Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus Senior

The elder Tiberius, father of Tiberius and Caius Sempronius Gracchus, was a very successful politician. Praetor in 180, he successfully subjugated Hither Spain (180-79), which had been a source of trouble for years (he was not only militarily successful but managed to negotiate a peace acceptable to the natives). As a reward he gained the consulship in 177 and successfully crushed a rebellion in Sardinia. In 169 he was censor, and in 163 secured a second consulship. As consul he waged war on Corsica and, when one of the new consuls was going to succeed him, conveniently remembered that he had botched the replacements' election, thereby invalidating his successor's election and securing for himself the conquest of the island. The son of one of the men thus stripped of the consulship was to bring about the murder of Ti. Gracchus the younger in 133 BCE.

As tribune in the 180s Ti. Gracchus the elder had prevented the arrest of P. Scipio Africanus the conqueror of Hannibal. After Africanus' death, Gracchus married his daughter Cornelia, whose mother was the daughter of L. Aemilius Paullus, who died at the terrible battle of Cannae in 216. Cornelia thus had a doubly patrician heritage, and was apparently a woman of much prominence. Plutarch tells us that Ptolemy, king of Egypt, sought her hand after Gracchus' death.

Ti. Gracchus the elder and Cornelia had twelve children, of whom only three survived to adulthood: Tiberius, born in 163, Caius, born in 154, and one daughter, Sempronia, who married her cousin, the adoptive grandson of Africanus, P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, who was consul in 147 and destroyed Carthage in 146, and after being (illegally) elected consul again in 134 destroyed the troublesome Spanish town of Numantia the next year.