Editing Gracchi brothers (section)

=== Public land ===
[[File:Roman republic, ager 133 BC.svg|thumb|This map shows Roman lands – the ''ager Romanus'' – in 133&nbsp;BC. The {{lang|la|ager}} was largely intermingled with the allied lands that covered essentially the rest of peninsula and required extensive surveying to disentangle.]]

Through the conquests of Italy in the fourth and third centuries BC, the Roman state had acquired legal rights to large amounts of land ceded by the subjugated Italian allies. Their former lands, the ''[[ager publicus]]'', were not heavily exploited by the Roman state. Rather, the land "had been regarded as a sort of {{lang|la|beneficium}} to the allies, who had been allowed to continue to work the land which had been confiscated from them".{{sfn|Roselaar|2010|p=222}} Through Roman conquests, the Italians who were allied to Rome were ''de facto'' confirmed in their lands and also gained substantially from the influx of booty and wealth from Roman conquest.{{sfn|Patterson|2006|p=611}}

The traditional narratives in the ancient sources which described the emergence of commercial {{lang|la|[[Latifundium|latifundia]]}} (enormous slave-staffed plantations owned by the elite) on the public land itself is also largely unattested to by the archaeological evidence in this period.{{sfn|Roselaar|2010|p=180}} Moreover, evidence indicates that the {{lang|la|ager publicus}} was largely located outside of the traditional farmlands close to Rome and instead located in non-Roman Italy closer to the Italian allies.{{sfn|Roselaar|2010|p=202}} Public land redistribution was therefore necessarily at the expense of the allies, who would be evicted from ancestral lands still occupied.{{sfn|Patterson|2006|p=613}}