caesar's dictatorship and his assassination on 15 March 44 BC. After Caesar died, his eighteen-year-old grandnephew Octavian purged opposition to his complete control of the Roman empire. In 27 BC he was granted the title Augustus.