Ager publicus in the context of "Public land"

The Gracchi brothers were two brothers who lived during the beginning of the late Roman Republic: Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus. They served in the plebeian tribunates of 133 BC and 122–121 BC, respectively. They have been received as well-born and eloquent advocates for social reform who were both killed by a reactionary political system; their terms in the tribunate precipitated a series of domestic crises which are viewed as unsettling the Roman Republic and contributing to its collapse.

Tiberius Gracchus passed legislation which established a commission to survey Roman public land, reassert state claims to it, and redistribute it to poor rural farmers. These reforms were a reaction to a perceived decline in Italy's rural population. A decade later, Gaius Gracchus' reforms, among other things, attempted to buttress Tiberius' land commission and start Roman colonisation outside of Italy. They also were far more broad, touching on many topics such as assignment of provincial commands, composition of juries for the permanent courts, and letting of state tax farming contracts. Both brothers were killed during or shortly after the conclusion of their respective tribunician terms.

A lex agraria (pl.: leges agrariae) was a Roman law which dealt primarily with the viritane allotment of public lands. Such laws came largely from two sources: the disposition of lands annexed by Rome in consequence of expansion and the distribution of existing public lands to poor citizens as freeholds. Such legislation dealt almost exclusively with public lands which were held by the state and not privately owned. There were other types of Roman laws related to agriculture, including those establishing new colonies and those regulating the holding of public lands (lex de modo agrorum).

The most famous lex agraria was that of the plebeian tribune Tiberius Gracchus, passed in 133 BC, which allotted public lands across Italy to rural plebs. Such laws were not without precedent, such as the lex Flaminia of 232 BC which authorised viritane distributions of lands in Cisalpine Gaul and Picenum. Further such laws were also passed in the years after 133 BC, including that of Tiberius' younger brother Gaius in 122 BC, and the epigraphically attested lex agraria of 111 BC. The law of 111 BC, among other things, buttressed recognition of the lands distributed in the prior law of 133. Other leges agrariae include a series of three laws vaguely described by Appian, the laws of Saturninus in 103 and 100 BC, the laws of Julius Caesar in 59 BC, and a law of Mark Antony in 44 BC.

Agrarian laws (from the Latin ager, meaning "land") were laws among the Romans regulating the division of the public lands, or ager publicus. In its broader definition, it can also refer to the agricultural laws relating to peasants and husbandmen, or to the general farming class of people of any society.

Various attempts to reform agrarian laws were part of the socio-political struggle between the patricians and plebeians known as the Conflict of the Orders.

The lex agraria of 111 BC is an epigraphically-attested Roman law on the distribution and holding of public land (ager publicus). It dealt with the confirmation of private title to formerly public lands distributed by the Gracchan land commission in Italy, public lands given in exchange for other lands given up by allies, the imposition of a rent or property tax (vectigal) on such lands, and the future privatisation or use of public lands. It also had provisions relating to the letting out of Roman lands in the provinces of Africa (especially with regard to transition provisions related to an abortive colonisation programme near Carthage) and Greece.

There is substantial disagreement about where the epigraphically-attested lex agraria should fit in the Appianic literary narrative of Roman land reform and whether the law should be equated with the lex Thoria described in Appian and Cicero. A large portion of the law is preserved on fragments of a bronze plate, along with a separate law on the reverse side. This plate was discovered during the Renaissance and the fragments which survive are now stored in various museums. There have been multiple modern transcriptions of the bronze fragments, including one in the mid-19th century by Theodor Mommsen and two transcriptions in the 1990s by Andrew Lintott and Michael Crawford.