Gracchi brothers

He wrote all of these amazing biographies that he intentionally selected the greatest and the worst men of Greece and Rome and wrote their stories so that they could be examples for the later years.

And we go back and read the Gracchi brothers.

And there's something that happens when you go look at men who were ruling in ancient Rome.

And you can see what worked and you can see what didn't.

And you can see what caused anger and you can see where were their strengths and their weaknesses.

And it suddenly makes this question of leadership one of studying human nature and looking at what are the mistakes that they made for both Gracchi brothers lean far too much on a popular appeal.

They thought that they were safe because the people were with them.

The oldest Iraqi brother kind of forgot that it was actually the senators who wielded power.

They would have misunderstood everything, and consequently misexplained everything.

The way in which Cicero alludes to the men and the events of the period of the Gracchi should be sufficient to convince us of this.

Sallust, though vastly inferior as a man to either of the Optimate leaders, was extraordinarily successful in seizing the thread of events.

The chapters on politics in Rome in the year which succeeded the Gracchan Revolution, and again after the consulship of Pompey and Crassus in B.C. seventy, can hardly be too highly praised, especially when we consider how soon after the events narrated they were written.

By these two laws, a new power was created in the state, a power which, though in the hands of Caesar it became essentially democratic, in the hands of Pompey, as the popular leaders clearly saw, might become a fatal agent of reaction.

With the rise of this force, the power of the Senate was definitely crushed, and, as a consequence, the old democratic battle cries lost all their meaning.

The authority against which they had been useful as levers was overthrown, and to quote the evils against which the Gracchi had striven as the object at this period of the popular party's attack is as idle as it would have been to support the reform bill of 1868 with the arguments used for that of 1832.

In B.C. 67, the partisans of Pompey had forced the hand of the popular party and compelled them to support the proposal of Gabinius.

Tiberius Gracchus was assassinated for instigating land reform.

During the days of the Gracchi, Like you've heard like the 1% kind of thing.

That was totally what was happening in the Roman Republic.

1% of people owned almost all of the land.

There are also four single Lives in our collection—Artaxerxes, Eretus, Galba, and Otho—and we get traces of twelve more that are now lost.

One of the pairs is a double one, where, to match the two Gracchi, Plutarch selects the two reforming Spartan kings Agis and Cleomenes.

We have in all, therefore, fifty Lives by Plutarch.

End of introduction.

Man was indeed screwed up by mood and figure into a logical machine that was to forward the public good with the utmost punctuality and effect, and it might go very well on smooth ground and under favorable circumstances, but would it work uphill or against the grain? It was to be feared that the proud temple of reason, which at a distance and in stately supposition shone like the palaces of the New Jerusalem, might, when placed on actual ground, be broken up into the sordid styles of sensuality and the petty huckster's shop of self-interest.

Every man, it was proposed, so ran the tenor of the bond, was to be a Regulus, a Codrus, a Cato, or Brutus; every woman, a mother of the Gracchi.

It was well said, and 'tis a kind of good deed to say well.

But heroes on paper might degenerate into vagabonds in practice, Corinna's into courtesans.