Plutarch

The tribunates of Tiberius and Gaius Sempronius Gracchus mark the beginning of an era of civil turmoil

Tiberius, however, was nine years older than Gaius,* which meant that their public careers were separated in time and was the main reason for their failure: they did not achieve prominence at the same time, so they could not combine and realize the potential the two of them together had for being an irresistibly powerful force.

a short time this edict did check greed and help the poor, and they stayed on the land they had rented, with each person occupying the plot of land he had originally held. Later, however, their rich neighbours began to transfer the leases to themselves under fictitious names, and then ended up by blatantly owning most of the land in their own names. The dispossessed poor lost any interest they might have had in performing military service, and could not even be bothered to raise children, with the result that before long all over Italy there was a noticeable shortage of free men for hire, while the place was teeming with gangs of foreign slaves, whom the rich used to cultivate their estates instead of the citizens they had driven away.

sooner had Tiberius been appointed tribune,* however, than he made a determined assault on the heart of the problem, at the urging, according to the majority of my sources, of Diophanes the orator and the philosopher Blossius. Diophanes was an exile from Mytilene, while Blossius was a native Italian, from Cumae, who had become a close friend of Antipater of Tarsus in Rome, and had received the signal honour of having Antipater address his philosophical writings to him.* Some people also claim that Cornelia was at least partly responsible, because she often told her sons off for the fact that she was known in Rome as Scipio’s mother-in-law, but not yet as the mother of the Gracchi.

But the powerful men of Rome were deeply concerned about all these measures and were afraid of Tiberius’ growing influence,

Besides Tiberius, over three hundred people lost their lives. They were clubbed or stoned to death; not one was killed by a sword.*

Solon held the office of archon and enacted his reform of the Athenian constitution in 594 BC.

Plutarch’s (and our) only contemporary written sources were Solon’s poems, collected by scholars long after his death, and the preserved text of his laws. Though the poems are known to us only in fragments, some found only in this Life, Plutarch had access to many complete poems—he notes, for example (8), that the Salamis poem ran to one hundred lines, although he only quotes the first two—

Plutarch cites a number of laws known from no other source

by making eligibilty to office dependent on wealth and not birth, Solon broke the political control of the landed