Tribune

Pour down your throat like a healing potion.

So Aoife feels a little chill and then glances at, well, she might, oh, I guess she would see Karis pull herself up out of the water, nods slightly, and is going to try to close the distance between herself and Tribunus.

She's just going straight for him.

Okay.

By 91 BC, one man tried to break that pattern.

Marcus Livius Drusus the Younger, Tribune of the Plebs.

And he was about as far from a firebrand as you could get.

An insider from one of Rome's great families.

And it made perfect fuel for the next crisis.

Which brings in Publius Sulpicius Rufus.

Tribune in 88 BC, who looked at those new citizens and saw a political army that had never bothered to mobilize yet.

He built a coalition out of them, out of the Italians who wanted their votes spread fairly across all 35 tribes, plus the urban poor, plus an old man who wanted one more command, Gaius Marius.

There's...

New York Herald Tribunes gave it four stars and said, "...a magnificent job, visually and dramatically.

The Alamo is top flight." And then Time said it's flat as Texas, which

is...

Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus' sister marries Scipio Aemilianus, Scipio Africanus the younger, who is the guy who, um, conquered finally conquered carthage sacked carthage in 146 so these are super super elite guys and um and so tiberius gracchus is uh is one of the the nobles and so he sees this this discontent as an opportunity to build a different kind of career and he's credited with being one of the most creative well i would credit him with being one of the most creative statesmen certainly his um his innovation and populism was very decisive in roman history so what he figured out was there's this office of the tribune of the plebs excuse me in roman um in the roman constitution that is a kind of um It's a legal office primary.

It's a civil office that there's 10 of them every year, depending on the period that you're looking at.

And the Tribune has this right to call a popular assembly and to propose laws to this popular assembly.

There's a couple of ways that you can pass a law at Rome.

One of them is through a kind of wealth and status ranked voting system.

He wins some decorated honors in war.

He's a great ambassador.

But I think he's around 30 years old when he becomes Tribune of the Plebs and with this radical agenda to solve this problem of wealth inequality.

Fortunately for him, Sulla’s rise brought him plenty of other enemies.

All Marius had to do was conspire with one of them, Tribune Publius Sulpicius Rufus, to strip Sulla of the command and grant it to himself.

When word of the betrayal reached Sulla, he decided he wasn’t going to just lie down and take it.

The strife between him and Marius had been brewing for a long time and now it was time to act.

Where is that slave which told me they had beat you to your trenches? Where is he? Call him hither.

Let him alone; he did inform the truth: But for our gentlemen, the common file, a plague! Tribunes for them! The mouse ne'er shunned the cat as they did budge from rascals worse than they.

But how prevail'd you?

Will the time serve to tell? I do not think.

Rome.

A public place.

Enter Menenius with the two Tribunes of People, Sicinius and Brutus.

The augurer tells me we shall have news tonight.

The Devil walked by Hell Gate that opens upon Earth, And saw a cloud of conflict around the house of birth, And highly mourned Beelzebub, that holy place within, To see so much of courtesy and such a lack of sin.

For three gates give on Mansoul, by two the spirits come, Tribunes of Saras, tyrants of Pandemonium, But by the other portal, too narrow for such wings, The unborn souls of manhood come to material things.

Then answered the Prince Moloch, There lacks not, O our Lord, Battle and skill for battle in stratagem and sword, And companies of valor and generals therefore, And all Mansoul is riotous with noise of civil war.

And often are men traitors, but yet for all our pains The oldest of their buildings untaken yet remains.