The brothers Gracchi, grandsons of Scipio Africanus who defeated Hannibal, championed the poor and were eventually murdered by their political opponents. A fam

The brothers Gracchi, grandsons of Scipio Africanus who defeated Hannibal, championed the poor and were eventually murdered by their political opponents. A famous line by Tiberius Gracchus who commented on the fate of those who fought for Rome in her legions: "The savage beasts," said he, "in Italy, have their particular dens, they have their places of repose and refuge; but the men who bear arms, and expose their lives for the safety of their country, enjoy in the meantime nothing more in it but the air and light and, having no houses or settlements of their own, are constrained to wander from place to place with their wives and children." [1] One of the unsavory facts of the Roman republic was tax farming. The rich paid huge sums to the Senate for the right to "tax" that is extort as much money as possible from freedmen as possible. If you can't pay, then your family could be enslaved. This was one of the reasons that led to the Second Servile War. Accordingly Marius sent to Nicomedes, the king of Bithynia, requesting assistance. The king replied that the majority of the Bithynians had been seized by tax farmers and were now in slavery in the Roman provinces. The senate then issued a decree that no citizen of an allied state should be held in slavery in a Roman province, and that the praetors should provide for their liberation. [2] The effect of Rome's many wars was that freedmen and small farmers became impoverished. After the Punic wars, the rich bought up all the land and employed their newly conquered slaves. Livy and Polybius also tell of farms suffering physical destruction at the hands of rampaging armies, both Roman and foreign, especially during the Hannibalic War. Scores of veterans returned home only to behold the burnt remnants of their once-productive farms and were forced to sell or abandon their plots when they could afford neither the resources nor the time to restore them.[3] [1] http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/tiberius.html http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/tiberius.html [2] https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ancient/3slaverevolttexts.asp https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ancient/3slaverevolttexts.as... [3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/intesociscierevi.92.1.01?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/intesociscierevi.92.1.01?seq=1 https://brewminate.com/praecipitia-in-ruinam-the-decline-of-the-small-roman-farmer-and-the-fall-of-the-roman-republic/ https://brewminate.com/praecipitia-in-ruinam-the-decline-of-...