His colleague, Verginius, opposed the proposition with the support of the senators. Cassius even made a largess of Sicilian grain to the plebs, but was, in the end, accused of attempting to gain too much power. Thus, he was convicted and executed when he left office. (Livy, 2.41).
As stated above, land reform was a huge agitation in the late Republic, and started to occur around the time of the Third Punic War of 149-146 BCE. As Rome expanded its territory across the known world, campaigns began to take longer amounts of time. Therefore, legionnaires (whose eligibility was based on a personal property requirement) were forced to be away from their families and estates for long periods of time. This caused their estates to go bankrupt, which were then sold to the richest members of the upper class, who used slave labor to work the fields. The first to attempt to reform this problem within the republic was Tiberius Gracchus. Gracchus was a quaestor serving under Scipio Aemilianus in the Third Punic War, and supposedly realized the need for land reform while passing through Etruria and seeing that all of the land was worked by slaves, rather than Romans (Plutarch, Life of Tiberius, 8.7). In 133 BC, he was elected tribune, and soon passed a law that gave land owned by the rich back to the poorer citizens who lacked any land to work as their own. This was not looked on favorably by the conservative Optimate faction, whose members owned the land to be redistributed. To get this legislation passed, however, he was forced to propose another law that illegally removed the tribune Marcus Octavius from office. He did so, and in passing the law, started with his brother Gaius, and Appius Claudius, dividing up land to be distributed to the poor. The final straw, however, was that he attempted to be reelected as tribune for the following year, as to keep reforming the land situation. It was after this that Gracchus, perceived as acting like some sort of tyrant by the Optimates, was murdered by a gang under their control (Plutarch, Life of Tiberius, 19.