# The Gracchi and the first blood > Two brothers try to give land to poor farmers, and the Senate answers with clubs. Lesson 2 of 6 in [How the Roman Republic fell](https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/), a free course from Learnfold. For nearly four hundred years, Roman politics inside the city had been loud and bitter but not bloody. In 133 BC that ended on the Capitol, when a crowd of senators and their followers beat an elected tribune to death with clubs and the broken legs of benches. ### A problem with land Rome's soldiers were farmers who had to own property to serve, and long wars kept them away from their fields for years. Many came home to debt. Rich families bought them out, or moved onto *ager publicus*, land the state had taken from defeated Italians. An old law capped how much of it one person could hold. Nobody enforced it, and slaves from the same wars worked the big estates. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, tribune in 133, came from the top of Roman society. His grandfather was Scipio Africanus, the man who beat Hannibal. His plan was to enforce the cap and hand the extra land to poor citizens in small plots, which would also mean more men who qualified to fight. Many senators were sitting on exactly that land. ### Three moves nobody had made 1. Another tribune, Marcus Octavius, vetoed the bill. Tiberius asked the assembly to vote Octavius out of office, and it did. The veto was the system's emergency brake. Now a majority could simply remove the man holding it. 2. The Senate starved his land commission of money. That year King Attalus III of Pergamum died and left his kingdom to Rome, and Tiberius proposed spending the inheritance on the new farms. Money and foreign affairs were the Senate's business. 3. He ran for a second year in a row as tribune. That was rare at best, and his enemies said it proved he wanted a crown. On election day, Scipio Nasica, Rome's chief priest and Tiberius's cousin, led the senators up the hill. Tiberius and about 300 supporters died. Their bodies went into the Tiber. No one was punished for the killings. Instead, a court went after his supporters. ### The younger brother Gaius Gracchus, nine years younger, was tribune in 123 and 122. His program went further. It offered cheap grain to the city's poor and proposed citizenship for Rome's Latin allies. He also passed a law that no citizen could be put to death without the people's consent. In 121, when he was out of office, a scuffle left one of the consul's attendants dead. The Senate passed a new kind of decree, urging the consul Lucius Opimius to see that the state came to no harm. Later Romans called it the *senatus consultum ultimum*, the final decree. Opimius read it as permission to kill. Gaius had a slave kill him rather than be taken. Plutarch puts the dead at about 3,000, many executed without trial. Afterward Opimius restored the temple of Concord, the goddess of harmony, in the Forum. ### Whose version is this? Most of what we know comes from Plutarch and Appian, Greek writers working more than two centuries later. Cicero, much closer to the events, usually praised the men who killed Tiberius. Historians still argue whether the brothers were reformers or demagogues. Whatever you think of the land bill, the response is what lasted. The Senate now had a decree with no clear limits, and everyone had seen that killing a tribune cost nothing. Press Play or move the slider through the events. Watch a dispute over land become a precedent for political killing. ### Rabbit holes > What did Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, think of what her sons were doing? > Was the final decree legal, or did the Senate invent the power on the spot? > How much land did the commission actually hand out before both brothers were dead? Read online: https://learnfold.app/learn/roman-republic/the-gracchi/