The Republic Breaks

CHAPTER 4 · 133–60 BC · The Rise and Fall of Rome, 264 BC – AD 476

The map keeps reddening — watch Pompey’s arrow sweep the east, Syria turning red, a ring of client kingdoms (grey-tan) forming behind it — but from this chapter on, the story is Rome against Rome. It opens with a land bill. In 133 BC the tribune Tiberius Gracchus proposes resettling the dispossessed poor on illegally-held public land; the Senate’s response is to club him and 300 followers to death on the Capitol — the Republic’s first political bloodshed in three centuries. His brother Gaius, more radical, follows in 121 with 3,000 supporters killed under an emergency decree. The message absor

The turn: Sulla marches on Rome, 88 BC.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.