Plutarch, a Greek from the first and second centuries AD, wrote Parallel Lives, paired biographies of Greeks and Romans. This is his life of Gaius Gracchus, a Roman of the late second century BC. Rome was still a Republic then: a senate and elected officials, not a king. Gaius's older brother Tiberius had already been killed over land laws for the poor.

Gaius takes up that cause and goes further: grain at a fixed price, new colonies, juries taken from the senators, and talk of citizenship for the Latins, Italy's neighbors under Rome. He is the better speaker and a more dangerous builder of following. The Senate's last decree hunts him to the Grove of Furrina, a shrine by the river. He dies by a slave's hand; his head is paid for in gold. The brothers leave street, statute, and corpse — a road that later leads toward Marius and Caesar.