Marcus Junius Gracchanus

Marcus Junius Gracchanus (2nd–1st century BC) was a Roman legal historian who was a partisan of the Brothers Gracchi and their reforms.

He assumed his epithet (agnomen) "the Gracchan"[1] or "Gracchian" (Gracchanus) out of solidarity with Gaius Sempronius Gracchus and his reforms.

[10] Similarly, if Gracchanus were identical to the separately attested Junius Congus and had the cognomen Gracchanus assigned to him by others,[11] then—as Rankov argues—he would have gone from a notoriously middle-brow[1] moderate ally of the Gracchi brothers to a learned antiquarian in retirement,[12] whether out of disillusion or an abundance of caution after having been exempted from the purge of the Gracchi's closest supporters in 121 BC and after.

[14] Rankov's arguments, however, depend on Silanus not having made a similar political adjustment[10] to the one he proposes for Congus, effusively praised by the optimate orator Marcus Antonius,[13] and on it being unlikely that the large and prominent Junia family would have two scholars in the same generation.

[7] Parts of Gaius's On the Law of the 12 Tables[18] and Pomponius's Enchiridion[19] excerpted in Justinian's Digest also seem to be based on Gracchanus's text.