Hello and welcome to this episode of Epochs where I should be talking all about the decline

or fall of the Roman Republic. Now let me take you to a moment in time, just shy of 140 years before Christ, a young Roman aristocrat was making his way

through Italy on his way to fight a war in Spain. And what he saw out of his carriage window

setting train a series of events which were to define his life and career and ultimately lead to the end of the Roman

Republic itself about a hundred years later. What that young Roman aristocrat just starting out on his career saw

was that where Italy should have been filled with small homesteads, small farms. It was in fact filled with giant farms held by just a small

number of extremely rich people. And instead of working those farms were good, hard-working

honest Italian people, he saw foreign slaves. And what it meant was that the very fabric of Roman or Italian society was

all out of whack but there was something terribly wrong at the heart of Roman society. And it affected that young

aristocrat very profoundly and he went on after his military career to have a

political career in Rome and he tried to champion the causes of the downtrodden and the poor and the dispossessed.

And I want to tell you his story because his story is really one of the first most important stories when it comes to the grand

narrative of the fall of the Roman Republic.

That young aristocrat's name was Tiberius Gracchus.

So when talking all about the life and career and achievements, or lack thereof, of Tiberius

Gracus, you'll be looking at Appian and Plutarch.

I'm mainly going to be reading from Plutarch.

So to begin the life of Tiberius Grechus, the first thing you've got to say really

is that he is extremely blue-blooded.

He wasn't just a bit aristocratic.

He was kind of as aristocratic as you could get in a way.

His father, another Tiberius, Tiberius Speronius Gracus, had been a censor and a console twice, i.e. the very, very pinnacle of Roman political life.

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