Around the year 133 BC, Rome was set up as a democracy. Later the Roman people were sovereign. Even the system of voting was weighted to give more influence to the votes of the wealthy. By 14 AD, when the first emperor Augustus died, popular elections had all but disappeared. This was nothing short of a revolution, brought about through a century of constant civil strife, and sometimes open warfare. Many Romans themselves put the key turning point in 133 BC. The course of events is clear enough.In the process, he deposed from office another tribune who opposed the distribution and argued that his reforms should be funded from the money that came from the new Roman imperial province of Asia. Gracchus's land bill was passed. Gracchus's motivation is much less clear. Whatever his motives were, his career crystallised many of the main issues that were to underlie the revolutionary politics of the next hundred years.The consequences of Rome's growing empire were crucial. Tiberius's decision to use the revenues of Asia for his land distribution was a provocative claim - that the poor as well as the rich should enjoy the fruits of Rome's conquests. But Tiberius's desire to stand for a second tribunate also raised questions of personal political dominance. This became an increasingly urgent issue as leading men in the first century BC, such as Julius Caesar, were sometimes given vast power to deal with the military threats facing Rome from overseas - and then proved unwilling to lay down that power when they returned to civilian life. The events of 133 BC were followed by a series of intensifying crises. At the end of the century Gaius Marius, a stunningly successful soldier, defeated enemies in Africa, Gaul and finally in Italy, when Rome's allies in Italy rebelled against her.He held the highest office of state, the consulship, no fewer than seven times, an unprecedented level of long-term dominance of the political process. Marius then came into violent conflict with Lucius Cornelius Sulla, another Roman warlord, who after victories in the east actually marched on Rome in 82 BC and established himself 'dictator'.This had been an ancient Roman office designed to give a leading politician short terms powers in an emergency.Unlike Julius Caesar, however, who was to become dictator 40 years later, Sulla retired from the office and died in his bed.The middle years of the first century BC were marked by violence in the city, and fighting between gangs supporting rival politicians and political programmes.The two protagonists were Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus ('Pompey the Great', as he was called, after Alexander the Great) and Julius Caesar.Caesar promoted radical policies in the spirit of Tiberius Gracchus; Pompey had the support of the traditionalists.Historians in both the ancient and modern world have devoted enormous energy to tracking the precise stages by which these two men came head-to-head in civil war. But the fact is that, given the power each had accrued and their entrenched opposition, war between them was almost inevitable. Not much 'liberty' was to follow. Instead there was another decade of civil war as Caesar's supporters first of all battled it out with his assassins, and when they had been finished off, fought among themselves.
