This chapter explores the crises of the Roman and American republics. Understanding these crises requires that we view politics as an arena of identity contestation rather than simply interest articulation. What changes in both Rome and the United States is that participants came to see each other as Strangers, no longer sharing the same background assumptions, the same sense of the past, nor the same anticipation of the future. Borne of distrust, norms of getting things down turned into norms of obstruction. This had implications for how politics was experienced. The changes in these norms not only disabled these institutions, making them unable to actualize a future, but also made possible alterations in the political framework that might have been inconceivable before. In particular, one sees the elevation of individuals who offered solutions by promising to bypass those ineffective and unresponsive institutions. That is, as institutions and processes become distant abstractions that no longer answer to fundamental questions of the future of the community, the individual becomes the tangible personification of politics, answering these questions in a singular voice.

Republican Rome saw a range of laws designed to moderate the acquisition of wealth, and this chapter focuses on two such measures, the Lex Licinia de modo agrorum (367 BCE) and Tiberius Gracchus’ agrarian law of 133 BCE. In our later sources these two historical moments tend to be conflated, and the chapter begins by confronting the ensuing methodological problems. A critical review of the previous scholarship establishes that whereas the pre-Gracchan limit applied to all landholding not just public land, Gracchus, who was interested in reclaiming public land for distribution rather than putting a limit on elite wealth, revived the earlier limit, but applied it only to public land. These findings serve as basis for a discussion of the law carried by the tribune C. Licinius Stolo in 367 BCE, including the identification of an ‘ethos of frugality’ in mid-republican Rome which was meant to prevent individuals from accumulating excessive material resources. The final part of the chapter traces the history of the tension between the pursuit of personal enrichment and the interest of the wider community to keep such pursuits in check – an endeavour rendered increasingly difficult given Rome’s foreign conquests.