The rhetoric of Roman decline appears in some of the earliest surviving Latin literary texts (like Plautus’s Trinummus). Cato the Elder built much of his political brand around the idea that greed, extravagance, and, later, Greek influence undermined Roman virtue. He defended the lex Oppia, a sumptuary law, and directed attacks against figures in the mode of Scipio Africanus. This sort of attack particularly resonated as economic changes and the rise of a new class of super-wealthy Romans emerged in the decades after the end of the Second Punic War. By the 130s, Tiberius Gracchus used similar attacks on the greed and extravagance of Roman and Italian elites to push for aggressive land reforms. Tiberius’s unwillingness to be bound by constitutional norms, however, represented a new sort of decline that ultimately prompted his murder by a mob led by Scipio Nasica.