with the evocation of an idyllic past, as, for example, in the story of Cincinnatus. And modern scholarship, though it has ceased to believe these legends, has nevertheless remained under the influence of the taste that inspired their invention, and continues to look at the conditions of the time through its eyes — the more readily as Greek and Roman history are treated as two separate worlds, and the evil practice of identifying the beginning of history with the beginning of sure documentation is followed as usual. In truth, the conditions of 500 B.C. are anything but Homeric. The trace of its walls shows that Rome under the Tarquins was, with Capua, the greatest city in Italy and bigger than the Athens of Themistocles.[1] A city that concludes commercial treaties with Carthage is no peasant commune. And it follows that the population in the four city tribes of 471 must have been very numerous, probably greater than the whole total of the sixteen country tribes scattered insignificantly in space.
The great success of the landowning nobility in overthrowing a Tyrannis that was almost certainly very popular, and establishing unrestricted senatorial rule, was nullified again by a series of violent events about 471 — the replacement of the family tribes by four great city-wards, the representation of these by tribunes (who were sacrosanct — i.e., who enjoyed a royal privilege that no single official of the aristocratic administration possessed) and lastly the liberation of the small peasantry from the clientela of the nobility.
The Tribunate was the happiest inspiration, not only of this period, but of the Classical Polis generally. It was the Tyrannis raised to the position of an integral part of the Constitution, and set in parallel, moreover, with the old oligarchical offices, all of which continued in being. This meant that the social revolution also was carried out in legal forms, so that what was elsewhere a wild discharge in shock and countershock became here a forum-contest, limited as a rule to debate and vote. There was no need to evoke the tyrant, for he was there already. The Tribune possessed rights inherent in position, not rights arising out of an office, and with his immunity he could carry out revolutionary acts that would have been inconceivable without street-fighting in any other Polis. This creation was an incident, but no other of its creations helped Rome to rise as this did. In Rome alone the transition from the First to the Second Tyrannis, and the further development therefrom till beyond the days of Zama,
- ↑ Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt. V § 809. If Latin became a literary language, only very late — after Alexander — the only deduction to be made from the fact is that under the Tarquins Greek and Etruscan must have been in general use — which, after all, goes without saying for a city that was of a size and position to have relations with Carthage; that waged war in alliance with Cyme and made use of the Treasury of Massalia at Delphi; whose standard weights and measures were Dorian; whose mode of warfare was Sicilian; and whose walls contained a large foreign colony. Livy (IX, 36), following older statements, observes that about 300 the Roman boy was still brought upon Etruscan culture, as he was later on Greek. The ancient form "Ulixes" for Odysseus shows that the Homeric sagas were not only known, but popularly known here (cf. p. 284). The provisions of the Twelve Tables (c. 450) agree with the more or less contemporary law of Gortyn in Crete (cf. p. 63), not merely as to substance, but even stylistically — so exactly that the Roman patricians who drew them up must have been entirely at home with juristic Greek.
