Strong-arm Tactics. Crime was probably common on the streets of Rome. Men were killed as spectacle in the arena. The Republic collapsed in a famous series of civil wars. It is easy to imagine, then, that Roman politics was always conducted by force, but for most of the Republic this idea was surprisingly false. There are perhaps traces of uprisings and riots in the early years after the fall of the kings, but these are hard to pin down. For periods about which more is known—the third and most of the second century B.C.E.—there is nearly no political violence. The problems started around the time when two brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, became tribunes in 133 and 123 B.C.E., respectively. Both wanted to redistribute the use of some publicly...