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As you might have guessed from squinting at the Latin, ager publicus was publicly owned land. As the Romans conquered Italy, they typically confiscated a third of a defeated enemy’s territory and turned it into state-owned ager publicus. In the early days of the Republic, this public land was converted into a Roman colony, but by Tiberius’s day it was usually leased to individual renters who would work the land in exchange for a portion of the produce. To prevent rich families from monopolizing the state lands, the Assembly passed a law that no family was allowed to lease more than five hundred iugera (about three hundred acres) of public land. But this prohibition was mostly ignored. The magistrates tasked with enforcing the limits were themselves wealthy landowners occupying excessive public land, so everyone colluded to get away with it together.²⁴

The legal rationale of the Lex Agraria was simple: the five-hundred-iugera prohibition would be strictly enforced. Anyone caught occupying ager publicus over the legal limit would be forced to relinquish the excess back to the state. The excess could then be divided up into small manageable plots and redistributed to landless citizens. Since the whole point of the reform was to rebuild the class of small holders, the bill stipulated that the newly created plots could not be broken up and sold. The authors of the Lex Agraria did not want to hand a plot of land to a poor man just so he could turn around and sell it back to a rich man.²⁵

Somewhat counterintuitively, the senators crafting this piece of radical reform legislation were not backbench agitators, but rather some of the most powerful men in Rome. The group was led by Tiberius’s father-in-law, Appius Claudius Pulcher, who was princeps senatus. Joining him were a prominent pair of brothers: the wealthy jurist and scholar Publius Licinius Crassus Mucianus and Publius Mucius Scaevola, one of the most respected legal theorists of his generation. There were other prominent senators and rising young nobles surrounding Claudius’s group of reformers; among them was Tiberius Gracchus.²⁶

For historians, one of the most controversial aspects of the Lex Agraria is whether the authors intended only Roman citizens to qualify for allotments or whether the noncitizen Italian Allies also qualified. The Italians provided much of the manpower for the legions and Tiberius himself was personally anxious about their plight, “lamenting that a people so valiant in war, and related in blood to the Romans, were declining little by little into poverty and paucity of numbers without any hope of remedy.” But whatever the original intent, there is no evidence the Italians were ultimately included in the redistribution program. It seems an obscure point, but the fight over the Lex Agraria was an early test of Roman willingness to treat the Italians as equals. It was a test they failed.²⁷

Historians also still argue about the motivations of the authors of the bill. Maybe they were acting on high-minded principle and simply wanted to restore the citizen-farmer and rebuild the manpower reserves of the legions. But it could also be that the law was cynically designed to add thousands of new clients to the political networks of its authors. Traditionally, the man tasked with distributing land absorbed the families that benefited onto his client rolls. And it is here that we might also detect the source of the intransigent opposition to the bill. Because what the Lex Agraria proposed to do was take all the miserable tenants attached by default to their landlords and transfer their political allegiance to the Claudian faction—an intolerable shift in the balance of senatorial power.²⁸

A piece of legislation this controversial and far-reaching was not drafted on a whim. Claudius, Scaevola, and Mucianus would have spent years carefully picking through Roman law, laying out how the survey process would work, and who would arbitrate contested claims. But once the law was written they simply had to wait for the right time and the right person to introduce the bill. And for that, Claudius had his eye on his talented young son-in-law Tiberius, who was now trying to recover from the shame of the Numantine Affair.