was accomplished, not indeed without shocks, but at any rate without catastrophe. The Tribune was the link between the Tarquins and Cæsar. With the Lex Hortensia of 287 he became all-powerful, he is the Second Tyrannis in constitutional "form." In the second century, tribunes caused consuls and censors to be arrested. The Gracchi were tribunes, Cæsar assumed the perpetual tribunate, and in the principate of Augustus the tribunician dignity was the essential element of his position, the only one in virtue of which he possessed sovereign rights.
The crisis of 471 was not unique but generically Classical. Its target was the oligarchy, which even now, within the Demos created by the Tyrannis, strove to be the impulsive force in affairs. It was no longer, as in Hesiod's day, the oligarchy as estate versus non-estate, but the oligarchic party against a second party — both in the cadre of the absolute state, which as such was not brought into the controversy. In Athens, 487 B.C, the archons were overthrown and their rights transferred to the college of strategi.[1] In 461 the Areopagus, the Athenian equivalent of the Senate, was overthrown. In Sicily (where relations with Rome were close) the democracy triumphed at Acragas (Agrigentum) in 471, at Syracuse in 465, at Rhegium and Messana in 461. In Sparta the kings Cleomenes (488) and Pausanias (470) tried in turn, without success, to free the Helots — in Roman terms, the Clientela — and thereby to acquire for the kingship, vis-à-vis the oligarchic Ephors, the importance of the tribunate in Rome. The missing element in this case, which was present (though overlooked by our scholars) in that of Rome, was the population-strength of the mercantile city that gives such movements both weight and leadership; it was on this that even the great Helot rising of 464 broke down (an event which probably inspired the Roman legends of a secession of the Plebs to the Mons Sacer).
In a Polis, the country nobility and the patriciate fuse (that is the object of synœcism, as we have seen), but not so the burgher and the peasant. So far as concerns their struggle with the oligarchy these are a single party — namely, the democratic — but otherwise they are two. This is what comes to expression in the next crisis. In this (c. 450) the Roman patriciate sought to re-establish its power as a party — for so we must interpret the introduction of the Decemvirs and the abolition of the Tribunate; the legislation of the Twelve Tables by which the plebs, which had recently attained political existence, was denied "Connubium" and "Commercium"; and above all the creation of the small country tribes in which the influence of the old families (not legally but in fact) predominated and which (in the Comitia Tributa now set up alongside the old Centuriata) enjoyed the unchallengeable majority of 16 to 4. This, of course, meant the disfranchisement of the townspeople by the peasantry, and there can be no doubt that it was a move of the Patrician party to make effective
- ↑ This measure — a usurpation of the administration by the "nation in arms" — corresponds to the setting-up of Consular Tribunes in Rome in the military disturbances of 438.
