First, a significant correction. Point 2) is backed up by neither the sources nor modern scholarship, and persists in the popular imagination basically because pop history and the internet still use Mommsen's interpretation of the Republic, with a little bit of Syme mixed in, as authoritative. Latifundia as a named phenomenon appear only in the imperial period, and only outside of Italy, although Pliny the Elder (who introduces the term in our texts) tells us that he believes that they had earlier ruined Italian agriculture. Agriculture. Pliny the Elder makes no comment on any social effects, and the identification of latifundia with any phenomenon observed by the Gracchi some two hundred years earlier seems suspect. Pliny seems to be talking, basically, about cash crop farming on a large scale, which is also not what the land that the Gracchi distributed was mostly being used for.

What the sources say Ti. Gracchus observed was a decline in Italian manpower, such that Gracchus worried that the military's reserves would be depleted. To a certain extent this is backed up by the census figures given in the epitome of Livy, but the census numbers are impossible, showing a population jump immediately after Gracchus' tribunate in 133 of several full percentage points, which cannot be. Various modern explanations have been floated to explain this discrepancy, but to make what is essentially a graduate module very, very short, the grudging consensus seems to be Rosenstein's argument.

Rosenstein accepted, as basically everybody but like...Lo Cascio does now, the so-called "Low Count," i.e. that Italy, while extremely highly urbanized, was not so populous as to be suffering from overpopulation, but was likewise not at all suffering from underpopulation. Quite the reverse. From this starting point, Rosenstein proposed that rural Italian farming families were probably multi-generational affairs, averaging several able-bodied adult men at any given time. Since small farming plots do not benefit, and are in fact only harmed, by an excess of workers, Rosenstein argued that warfare served mostly as a sort of overflow valve that was beneficial to rural families. The Roman people, assembled as the Tribal Assembly, declared war, and while they occasionally rejected it (famously during the first vote for the Second Macedonian War), overwhelmingly in this period the Roman people voted to go to war with very little pretext. The Romans were at war every single year pretty much from the end of the First Punic War to the time of Augustus (I forget the precise dates Rosenstein gives). Rural families, who made up the bulk of the army during every period of the Roman state, likely found it beneficial to send off one of their four sons to war for four or five years. The labor lost was negligible for the size of their plots, and temporarily losing that mouth to feed was a significant economic advantage, especially if he was going to come home in a few years laden with plunder, at a marriageable age.

Moreover, the evidence for disenfranchised soldiers is vanishingly hard to find. Pretty much all of it dates from the first century. Probably the best piece of evidence is the example of the Sullan veterans as reported by Sallust. Sallust doesn't go into much detail, but he says that a lot of Sullan veterans joined Manlius (and then Catiline) because their farming plots had failed and they were forced to sell their land. But he doesn't refer at all to the idea that they sold their land to large landholders consolidating massive plots, and being discharged veterans they were certainly not selling their land because they were unable to maintain it while on campaign. The usual consensus on what Sallust is talking about is that the Sullan veterans were a) often not settled on especially good land (the best land in the south was that in the ager Campanus, which at the time was still public) and b) had fallen victim to the debt crisis of the early 60s, which forced them to borrow continuously larger sums of money to pay back their creditors.

Moreover, the land distributions of the Gracchi had no effect on the ability of large landholders to purchase smaller plots nearby. When the idea you're referring to was first floated, it was still unclear whether the Gracchan land commissions had broken up and distributed private land or whether it had only distributed and privatized public land. The universal consensus today is the latter: the Gracchi centuriated designated areas of public land and privatized it. The evidence is simply overwhelming. The problem that Ti. Gracchus argued was lowering Italian manpower was that he believed that allied Italian communities, which usually had the right to rent adjoining public land (which had often been their own land, confiscated after war with the Romans), were being prevented from access to this land by people who were renting too much of it. Economic historians today usually reckon that most of this land, which was overwhelmingly in the south (even though...Ti. supposedly identified this problem in...Etruria...where survey archaeology disproves his conclusions...), was being used for pasture, hence the need for very large holdings. The whole scenario makes very little sense (settling Roman citizens is supposed to improve allied Italian manpower?), and Rosenstein's argument has not yet been satisfactorily countered, and as I said has become the grudging consensus. Rosenstein suggested that the phenomenon Ti. was misunderstanding was a reluctance on the part of rural families to register for the census, causing an artificial deflation of the census figures. Combined with the fact that no colonial foundations had been established in about three decades--quite contrary to internet belief, the distribution of land to Roman citizens wasn't at all an innovation of the Gracchi, but rather it was a long accepted practice in the Republic to ensure a large reserve force and to police conquered Italian territory with fortified military colonies--there appeared to be a land crisis when in fact there wasn't really one. The reluctance to register in the census, Rosenstein reckoned, was due to the unpopularity of recent wars, particularly the wars in Spain that dragged on for decades (centuries, even) without end, and from which very little profitable plunder was being extracted. Under these circumstances, it was no longer worthwhile for many families to send their young men to war, until a better war (or some benefit to registering for the census, such as eligibility in the Gracchan land program) appeared.

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