Totally agree that there wasn't much for the plebs to compromise on and I hope I'm not both-sidesing here, just pointing out that the tradition of violence around any proposed land reforms goes back hundreds of years, indeed all the way to the very first proposed agrarian laws of 486BC. The patrician class was conservative and backward-looking by its very nature, and the Roman form of government was almost _explicitly_ created to reach stalemate rather than solve problems in one side's favour (tribunes had the veto too, except as you point out for a few years under Sulla). Obviously in practice that meant the oligarchy had the better part of the deal. But that wasn't necessarily a _new_ tension. So what changed that these old grievances ended up shattering the Republic?
