rear) is the next oldest, probably dedicate to Juturna in 241 BC. The circular temple B, in the middle, is thought to be that of
Fortuna Huiusce Diei (Fortune of the Present Day), inaugurated in 101 BC soon after the unification of the temple into a single
monumental complex.
Obviously, in so far as free labour was used in the execution of such projects, the lower orders benefited economically. And indeed
the emergence of urban markets with considerable spending power is a necessary hypothesis to explain another important second-
century development. For it seems clear that much of the new wealth of the Roman and Italian elite was invested in land, in large
farming enterprises run by slave labour. These were essentially of two types, market gardens, olive groves, or vineyards on the one
hand, transhumant sheep farming on the other. Both types of enterprise created a demand for land in central Italy, to the detriment
of the peasant farmer, whose plot might be requested in purchase or sometimes even seized and whose access to common land on
which he depended might be rendered more difficult. In concentrating central-Italian land in its hands, the Roman and Italian elite
was to a certain extent acting against its own interests, since it needed to ensure a steady supply of men for the legions in order to
organize its wars of conquest overseas. But men do not always act wholly rationally.
The Age of the Gracchi
A pattern seems to have emerged in the second century whereby peasant soldiers in central Italy surrendered their land and their
rights to common land, from which they had in any case become detached in the course of long service overseas, and went to settle
in the Po valley; their sons provided the next generation of soldiers. But with the pacification of that area, the great days of
colonization came to an end, and there seems to have followed in the generation before 133 a steady build up of men without land
of their own and without hope of land to go to. What Ti. Gracchus attempted to do was to reverse the trend in central Italy and
increase the number of peasants at the expense of large-scale farming enterprises.
Elected tribune for 133 BC, he introduced a land bill limiting the size of holdings of public land, and redistributing the surplus to
the people. The Senate retaliated by putting up another tribune, M. Octavius, to veto the proposal, and Tiberius was finally forced to
procure his fellow tribune's deposition from the people. He further antagonized the Senate by seeking to interfere in the
arrangements for the kingdom of Pergamum, left by will to the Roman people: the administration of foreign affairs was
traditionally a prerogative of the Senate. Finally, in the disturbances caused by his attempt to secure re-election to the tribunate for a
second term, he was murdered together with 300 of his supporters.
Perhaps the principal consequence of the attempts at reform in this period was the inextricable entangling of Italian with Roman
politics. But there is a further process which must be considered before we can turn to this particular problem, the progressive
Romanization of Italy. The golden age of Roman road-building is the generation or so before Ti. Gracchus; as a result the whole of
Italy became linked together, both actually and symbolically, to a far greater extent than ever before.
Italy also became in the years after the Second Punic War a monetary and economic unity. Down to the end of that war there
circulated in the different areas large numbers of coins produced by Italian communities other than Rome; after the end of the war
few communities felt themselves sufficiently independent of Rome to produce coinage for themselves, and earlier issues rapidly
disappeared from circulation. It was soldiers returning from service with the armies of Rome who carried Roman coinage into the
remote backwaters of the Appennines. And it was the developing market economy of Italy in response to the wealth flowing in
from the East that took the monetary and economic unity of Italy a stage further. Down to the middle of the second century there
were some inequalities in the pattern of circulation of Roman coins in Italy, both in terms of types and in terms of quantity. These
inequalities then disappeared, clearly a sign of the developing process of exchange of money for goods.
The armies of Rome were important in another respect also, as a powerful factor for linguistic unity. During and after the Second
Punic War men were away from home for much longer than before, in an essentially Latin-speaking environment. Etruscan
survived, as did the languages of Samnium and Lucania, but the rest were in the process of disappearing in the period before Ti.
Gracchus.
The principal problem to be faced in dealing with Gracchus' legislation is that we simply do not know whether, let alone to what
extent, it was intended to revive peasant farming, not only in Roman, but also in Italian communities in central Italy, although it
must be the case that these were suffering from the same developments.