whose hands were the treasury, the provinces, public oYces, glory and
triumphs.... The generals divided the spoils of war with a few friends’’ (Sallust
1921 , 255 ; cf. Gruen 1984 , 60 – 3 ). When virtuous citizens ‘‘who preferred true
glory to unjust power’’Wnally rose up against these private men with their
personal armies, ‘‘the republic was torn to pieces’’ (Sallust 1921 , 223 – 4 ).
This account of the nexus between foreign conquest and personal ambition
is, as noted above, a feature of virtually every surviving account of the
collapse of the republic. But a second explanatory narrative appears in
many, if not most, of the Latin sources, and it is this second story that is
unambiguously drawn from patrician polemic. It concerns the Roman agrar-
ian laws. Under Roman law, lands captured in war or bequeathed to Rome by
foreign princes were designatedager publicus, ‘‘public land.’’ The uncultivated
portions of this public territory were, in theory, meant to be distributed in
small parcels among Roman citizens, who would then farm the land and pay a
tithe to the republic. In reality, however, patricians quickly acquired vast
tracts of the uncultivatedager publicus, often by means of fraud and violence,
and then neglected to pay the required tax—a practice which provoked the ire
of even some of the most rabidly anti-plebeian Roman authors. However, by
the time of the Gracchan laws ( 133 and122 bce) these large estates had been in
private hands for generations, and had acquired the aura of private property. 4
Beginning in theWfth centurybce,tribunes periodically proposed laws
designed to redivide theager publicusand distribute it among the plebs; such
laws became known asleges agrariae(‘‘agrarian laws’’). It is an article of faith
of the patrician narrative that these laws constituted unjust expropriations of
private property, and that the controversy surrounding their proposal
and passage ultimately brought about the fall of the republic (Nelson 2004 ,
49 – 86 ). Speaking of the land law put forward by the tribune Spurius Cassius
in 486 bce,Livy observes pointedly that ‘‘this was theWrst proposal for
agrarian legislation, and from that day to within living memory it has never
been brought up without occasioning the most serious disturbances’’ (Livy
1919 , 353 ). Livy’s Roman successors were even more emphatic on this subject,
but they directed their animus chieXy toward the agrarian program of
Tiberius and Caius Gracchus. In Lucan’sPharsalia, the Gracchi, ‘‘who dared
to bring about immoderate things,’’ appear in the underworld alongside other
famous Roman traitors in the ‘‘criminal crowd’’ which rejoices at Rome’s civil
war, while the blessed dead weep (Lucan 1928 , 363 ).
4 On the Roman agrarian laws, see Badian ( 1962 , 197 – 245 ); Bernstein ( 1978 ); Carcopino ( 1967 );
Cardinali ( 1965 ); Crawford ( 1992 , 94 – 122 ); and Stockton ( 1979 ).
196 eric nelson