The Gracchi Brothers

The victories over Carthage and the East bring Rome slaves and plunder, but ruin its peasants: the soldier is away for years on campaign, a rich neighbour buys up his plot, and on returning he drifts to the city. Tiberius Gracchus carries a law limiting the holding of public land and distributing it to the landless — and is killed on the Capitol itself. Ten years later his brother Gaius goes further — cheap grain, the courts, new colonies — and dies the same way, with hundreds of his followers. The land question stays unsolved; what is settled is that a political quarrel in Rome can be ended by murder — and by that rule the whole next century lives.