More importantly, they were the first to bypass the democratic norms of the republic in order to get their agendas passed (by skipping senatorial approval for their bill, and censuring a tribune for vetoing it), and their opponents violated even more norms in order to halt their agendas (by passing an emergency decree calling for their deaths).
The saga of the Gracchi is when the cracks in the Republican order first began to appear. This pattern of norm-breaking back and forth between progressives and reactionaries would repeat until there were no norms left and it took six decades of civil war until peace and stability was restored by the imperial dictatorship.
To refer to "democratic norms" or "progressives and reactionaries" is an anachronistic stretch to say the least. A more accurate summation is that the Gracchi championed land reform for the poor (specifically, redistributing land illegally acquired smallholders by members of the senatorial oligarchy) in the service of their own political ambitions, and in doing so they repeatedly violated the norms of the governing oligarchy, which protected their property (itself frequently acquired in technical violation of legal norms) by murdering the reformers and massacring their followers.
The story of the fall of the Roman Republic is not so much a story of the decay of democratic or governing institutions as we know them as it is the story of a ruling oligarchy that gradually loses the ability to discipline its own members and keep them united in a common policy.
The story of the fall of the Roman Republic is not so much a story of the decay of democratic or governing institutions as we know them as it is the story of a ruling oligarchy that gradually loses the ability to discipline its own members and keep them united in a common policy.
The sky isn’t so much blue as it is light that has a wavelength around 450-495 nm.
I understand that a historian would take great offense to the anachronism you’ve pointed out, but I still can’t help but to think that we’re describing the same thing with different words. Yes yes, words matter, but, there’s some underlying truth about when groups of apes stop being able to govern themselves that comes out, no matter the words.
They didn't call them "democratic norms" or "progressives and reactionaries", sure, but that's what they were. These are descriptive terms, not proper nouns.
"democratic norms" are behaviors in the public sphere that are expected under the assumption that politicians are interested in the good of everyone and that the popular will has political meaning.
"progressives" are politicians who want to improve society through reform and the redistribution of wealth and power.
"reactionaries" are politicians who want to return things back to the way they were before progressives existed.
These terms are perfectly appropriate to describe the political climate in the late republic.
You keep asserting that there was a "ruling oligarchy" when this is simply not true. If Rome was ruled by an oligarchy, then the Gracchi never would have got off the ground.
Leaving aside the historiographical issue of how projecting modern descriptive terms onto the past fundamentally distorts our understanding of how people back then conceived of their society, I'm afraid you're laboring under some extreme misapprehensions about the nature of the late Republican government. That Republican Rome was governed by an aristocratic land-owning oligarchy for pretty much its entire existence is an undisputed historical fact. The Gracchi were wealthy members of the ruling elite wielding land redistribution as a political tool in their competition for power with other members of the ruling elite. They weren't ordinary Roman citizens organizing popular resistance from below.
Can you name a historical society where there wasn't any manner of "aristocratic ruling class"?
It is a historical constant that rich people are more likely to find themselves in office. Campaigning takes time and effort and you don't get paid for it, so you pretty much have to have some wealth stashed up before you can run for office. That was true then as it is true now.
That doesn't mean that there has never been a democratic government in all of history. No matter how wealthy you are, in order to get those jobs, you have to convince people to vote for you.
I didn't say that there has never been a democratic government in all of history. I said that the Roman Republic could not in any sense of the word be described as democratic. It was fundamentally and wholly governed by wealthy land-owning elites, who derived their position in the system from their wealth, despite the presence of institutions that bear a superficial similarity to institutions present in modern democracies.
I'd really urge you to crack open an academic textbook on the subject. If you'd like to dive a little deeper, I'd recommend W.G. Runciman, "Capitalism Without Classes: The Case of Ancient Rome" (British Journal of Sociology), Wilfried Nippel, "Policing Rome" (Journal of Roman Studies), Peter Baehr, "Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World", Peter Brunt, "The Army and the Land in the Roman Revolution" and Douglass North, "Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance" which has a large stretch of summary of Roman political economy.
Would you agree that more often than not, most ‘revolutions’ throughout history have been members of the ruling elite wielding wealth redistribution as a political tool? I ask this seriously, and if you can point me towards some related literature I’d greatly appreciate it.
How should history account for the economic unrest allowing the Gracchi to come to power? It seems that if the overall economic system were not functioning to distribute prosperity widely enough then some sort of chaos would ensue - is it the norm breaking, could the economic instability be a stronger contributing cause? Would the norm breaking even be possible without the lack of access to economic opportunity?
Definitely. In times of peace, prosperity, and contentment, people would be much more harsh on those who want to overturn the liberal democratic order.
When people are feeling desperate, and it's become clear that the system is not working, it's easy for populists to come in and promise to fix all the problems if only you'll let them do away with that pesky free press, and take votes away from those frustrating opposition people, and get rid of the annoying rules about making profit while in office.
The saga of the Gracchi is when the cracks in the Republican order first began to appear. This pattern of norm-breaking back and forth between progressives and reactionaries would repeat until there were no norms left and it took six decades of civil war until peace and stability was restored by the imperial dictatorship.