The First Agrarians

Cincinnatus' fears of the plebs and their laws eventually came to fruition about 300 years after his death.  The plebian Caius Tiberius Gracchus was elected tribune in 133 BC.  Plutarch says that Caius was at first bad-tempered and lazy, but he trained himself to be an eloquent speaker and was elected as treasurer in Sardinia, which was where he learned to work hard and apply himself.  He later returned to Rome and was elected tribune.

Because of ongoing civil war in Rome, many men had been absent from their farms for years.  Small farms were going bankrupt and being bought up by the wealthy, which became conglomerated into huge, private estates.  Plutarch says that when Tiberius was traveling in the outlying districts he "found the country almost depopulated and its husbandmen and shepherds imported barbarian slaves."  It was after seeing this that he "first conceived the policy which was to be the source of countless ills to himself and to his brother."

In at attempt to help the poor he proposed a new policy, including a law known as Lex Sempronia Agraria.  In dealing with public land, which was land that had been conquered in war, the current law stated that no individual could own more than 500 jugera (about 125 hectares), but that law had been ignored for generations.  Tiberius' law stated that landowners could keep 250 jugera above the legal limit and that the state would buy back any land they had to forfeit.  However, much of the land in question was held by landowners who owned far larger portions than that.  In addition, much of that land had been leased, rented, or re-sold in portions, sometimes for generations of families.  The Lex stated that all the surplus land had to be re-distributed, at 30 jugeras per household, for each of the poor and homeless families in Rome.  This amount of land would also be just enough to make those poor eligible for taxation by the Roman government.  Tiberius then bypassed the Roman Senate and brought his law to the Popular Assembly for approval.  Soon after when the King of Pergamum died and left his entire country to the state of Rome, he moved in to use this land to fund his law.  The Senate accused Tiberius of aspiring to become king himself and brought him to trial.  The trial quickly got out of hand and Tiberius was beaten to death along with several of his followers.  Their bodies were thrown into the Tiber River.

It was the Lex Sempronia Agraria that gave us our modern term "agrarian," and the resulting political fallout also lent to the term its revolutionary connotations.  The idea of using farmland as a social leveling tool by the government persisted up through the French Revolution of 1789.  Those revolutionary agrarians insisted on re-instituting the agrarian law to re-distribute farmland among the poor in the cities.  Thomas Jefferson admired this tactic and both he and James Madison believed that the moral superiority of farming was essential to sustaining American democracy.