with the soil by acquiring lands (although the old family house in town was no bad substitute). But the new money-aristocracy of deals and speculations rapidly acquired a taste for polite forms and at last forced its way into the birth-nobility — in Rome, as Equites, from the first Punic War, in France under Louis XIV[1] — which it disintegrated and corrupted, while the intellectual aristocracy of the Enlightenment, for its part, overwhelmed it with scorn. The Confucians took the old Chinese idea of Shi from the ethic of nobility and put it into the virtue of intellect, and made the Pi- Yung, from a centre of knightly battle-play, into an "intellectual wrestling-school," a gymnasium — quite in the spirit of our eighteenth century.
With the close of the Late period of every Culture the history of its estates also comes to a more or less violent end. The mere desire to live in rootless freedom prevails over the great imperative Culture-symbols, which a mankind now wholly dominated by the city no longer comprehends or tolerates. Finance sheds every trace of feeling for earth-bound immovable values, and scientific criticism every residue of piety. Another such victory also, in a measure, is the liberation of the peasant, which consists in relieving him from the pressure of servage, but hands him over to the power of money, which now proceeds to turn the land into movable property — which happened in our case in the eighteenth century; in Byzantium about 740 under the Nomos Georgikos of the legislator Leo III[2] (after which the colonate slowly disappeared); in Rome along with the founding of the Plebeian order in 471. In Sparta the simultaneous attempt of Pausanias to emancipate the Helots failed.
This Plebs is the Third Estate in the form in which it is constitutionally recognized as a unit; its representatives are the Tribunes, not officials, but trusted persons armed with a guaranteed immunity. The reform of 471,[3] which inter alia replaced the old three Etruscan tribes by four urban tribes or wards (a highly suggestive fact in itself), has been variously regarded as a pure emancipation of peasantry[4] or as an organization of the trading class.[5] But the Plebs, as Third Estate, as residue, is only susceptible of negative definition — as meaning everyone who does not belong to the land-nobility or is not the incumbent of a great priestly office. The picture is as variegated as that of the French "Tiers État" of 1789. Only the protest holds it together. In it are traders, craftsmen, day-labourers, clerks. The gens of the Claudii contained patrician and plebeian families — that is, great landlords and prosperous yeomen (for example, the Claudii Marcelli). The Plebs in the Classical city-state is what a combination of peasant and burgher is in a Baroque state of the West, when it protests in an
- ↑ The memoirs of the Duc de Saint Simon give a vivid picture of this evolution.
- ↑ P. 75.
- ↑ Corresponding to our seventeenth century.
- ↑ K. J. Neumann, Die Grundherrschaft der römischen Republik (1900); Ed. Meyer, Kl. Schriften, pp. 351, et. seq.
- ↑ A. Rosenberg, Studien zur Entstehung der Plebs, Herm. XLVIII (1913), pp. 359, et seq.
