Who Killed the Roman Republic? Who is Always Wrong? The Side that Starts the Killing.

This article is the first in a series that pins the blame of the fall of Roman Republican democracy on……..waaaaiiiiit for it……the conservative elites, which means Roman citizens from the lowest equestrians to the highest senators.

Most scholarship on the fall of the Roman Republic into Empire sort of tip toes around laying the blame on any particular political ideology or way of thinking. This series of articles clearly and explicitly lays the blame at the hands of elites starting and initiating physical violence to preserve their power and privileges.

This first article focuses on the first round of violence targeting the Gracchus brothers, Tiberius Gracchus and the younger Gaius Gracchus, that historical consensus has always identified as the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic.

The proximate cause of this first round of violence was the #1 legislative priority of Tiberius Gracchus when in 133 B.C. he was elected for a one-year term as one of ten Tribunes of the Plebian class. (Plebians were citizens, but unlike the next highest ranking equestrians, they did not own land. Equestrians, in fact, were Roman’s highest class of business magnates, akin to the like of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in the USA.)

Tiberius Gracchus wanted to have a law passed that would divide government-owned land into smaller plots to be given each to an individual plebian poor. Many rich, including one of the…