Appian, a Greek from Alexandria, wrote The Civil Wars in the second century. This is Book 1, the Gracchi through Sulla. Rome was still a republic: a city run by a senate and elected officials, not a king.

Tiberius Gracchus, a tribune — an official elected to protect the people — claims public land the rich treated as their own, and is beaten to death with fragments of a bench. His brother Gaius follows with grain and Italian citizenship, and dies hunted through a grove. The Social War turns Italy into a battlefield for the citizenship Italians had earned fighting for Rome. Then Marius and Sulla show what a client army is for: a march on Rome, a list of the condemned, heads on the speaker’s platform, a dictator who retires as if the constitution could be put back in a cupboard. It is a story of Romans killing Romans, from a land bill to soldiers in the Forum.