# 1 in Google is this biography of the Gracchi Brothers, which is general but which leaves me with endless questions.

From it, there's the following quote about the Gracchi:

" He [Gaius Gracchus] was for giving the citizenship to all Italians, extending it almost to the Alps, distributing the public domain, limiting the holdings of each citizen to five hundred acres, as had once been provided by the Licinian law, establishing new customs duties, filling the provinces with new colonies, transferring the judicial powers from the senate to the equites, and began the practice of distributing grain to the people. He left nothing undisturbed, nothing untouched, nothing unmolested, nothing, in short, as it had been.

What interests me is simply this - I can't find ANY Roman leader prior to first Tiberius, then the more revolutionary Gaius, who interested themselves at all in the plight of the poorer Romans who were being edged out of economic viability as the Republic gained mroe and more territory. Were they totally oblivious to the problems the Gracchi pinpointed, or was there simply a tradition of complete "laissez-faire" which meant that the richer could have cared less what happened to the poor?

What also strikes me is how very well this description of what Gaius Gracchus hoped to accomplish, was actually in the legislative program of Julius Caesar once he'd assumed power as a dictator - as if the Republican form of government prevented those reforms from being made for EIGHTY YEARS, until that government had to be destroyed entirely to take the actions Gaius Gracchus had desired.