Marcus Junius Gracchanus

Life

Little is known of the life of Gracchanus. He was born into the prominent plebeian Junia family and was a partisan of the populares and the Gracchian reforms. He apparently belonged to a fraternity (sodalitas) with Titus Pomponius, the father of Cicero's friend T. Pomponius Atticus.

A tribune of the plebs for 123 BC named Marcus Junius son of Decimus ("M. Iunius f. D. tr. pl.") was responsible for the Lex Junia that amended the Lex Calpurnia, changing court procedures and jury composition to make it easier for provincial subjects to recover property illegally seized by governors and other Roman officials. This is usually taken to have been M. Junius Silanus who was an optimate consul in 109 BC, but Boris Rankov suggests it may have been the Gracchian ally Marcus Junius instead. Similarly, if Gracchanus were identical to the separately attested Junius Congus and had the cognomen Gracchanus assigned to him by others, then—as Rankov argues—he would have gone from a notoriously middle-brow moderate ally of the Gracchi brothers to a learned antiquarian in retirement, whether out of disillusion or an abundance of caution after having been exempted from the purge of the Gracchi's closest supporters in 121 BC and after. His father would have been named Decimus Junius Congus and the son would've been remarkably long lived, the historian Junius Congus being mentioned as only recently dead in 54 BC. Rankov's arguments, however, depend on Silanus not having made a similar political adjustment to the one he proposes for Congus, effusively praised by the optimate orator Marcus Antonius, and on it being unlikely that the large and prominent Junia family would have two scholars in the same generation.