Bret Devereaux

Haha! Oh man. But yeah, I'm with @PetreRaleigh - by refusing to compromise anything, the Roman aristocracy lost everything. Hell, if they had backed Gracchus' land reform fully, they might not have *needed* a grain dole.

I’m glad my thinking aligns with Bret’s because it makes me feel smart. I was like, “uh, I’m pretty sure it was the aristocrats refusing to rise to the challenge of the time plus a bunch of rich dicks trying to privatize everything.”

I mean, there's also a criticism to be made of some of the 'reformer's and the speed to which they moved to extra-legal and even violent means. But that was going to happen *eventually* regardless - if you stonewall these guys forever, someone's gonna get violent.

And while I sympathize with some of the aristocrats (particularly the post-Sullan ones trying to hold a broken system together), it's impossible to argue that 'compromise nothing' could have ever worked-because the Social War is such an obvious failure of Roman political will

If Ti. Gracchus never shoves a tribune, if C. Gracchus avoids public life, if Marius never becomes a soldier, if Saturninus and Sulpicius remained private citizens... Elite Roman intransigence *still* would have sparked a nearly catastrophic civil war w/ the socii.

Right - and it feels unlikely in any case that Marius was the only possible agent who would have paved the way for a series of brutal strongmen, given the very real military inadequacies he was responding to.