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Gracchus (urban Prefect)
The Gracchi brothers were two Roman brothers, sons of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus who was consul in 177 BC. Tiberius, the elder brother, was tribune of the plebs in 133 BC and Gaius, the younger brother, was tribune a decade later in 123–122 BC. They attempted to redistribute the ''ager publicus'' – the public land hitherto controlled principally by aristocrats – and military veterans, in addition to other social and constitutional reforms. After achieving some early success, both were assassinated by the Early lives Their father was the elderly Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, who had served as tribune of the plebs, praetor, consul, and censor. Their mother was Cornelia, daughter of Scipio Africanus, himself considered a hero by the Roman people for his part in the war against Carthage. Their parents had 12 children; only one daughter – who later married Scipio Aemilianus – and two sons, Tiberius and Gaius, survived to adulthood. After the boy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (consul 177 BC)
Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus ( 220 BC – 154 BC) was a Roman politician and general of the 2nd century BC. He served two consulships, one in 177 and one 163 BC, and was awarded two triumphs. He was also the father of the two famous Gracchi brothers: Tiberius and Gaius. Tiberius was of plebeian status and was a member of the well-connected gens Sempronia, a family of ancient Rome. Tiberius was the son of Publius Sempronius Gracchus. He was nephew of the consul and general Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (killed 212 BC). His paternal grandfather was also a consul in 238 BC. His mother's identity is not known. His father was not the same Publius Sempronius Gracchus who served as tribune of the plebs in 189 BC. Instead his father had possibly died during the Second Punic War, since no further references exist to him. Early career Not much is known of his early life. He may have been made an augur in 204 BC in place of Marcus Pomponius M ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Third Punic War
The Third Punic War (149–146 BC) was the third and last of the Punic Wars fought between Carthage and Rome. The war was fought entirely within Carthaginian territory, in modern northern Tunisia. When the Second Punic War ended in 201 BC, one of the terms of the peace treaty prohibited Carthage from waging war without Rome's permission. Rome's ally, King Masinissa of Numidia, exploited this to repeatedly raid and seize Carthaginian territory with impunity. In 149 BC Carthage sent an army, under Hasdrubal, against Masinissa, the treaty notwithstanding. The campaign ended in disaster as the Battle of Oroscopa ended with a Carthaginian defeat and the surrender of the Carthaginian army. Anti-Carthaginian factions in Rome used the illicit military action as a pretext to prepare a punitive expedition. Later in 149 BC, a large Roman army landed at Utica in North Africa. The Carthaginians hoped to appease the Romans, but despite the Carthaginians surrendering all of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cato The Elder
Marcus Porcius Cato (; 234–149 BC), also known as Cato the Censor ( la, Censorius), the Elder and the Wise, was a Roman soldier, senator, and historian known for his conservatism and opposition to Hellenization. He was the first to write history in Latin with his ''Origines'', a now fragmentary work on the history of Rome. His work '' De agri cultura'', a rambling work on agriculture, farming, rituals, and recipes, is the oldest extant prose written in the Latin language. His epithet "Elder" distinguishes him from his great-grandson Cato the Younger, who opposed Julius Caesar. He came from an ancient Plebeian family who were noted for their military service. Like his forefathers, Cato was devoted to agriculture when not serving in the army. Having attracted the attention of Lucius Valerius Flaccus, he was brought to Rome and began to follow the ''cursus honorum'': he was successively military tribune (214 BC), quaestor (204), aedile (199), praetor (198), consul (195) together ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Decline Of The West
''The Decline of the West'' (german: Der Untergang des Abendlandes; more literally, ''The Downfall of the Occident''), is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler. The first volume, subtitled ''Form and Actuality'', was published in the summer of 1918. The second volume, subtitled ''Perspectives of World History'', was published in 1922. The definitive edition of both volumes was published in 1923. Spengler introduced his book as a " Copernican overturning"—a specific metaphor of societal collapse—involving the rejection of the Eurocentric view of history, especially the division of history into the linear "ancient-medieval- modern" rubric. According to Spengler, the meaningful units for history are not epochs but whole cultures which evolve as organisms. In his framework, the terms "culture" and "civilization" were given non-standard definitions and cultures are described as having lifespans of about a thousand years of flourishing, and a thousand years of decline. To Spen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oswald Spengler
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (; 29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936) was a German historian and philosopher of history whose interests included mathematics, science, and art, as well as their relation to his organic theory of history. He is best known for his two-volume work, ''The Decline of the West'' (''Der Untergang des Abendlandes''), published in 1918 and 1922, covering human history. Spengler's model of history postulates that human cultures and civilizations are akin to biological entities, each with a limited, predictable, and deterministic lifespan. Spengler predicted that about the year 2000, Western civilization would enter the period of pre‑death emergency whose countering would lead to 200 years of Caesarism (extra-constitutional omnipotence of the executive branch of government) before Western civilization's final collapse. Spengler is regarded as a nationalist and an anti-democrat, and he was a prominent member of the Weimar-era Conservative Revolution. Although he h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tribal Assembly
The Tribal Assembly (''comitia populi tributa'') was an assembly consisting of all Roman citizens convened by tribes (''tribus''). In the Roman Republic, citizens did not elect legislative representatives. Instead, they voted themselves on legislative matters in the popular assemblies (the comitia centuriata, the tribal assembly and the plebeian council). Bills were proposed by magistrates and the citizens only exercised their right to vote. In the Tribal Assembly, citizens were organized on the basis of 35 tribes: four urban tribes of the citizens in the city of Rome, and 31 rural tribes of citizens outside the city. Each tribe voted separately and one after the other. In each tribe, decisions were made by majority vote and its decision counted as one vote regardless of how many electors each tribe held. Once a majority of tribes voted in the same way on a given measure, the voting ended and the matter was decided. The Tribal Assembly was chaired by a magistrate, usually a consu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Roman Constitution
The Roman Constitution was an uncodified set of guidelines and principles passed down mainly through precedent.Byrd, 161 The Roman constitution was not formal or even official, largely unwritten and constantly evolving. Having those characteristics, it was therefore more like the British and United States common law system than a sovereign law system like the English Constitutions of Clarendon and Great Charter or the United States Constitution, even though the constitution's evolution through the years was often directed by passage of new laws and repeal of older ones. Concepts that originated in the Roman constitution live on in both forms of government to this day. Examples include checks and balances, the separation of powers, vetoes, filibusters, quorum requirements, term limits, impeachments, the powers of the purse, and regularly scheduled elections. Even some lesser used modern constitutional concepts, such as the bloc voting found in the electoral college of the Uni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Athenian Democracy
Athenian democracy developed around the 6th century BC in the Greek city-state (known as a polis) of Athens, comprising the city of Athens and the surrounding territory of Attica. Although Athens is the most famous ancient Greek democratic city-state, it was not the only one, nor was it the first; multiple other city-states adopted similar democratic constitutions before Athens. By the late 4th century BC as many as half of the over one thousand existing Greek city-states might have been democracies. Athens practiced a political system of legislation and executive bills. Participation was open to adult, male citizens (i.e., not a foreign resident, regardless of how many generations of the family had lived in the city, nor a slave, nor a woman), who "were probably no more than 30 percent of the total adult population". Solon (in 594 BC), Cleisthenes (in 508–07 BC), and Ephialtes (in 462 BC) contributed to the development of Athenian democracy. Cleisthenes broke up the unlimite ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marcus Fulvius Flaccus (consul 125 BC)
Marcus Fulvius Flaccus (d. 121 BC) was a Roman senator and an ally of the Gracchi. He served as consul in 125 BC and as plebeian tribune in 122 BC. Biography Flaccus had become one of the three men for the assignment of agricultural lands that was established by Tiberius Gracchus' ''lex agraria'' by 130 BC; he retained the post until his death. In this role, he attacked Scipio Aemilianus' attempts – at the instigation of the allies themselves – to transfer the jurisdiction over boundary disputes from the commission to the consuls. He served as praetor some time before 128 BC. As a solution to the problem of land division among the allied cities, Flaccus proposed to give Roman citizenship to individual Italian allies in order to obtain lands, thereby introducing a question that vexed Roman politics for many years. Elected consul in 125 BC on this programme, he proposed bills to grant the Italians citizenship and right of appeal. Valerius Maximu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Senatus Consultum Ultimum
The ''senatus consultum ultimum'' ("final decree of the Senate", often abbreviated to SCU) is the modern term given to resolutions of the Roman Senate lending its moral support for magistrates to use the full extent of their powers and ignore the laws to safeguard the state. The decree has been interpreted to mean something akin to martial law, a suspension of the constitution, or a state of emergency. However, it is generally accepted that the senate did not have power to make or provide exceptions to laws. No laws were actually suspended; the senate merely lent its moral authority to defend a magistrate's extra-legal acts. First used against Gaius Gracchus in 121 BC to suppress a violent protest against repeal of a colonisation law and accepted thereafter, recourse to the decree accelerated over the course of the last century of the republic. Its use was politically disputed, although usually in terms of whether a decree was justified by the challenges facing the state ra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lucius Opimius
Lucius Opimius was a Roman politician who held the consulship in 121 BC, in which capacity and year he ordered the execution of 3,000 supporters of popular leader Gaius Gracchus without trial, using as pretext the state of emergency declared after Gracchus's recent and turbulent death. Biography He is first mentioned for crushing the revolt of the town of Fregellae in 125 BC. He was elected consul in 121 BC with Quintus Fabius Maximus Allobrogicus, and while Fabius was campaigning in Gaul, he took part in perhaps the most decisive event of Roman history to that point. When Gaius Gracchus and M. Fulvius Flaccus were defeated for re-election by Opimius and Fabius, Gracchus organized a mass protest on the Aventine Hill. Alarmed by this action, the Senate passed the motion ''senatus consultum ultimum'', which Opimius understood as an order to suppress their activities by any means necessary—including force. He gathered an armed force of Senators and their supporters, and confron ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Centuriate Assembly
The Centuriate Assembly (Latin: ''comitia centuriata'') of the Roman Republic was one of the three voting assemblies in the Roman constitution. It was named the Centuriate Assembly as it originally divided Roman citizens into groups of one hundred men by classes. The centuries initially reflected military status, but were later based on the wealth of their members. The centuries gathered into the Centuriate Assembly for legislative, electoral, and judicial purposes. The majority of votes in any century decided how that century voted. Each century received one vote, regardless of how many electors each Century held. Once a majority of centuries voted in the same way on a given measure, the voting ended, and the matter was decided.Taylor, 40 Only the Centuriate Assembly could declare war or elect the highest-ranking Roman magistrates: consuls, praetors and censors.Abbott, 257 The Centuriate Assembly could also pass a law that granted constitutional command authority, or "Imperium", to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
