[12] In 137 BC he was quaestor[13] to consul Gaius Hostilius Mancinus and served his term in Hispania Citerior (nearer Spain)[14] during the Numantine War.

[19] However, by the time the terms of this agreement were being debated in the senate, Numantine ambassadors had also arrived and Mancinus likely argued in favour of his own ritual surrender, felt confident in his safety, and wanted to look towards making a soft landing for his career.

While Livy's depiction of the domestically placid middle republic is an overstatement, the political culture in Rome at this time still was able to find solutions through negotiation, peer pressure, and deference to superiors.

[22][23] There was substantial demand among the poor for land redistribution; Tiberius enjoyed unprecedented levels of popularity in bringing the matter before the assemblies.

A similar land reform proposal by Gaius Laelius Sapiens during his consulship in 140 BC was withdrawn after bitter opposition and its defeat in the senate.

[28][29][30] Moreover, victory on the matter of the lex agraria would have, for Tiberius, won him considerable support among the people and buttressed his prospects for higher office.

His refusals to compromise or withdraw his proposals led to suspicion among the elite that the bill was for his personal and familial political interests instead of his stated objectives.

[31] The complex motives of Tiberius and his ally and father-in-law Appius Claudius Pulcher were not limited to pro-natalist policymaking and its concomitant effects for army levies; they also may have calculated that land distributions would co-opt the loyalties of the soon-to-return Numantine war veterans.

Passage would have served to balance against Aemilianus' political influence – he was the commander in the final campaign of the Numantine war – after his expected victory.

[32][33] At the time of Tiberius' tribunate in the late 130s BC, there were a number of economic issues before the Roman people: wage labour was scarce due to a dearth of public building, grain prices were likely high due to the ongoing slave rebellion in Sicily, population growth meant there were more mouths to feed, and declining willingness to serve on long army campaigns had increased migration to the cities.

[45] A recent census also recorded a fall in Rome's population and, therefore, the number of leviable citizens; modern archaeology, however, has shown that this apparent decline was illusory.

[48] Tiberius believed that a previous law – commonly identified by modern scholars as the Licinio-Sextian rogations of the early fourth century BC[49] – had limited the amount of public land that any person could hold to 500 jugera (approximately 120 hectares).

[50][51] This legal maximum on land holdings, if it actually existed,[52] was largely ignored and many people possessed far more than the limit,[53][54] including Marcus Octavius, also serving as tribune in that year, and Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio, then pontifex maximus.

And it is with lying lips that their [commanders] exhort the soldiers in their battles to defend sepulchres and shrines from the enemy; for not a man of them has an hereditary altar, not one of all these many Romans an ancestral tomb, but they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury, and though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of earth that is their own.

Tiberius tries various tactics to induce Octavius to abandon his opposition: offering him a bribe and shutting down the Roman treasury, and thereby, most government business.

[82] After passage of the bill, the senate allocated very little money for the commissioners, making it impossible for the commission to do its job when it needed to pay for surveyors, pack animals, and other expenses.

[83] After this meagre allotment, however, news arrived that Attalus III of Pergamum had died and that he had bequeathed his treasury and devised his kingdom to Rome.

[54] This was compounded by his attempt to stand for re-election, claiming that he needed to do so to prevent repeal of the agrarian law[87] or possibly to escape prosecution for his deposition of Octavius.

When Scaevola refused, Scipio Nasica shouted a formula for levying soldiers in an emergency – "anyone who wants the community secure, follow me" (Latin: qui rem publicam salvam esse volunt me sequatur)[94] – and led a mob to the comitia with his toga drawn over his head.

[96] Tiberius and supporters did not fight back;[79] killed with stones, wooden chairs and other blunt weapons, their bodies were thrown into the Tiber.

[102] However, over the few years of the commission's most fruitful activities, the amount of land distributed was substantial: the Gracchan boundary stones are found all over southern Italy.

Scipio Nasica, after being brought up on the charge of murdering Tiberius Gracchus,[109][110] was sent on a convenient delegation to Pergamum, where he died the following year.

[112] Tiberius' brother, Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, continued his career without incident until he too stood for the tribunate and proposed similarly radical legislation, before also being killed with now explicit approval of the senate.

[117] Roman republican law, when passing ostensibly capital sentences, permitted convicts to flee the city into permanent exile.

[118] His death also suggested that the republic itself was temperamentally unsuited for producing the types of economic reforms wanted or hypothetically needed, as in Tiberius' framing, by the people.

[119] The senate's continued pursuit of Tiberius Gracchus' supporters also entrenched polarisation in the Roman body politic, while at the same time endorsing private use of violence to enforce or suppress a group, even a majority, of fellow countrymen.

[124] Modern historians such as Mary Beard, however, warn that Cicero's claim is "rhetorical oversimplification [and that] the idea there had been a calm consensus at Rome between rich and poor until [133 BC] is at best a nostalgic fiction".

For example, Andrew Lintott writes: In this way Sigonio has helped to create the standard modern periodisation, whereby the Conflict of the Orders ends in 287 and the decline of the Republic begins in 133, the intervening period displaying the constitution at its best.

[131] In the end, Roman enforcement of its long-unexercised rights over the ager publicus, stoking resentment and removing disincentives to rebellion, contributed to the Social War between Rome and its Italian allies.

[135] Modern perspectives see the comparison as unapt, as Babeuf intended abolish private land ownership entirely and overthrow the French republic, goals incompatible with Tiberius'.