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But while the issue of Asia made for good antisenatorial fodder, there was no issue Gaius exploited more than the tragic story of his brother. “Before your eyes,” he would say, “these men beat Tiberius to death with clubs, and his dead body was dragged from the Capitol through the midst of the city to be thrown into the Tiber… those of his friends who were caught were put to death without trial.” And though much of this was intentionally manipulative there is no reason to think it was pure cynicism. Tiberius had been murdered by powerful men who had escaped punishment. No Roman would ignore the chance to settle matters of family honor, especially in such a public way.²²

When election day came Gaius was elected easily, and upon taking office in December 124 the force of his reputation and power of his ambition made him indisputably the “first of all the tribunes.”²³

THE BREADTH AND depth of Gaius’s reform package was unprecedented. After what must have been years of careful preparation, Gaius Gracchus entered the tribunate of 123 with a multifaceted platform designed to appeal to different interest groups. If enacted in full, that platform would curb the power of the Senate and restore the balance of the Polybian constitution. It was later said that when Gaius was done, “he left nothing undisturbed, nothing untouched, nothing unmolested, nothing, in short, as it had been.”²⁴

But before he could get to ambitious sociopolitical reform, Gaius had some family business to settle. The first bill he introduced was aimed squarely at Octavius, the tribune whose obstinacy had contributed so much to Tiberius’s death. Gaius introduced a bill making it illegal for a man deposed from office by the Assembly to serve as a magistrate ever again. If enacted, this would end Octavius’s public career. But famously, Cornelia interceded and Gaius withdrew the bill, which some historians have suggested may have been a stage-managed affair to establish Gracchan benevolence while slyly confirming the principle that the Assembly could depose a magistrate if it wanted to—which was still not yet an established point of law.²⁵

Gaius next aimed for the men who had persecuted his brother’s followers. Gaius claimed that the extraordinary tribunal of 132 had violated the Assembly’s supremacy in capital cases. To make sure it never happened again Gaius introduced a bill saying that the Senate could only convene a tribunal after receiving permission from the Assembly. The Senate would never again be able to repeat the repressive tribunal of 132. But the new law went further than simply ensuring such tribunals would be illegal in the future—Gaius’s law was also retroactive. There was no prohibition against ex post facto legislation of this kind, and a person could find themselves guilty of breaking a law that did not exist at the time of the alleged crime—for example, Rupilius and Laenas, the two consuls who had led the tribunal in 132. By the time Gaius was passing this ex post facto law Rupilius was already dead, but his colleague Laenas was alive and well. When the law passed, tearful friends accompanied Laenas to the gates of Rome and he departed for exile.²⁶

With family business settled, Gaius moved swiftly to implement his reforms. First up was restarting the work of the land commission. The commission still tecÚically existed and Gaius, Flaccus, and Carbo were all still commissioners, but their work had been stalled for years by the Senate decree that consuls had jurisdiction over disputes with the Italians. Flaccus had tried to circumvent the problem by making the Italians full Roman citizens, and when that failed, the commission remained in dry dock. Gaius cut through the legal red tape by passing a bill establishing that the land commissioners had final jurisdiction over all disputed boundaries. The rural poor had always been the bedrock of Gracchan support, and they thrilled at the idea that more ager publicus could now be identified and parceled out.²⁷

But Gaius now wanted to do much more than settle landless plebs on small private plots—he wanted to create whole new communities. Gaius envisioned a whole network of new colonies in Italy, stretching from Etruria in the north, all the way down to Tarentum in the south. All the colonies would be situated on good harbors and improve trade in and out of the Italian interior. To fill these colonies Gaius would not just need landless peasants, but also rich Equestrians who would become the principal merchants of the new colonies; profits both in trade and state contracts to build the roads and streets and harbors made his colonization project attractive to everyone. He even dreamed of overseas expansion, targeting the great harbor of vanquished Carthage as the perfect location for a permanent Roman colony.²⁸