abolition of the monarchy brought with it a change of the utmost importance in the actual working of the constitution. Though the distinction between patricians and plebeians was at least as old as the state itself, it is not until the establishment of the Republic that it plays any part in the history of Rome. No sooner, however, was the overshadowing authority of the king removed than a struggle commenced between the two orders which lasted for more than two centuries. It was in no sense a struggle between a conquering and a conquered class, or between an exclusive citizen body and an unenfranchised mass outside its pale. Patricians and plebeians were equally citizens of Rome, sprung off the same race and speaking the same tongue (but see above).[1] The former were the members of those ancient gentes which had possibly been once the “chiefly” families in the small communities which preceded the united state, and which claimed by hereditary right a privileged position in the community. Only patricians could sit in the council of patres, and hence probably the name given to their order.[2] To their representatives the supreme authority reverted on the death of the king; the due transmission of the auspicia and the public worship of the state gods were their special care; and to them alone were known the traditional usages and forms which regulated the life of the people from day to day. To the plebs (the multitude, πλῆθος) belonged all who were not members of some patrician gens, whether independent freemen or attached as “clients”[3] to one of the great houses. The plebeian was a citizen, with civil rights and a vote in the assembly of the curies, but he was excluded by ancient custom from all share in the higher honours of the state, and intermarriage with a patrician was not recognized as a properly legal union[4] (see Patricians).
The revolution which expelled the Tarquins gave the patricians, who had mainly assisted in bringing it about, an overwhelming ascendancy in the state. The plebs had indeed gained something. Not only is it probable that the strictness of the old tie of clientship had somewhat relaxed, and that the number of the clientes was smaller and their dependence on patrician patrons less complete, but the ranks of the plebs had, under the later kings, been swelled by the admission of conquered Latins, and the freeholders among these had with others been enrolled in the Servian tribes, classes and centuries. The establishment of the Republic invested this military levy of landholders with political rights as an assembly, for by their votes the consuls were chosen and laws passed, and it was the plebeian landholders who formed the main strength of the plebs in the struggle that followed. But these gains were greater in appearance than in reality. The plebeian landholders commanded only a minority of votes in the comitia centuriata. In their choice of magistrates they were limited to the patrician candidates nominated by patrician presiding magistrates, and their choice required confirmation not only by the older and smaller assembly of the curiae, in which the patricians and their clients predominated, but also by the patrician patres. They could only vote on laws proposed by patrician consuls, and here again the subsequent sanction of the patres was necessary. The whole procedure of the comitia was in short absolutely in the hands of their patrician presidents, and liable to every sort of interruption and suspension from patrician pontiffs and augurs (for details see further Comitia and Senate).
But these political disabilities did not constitute the main grievance of the plebs in the early years of the Republic. What they fought for was protection for their lives and liberties, and the object of attack was the despotic authority of the patrician magistrates. The consuls wielded the full imperium of the kings, and against this “consular authority” the plebeian, though a citizen, had no protection and no appeal, nor were matters improved when for the two consuls was substituted in some emergency a single, all-powerful, irresponsible dictator.
The history of this struggle between the orders opens with a concession made to the plebs by one of the consuls themselves, Lex Valeria de provocatione. a concession possibly due to a desire to secure the allegiance of the plebeian landholders, who formed the backbone of the army. In the first year of the Republic, according to the received chronology, P. Valerius Publicola or Poplicola carried in the comitia centuriata his famous law of appeal.[5] It enacted that no magistrate, saving only a dictator, should execute a capital sentence upon any Roman citizen unless the sentence had been confirmed on appeal by the assembly of the centuries. But, though the “right of appeal” granted by this law was justly regarded in later times as the greatest safeguard of a Roman's liberties, it was by no means at first so effective a protection as it afterwards became. For not only was the operation of the law limited to the bounds of the city, so that the consul in the field or on the march was left as absolute as before, but no security was provided for its observance even within the city by consuls resolved to disregard it.[6]
It was by their own efforts that the plebeians first obtained any real protection against magisterial despotism. The The first secession and the tribunate. traditional accounts of the first secession are confused and contradictory,[7] but its causes and results are tolerably clear. The seceders were the plebeian legionaries recently returned from a victorious campaign. Indignant at the delay of the promised reforms, they ignored the order given them to march afresh against Volsci and Aequi, and instead entrenched themselves on a hill across the Anio, some 3 m. from Rome, and known afterwards as the Mons Sacer. The frightened patricians came to terms, and a solemn agreement (lex sacrata)[8] was concluded between the orders, by which it was provided that henceforth the plebeians should have annual magistrates of their own called tribunes (tribuni plebis), members of their own order, who should be authorized to protect them against the consuls,[9] and a curse was invoked upon the man who should injure or impede the tribune in the performance of his duties.[10] The number of tribunes was possibly at first two, then five; before 449 B.C. it had been raised to ten.
The tribunate is an institution which has no parallel in history. The tribune was not, and, strictly speaking, never became, a magistrate of the Roman people. His one proper prerogative was that of granting protection to the oppressed plebeian against a patrician officer. This prerogative (jus auxilii) was secured to him, not by the ordinary constitution, but by a special compact between the orders, and was protected by the ancient oath (vetus jusjurandum),[11] which invoked a curse upon the violator of a tribune. This exceptional and anomalous right the tribunes could only exercise in person, within the limits of the “pomoerium,” and against individual acts of magisterial oppression.[12] It was only gradually that it expanded into a wide power of interference with the whole machinery of government, and was supplemented by the legislative powers which rendered the tribunate of the last century B.C. so formidable (see Tribune).
But from the first the tribunes were for the plebs not only protectors but leaders, under whom they organized themselves Lex Publilia. in opposition to the patricians. The tribunes convened assemblies of the plebs (concilia plebis), and carried resolutions on questions of interest to the order. This incipient
- ↑ This is the view taken by the present writer, as against Schwegler and others. For Ridgeway's theory, see above.
- ↑ Cf. aedilis, aedilicius, &c.; Cic. De Rep. ii. 12; Livy i. 8; for a full discussion of other views, see Soltau 179 seq.; Christensen, Hermes, ix. 196.
- ↑ For the clientela, see Mommsen (Forsch. i. 355 sqq.; Staatsr. iii. 54 sqq.); Schwegler (i. 638 sqq.); Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyklopädie, iv. 23 sqq. (von Premerstein).
- ↑ The offspring of such a union ranked as plebeians.
- ↑ Livy ii. 8, lex Valeria de provocatione; Cic. De Rep. ii. 31; cf. Livy iii. 20.
- ↑ Greenidge, Legal Procedure of Cicero's Time, pp. 344 sqq.
- ↑ Schwegler ii. 226 seq.
- ↑ Ibid. ii. 251 n.; Livy i. 33.
- ↑ Cic. De Rep. ii. 34, “contra consular imperium creati.”
- ↑ Livy iii. 55.
- ↑ Festus 318.
- ↑ Gell. xiii. 12, “ut injuria quae coram fieret arceretur.”
