WILHELM IHNE’S HISTORY OF ROME

 

SECOND BOOK.

THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC.

CHAPTER I.

THE FIRST YEARS OF THE REPUBLIC.

 

Roman tradition is, as we have seen, wholly untrustworthy as to the cause and course of the revolution which brought about the overthrow of the kingly power, and laid the foundation of the republic. Whatever may have been the nature of these struggles, it cannot be supposed that the republic appeared at once in its perfect form, and that in the very first year the regular consular power was introduced with all its attributes and functions in relation to the senate and citizens. Traces of a less quick and smooth transition have been preserved, especially in the traditions connected with the name of the great legislator P. Valerius Poplicola, from which it appears not unlikely that, after the abolition of the royal dignity, a period of dictatorial government followed, which ended with the dictatorship of Valerius.

At all events the republic seems to have been first regularly established by the Valerian laws, of which, unfortunately, we can discover little more than half obliterated traces in the oldest traditions of the Romans.

According to the story, P. Valerius was chosen as consul after the banishment of Tarquinius Collatinus, and remained alone in office after the death of his colleague, Brutus, without assembling the people for the election of a second consul. This proceeding excited a suspicion in the minds of the people, that he intended to take sole possession of the state, and to re-establish royal power. But these fears proved groundless. Valerius remained in office with the sole design of introducing a number of laws intended to establish the republic on a legal foundation, without the danger of any interference on the part of a colleague.

The first of these Valerian laws threatened with the curse of the gods any one who, without the consent of the people, should dare to assume the highest magistracy. By this law the sovereignty of the people was not only recognised, but an effectual barrier was presented to any attempt to keep an office beyond the period legally fixed for its duration. As the public law did not allow the people to compel a magistrate to resign, and as, therefore, a magistrate once elected could only return into private life by an act of voluntary abdication, it would have depended apparently on his own free will whether his power should last during his lifetime or not, unless by this law the magistrate who, after the legal time, refused to resign an office was marked as a traitor to the state. Against such a one resistance by force was legally sanctioned, and from this time forward, therefore, the regular annual change of republican magistrates was secured, and the restoration of the royal power in Rome was made impossible, unless a usurper was prepared to use force and violence to upset the very basis of the established order. Such an act of violence, however, was not to be expected in Rome, where the magistrates had the command of no military force except the armed citizens, and where each member of the aristocracy was a zealous guardian of republican equality.

The second law of Valerius was of equal importance for the good order of the republic. It prescribed that in criminal trials, where the life of a citizen was at stake, the sentence of the consul should be subject to an appeal to the general assembly of the people. This Valerian law of appeal was the Roman Habeas Corpus Act. It formed the keystone of the structure of the republic. It provided a barrier against every illegal stretch of authority on the part of the magistrates, and against every act Of military tyranny during their legal term of office. With such a guarantee against abuse of judicial authority, the Romans could afford to entrust to their magistrates an extensive jurisdiction, without being obliged, like the Athenians, to have recourse to popular assemblies as ordinary courts of law.

As an outward sign of the limitation of the official power, and as an acknowledgment of the sovereignty of the people, Valerius caused the fasces of the lictors to be lowered before the people. From this time the consuls never displayed the dreaded axes within the town. But in the field, where the consular authority was preserved without limitation, the axes continued to be in the fasces of the lictors, as a symbol of the military power of the consuls.

The Romans found a further protection against the abuse of consular authority in the division of the office between two colleagues of equal rank. In this way not only was the re-establishment of the monarchy rendered difficult, but too harsh and severe an exercise of the power which was left to the consuls was also prevented, as in the intercession of one of the two consuls against the decisions of the other there was a certain guarantee against precipitation and injustice. According to the principles of public law in Rome, the intercession of a magistrate had the effect of stopping the execution of any order or sentence pronounced by an official of equal rank. There can be no doubt that the possibility of limiting the power of the consuls by the consuls themselves was the principal if not the only reason for the division of the chief magistracy of the state, which was in many respects so prejudicial.

Although the Roman consulship was divided between the two colleagues, and was limited in its duration to one year, yet it conferred very considerable power, and by the insignia of the office, as well as its substantial rights, resembled the abolished royalty. The royal functions which remained to the consuls were those which related to the internal administration, the jurisdiction, and the command of the army. The priestly functions alone were separated and were conferred on an officer called the king of sacrifices (rex sacrificulus, or rex sacrorum), who was appointed for life. The reason for this arrangement may be found in a feeling of conscientiousness and religious formalism; the gods were not to be deprived of services or sacrifices which the state owed them through a ‘king.’ Although the shadow of the regal dignity was thus preserved, care was taken to make the office powerless. The king of sacrifices was excluded from all political functions; he was declared incompetent to fill any other office in the state; and it was not he, but the chief pontiff, who was placed at the head of all religious concerns.

But by the nomination of the sacrificial king, and by the transfer of the whole religious authority to the pontiff, the consulship was by no means entirely secularised, nor brought into any sort of opposition to the priesthood, or exposed to the possibility of a conflict with it. In so far as religion had an influence on political life, it was wholly and entirely at the service of the magistrates. A religious interest apart from the interest of the state was never thought of; a dispute between spiritual and secular authorities was not possible. Religion was expected to preserve and to benefit the people and the state; its servants were only the mediators of whom the state made use to secure the goodwill and protection of the gods. The augurs certainly conducted the auspices, and inter­preted the divine will, but only at the command of the magistrates; and the answer from heaven was not addressed to them, but, through them, to the political representatives of the Roman people. When the consul wished to offer up a solemn prayer, the pontiff repeated for him the prescribed form, and instructed him in the manner of performing the religious ceremony. He was the living book in which the science of heavenly things was written down, but only the officers of the state were permitted to open and to read it.

By this arrangement the consulship had suffered no loss of power through the separation of the religious functions from the secular magistracy. Religion, as an instrument for political purposes in the hands of the magistrates, had become rather more effective now that the fulcrum of the lever lay further off in the priesthood. The ruling party could, by the mouth of the priests, sanctify or condemn, without scruple, what, from a political point of view, they sanctioned or rejected; and the Roman parties never hesitated to make use of this means to increase their real power.

As judges the consuls occupied altogether the place of the kings. They decided the legal disputes of the citizens either personally or by deputy. Their criminal jurisdiction was probably limited to the most important cases, as the paternal authority (patria potestas), which extended over clients as well as all members of the family, was in full force.

In the warlike state of the Romans the military character of the consuls was no doubt most prominent and most important. When the consul led the army into the field, he possessed the unlimited military power of the kings (the imperium). He was entrusted with the direction of the war, the distribution of the booty, and the first disposal of the conquered land. Here he had an opportunity of gaining the respect of his fellow-citizens, renowned for his family, an influential position in the state, and material profit. The oldest designation for the consuls,—therefore, was derived from their military quality, for they were called praetors, that is, commanders.

It was, however, precisely in war that the division of power among two colleagues must often have proved prejudicial. The want of unity in the command of the army was the frequent cause of great dangers and reverses. Had it not been for the military instinct, which every Roman possessed, and the wonderful discipline and drill of the legions, it would have been impossible for Rome to endure for any length of time the division of the supreme command. But there came troubles in which, in spite of the military qualities of the people, the organisation broke down, and the necessity of unity in the direction of affairs was felt to be indispensable.

The dictatorship served this purpose. By decree the consuls could be charged with naming a dictator for six months, and in this officer the full power of the king was revived for a limited period. The dictatorship was a formal suspension of the constitution of the republic. All magistrates remained in office, and continued to discharge their regular duties, but they were all placed under the absolute command of the dictator. The guarantees of republican freedom (such as the right of appeal to the people) were in abeyance during the continuation of the dictator’s power. Military was substituted for common law, and Rome, during the time of the dictatorship, was in a state of siege.

Armed with such authority, which placed the resources of the whole state at their disposal, the dictators often succeeded in saving the commonwealth from great dangers. In the good old time of the republic, the dictator­ship was never abused for the gratification of personal ambition. The attempt was never made to turn the temporary possession of regal authority into a permanent restoration of monarchy. On the contrary the dictators felt it to be their pride to solve as quickly as possible the problem for the solution of which they had been appointed, and then, even before the end of the legal period, to return into private life.

That the dictatorship had an essentially military character is proved especially by the circumstance that the dictator had to nominate as second in command a master of the horse (magister equitum), who by his very name is characterised as an officer of the army. It was indeed natural that the government should also make use of the power of the dictator for the settling of internal disputes. In fact a dictator was often appointed to be the leader of the patrician party against the plebeians. But the origin of the dictatorship is certainly not to be found in the disputes between the two classes. It is possible that it formed the transition from the monarchy to the consular constitution, as hinted above; but it is impossible now to arrive at any certainty on this very difficult question.

As first administrative officers, the consuls had the presidency in the senate, a political body which in ancient Rome corresponded in many respects to what is now called the ministry, and which, besides being a supreme council of state, had the control of the whole administration. The consuls were charged with the selection of new senators, with calling the senate together, presiding over its deliberations, conducting the debate, and carrying out the resolutions. The senate had no independent legislative, still less any independent executive, power; it was in fact only an administrative council. The consul, therefore, would naturally be influenced in his actions by the authority of the senate, but he was not bound to carry out any of its resolutions to which he was opposed. The law did not compel him in his public actions to obtain the consent of the senate; in fact he was not the servant, but rather the master of the senate. He called the senators together to receive their advice, not their commands. Yet, owing to the annual change of consuls and the great influence which the senate, as a permanent body, exercised on the election of consuls, the practical result was that, in all essential and important questions, the senate decided the policy which the consuls had no alternative but to adopt. The senate was the head of the body politic, the consuls were the hands. The sum total of political wisdom and experience was treasured up in the senate; as the senate was, so were Roman politics internal and external. No growth or development could take place unless the germ had been previously matured in the bosom of the senate.

With regard to the consuls, therefore, the power of the senate was not so much a legal and formal superiority as a de facto irresistible influence. With regard to the general assembly of the people it was otherwise. The senate had not only the duty of previously discussing and preparing all measures about which the assembly had to decide, but it possessed also the constitutional right of confirming the resolutions of the people. The previous deliberations in the senate were the most natural functions of a select assembly of experienced men. Regular discussion and debate were not possible in the large unwieldy assemblies of the people. They could only decide with yes or no on a question laid before them. But in the senate different views could be maintained by different speakers. There were here, as in all free public assemblies, opposing parties, and representatives of the various interests which divided the people. There was a rule that after a resolution had been arrived at by the senate (a senatus-consultum) one of the magistrates should lay it before the people. If the people approved, it came back for confirmation to the senate, and in this manner obtained the force of law. The act of conferring this ratification by the patrum auctoritas was no superfluous formality. It is true the preliminary deliberation in the senate was the common rule, and when the senate had once decided to bring a resolution before the people for acceptance, it was almost certain that their consent and approbation would follow; but it was not impossible that, owing to unlooked-for events, or party manoeuvres, the senate, after repeated deliberations, might arrive at a different vote, just as in the English parliament the first and second readings of a bill do not always insure its passing on the third. But the right of the senate to give or withhold its consent to a resolution of the people was of especial importance, because the magistrates could not be prevented from bringing a question before the people even without submitting it previously to the senate. The withholding of the patrum auctoritas, therefore, was one of the means which the patricians made use of to control the decisions of the comitia. It was first legally abolished by the Publilian law, 339 b.c., with regard to acts of legis­lation, and by the Majnian law with reference to the election of magistrates. In consequence of these two laws the patrum auctoritas became a mere formality, because the senate was now compelled to confirm the eventual decision of the people before the votes were actually taken.

One branch of the public service, which in modern times occupies a prominent part and regulates all political action, was of subordinate importance in old republican Rome. This was the management of the finances. In a state in which no public officer received any salary, where the military service was a personal duty exacted from the citizens, there was no necessity for an elaborate system of finance, and even taxes properly so-called could not be wanted before the introduction of regular pay to the soldiers, i.e. before the year 406 b.c. There were, therefore, no officers especially entrusted with the management of the finances. The senate administered the property of the state. Booty gained in war, fines imposed by law, and any other money that flowed into the treasury of the state, passed through the hands of the consuls. Annually elected officers, the quaestors of the treasury, were not appointed before the year 449 b.c. for the management of the public finances.

As to the composition of the senate, it is certain that senators.  election of senators was entrusted to the consuls. After the violence of the revolution which had driven into exile a great number of the adherents of the dethroned monarch, the senate was naturally very much reduced in numbers, and it became necessary to fill up the numerous vacancies by an extraordinary measure. This measure, which by some historians is ascribed to Brutus, by others to Valerius Poplicola, is supposed to have brought a number of plebeians into the senate, who after the current view of the old historians were at once raised to the rank of patricians, but who, according to the opinion of modern critics, remained plebeian, and thus formed a plebeian section in the patrician, senate. The official title of the senators, by which they were addressed as ‘Patres Conscripti,’ was by the popular archaeologists derived from this new element in the senate, the surname ‘Conscripti ’ being supposed to apply originally only to the newly received plebeian members.

If there existed authentic historical evidence of the period which immediately followed the beginning of the, republic, we should be compelled simply to accept the account of the reception of plebeians into the senate, although it sounds very improbable. But all the reputed evidence consists in attempts of later Roman antiquarians to account for the title ‘Patres Conscripti’. These have no value in themselves, and as they do not agree with the gradual development of the plebeian rights, there is no choice left us but to reject them.

The legal position of the plebeians in the beginning of the republic was such that we cannot conceive their admission to the council of patricians to have been possible. The senate was the representative of the patrician interest during all the disputes of the two classes of citizens. Nowhere can there be discovered a trace of a plebeian party in the senate. A whole century elapses after the beginning of the republic before we find a single plebeian in the senate; and even long after the admission of plebeians to the highest offices of the state, the patrician element in the senate was by far the strongest. Moreover, the elevation of plebeians to the rank of patricians for the purpose of strengthening the senate is highly improbable. It is irreconcilable with the great contrast which evidently separated the two classes at the beginning of the republic—a contrast which amounted to a legal barrier between them, and prevented the possibility of individuals from one class joining the other, but which, after such a precedent as the alleged reception of many plebeians into the body of the patricians and into the senate, could not have been maintained any longer.

We have, therefore, no alternative left but to hold that, in the beginning of the republic, the senate was purely patrician, and remained for a long time the real representative of the patrician interest. As such it appears throughout in the narratives of the annalists, and it is therefore easily explained that the same political terms are applied to the senate which designate the patrician order as such, particularly the expressions Patres and Patricians. Afterwards, when, by the admission of plebeians to the highest offices of state, they were admitted by degrees into the senate, and when, by the equality of rights of the two orders, the old aristocracy of the patricians was merged in the new ‘nobility,’ the senate was always the representative of these nobles, and the old views and names were on the whole preserved by the historians of the time.

Simultaneously with the Valerian laws, which established the republic, the Comitia centuriata, which Servius Tullius is said to have devised with a view of abolishing the kingly power, came into practical use. The highest political functions in the state, the decisions of the sovereign people, were now formally transferred to this assembly, which, as we have surmised above, owed its origin to military necessities at a time when the old organisation of the army, based on the curiae, no longer sufficed. It seems to have gradually grown out of the original assembly of the thirty curiae. As a natural consequence of this innovation, the comitia of curiae were now more and more confined to mere formalities, just as the royal dignity was not altogether abolished, but was allowed to survive in the office of sacrificial king, though reduced to an empty shadow of its original power. The comitia of the centuries had, therefore, from the very beginning of the republic, the same functions which had formerly belonged to the comitia of curiae. In them was vested the right of legislation, the election of the chief magistrates, the decision of questions of peace and war, and, lastly, they formed the highest court of judicature, which had to pass sentence, in the last instance, in all cases affecting the life of a citizen. In the comitia of centuries, therefore, reposed the sovereignty of the people. They were the source of power, because they appointed the magistrates, and indirectly, through the magistrates, the senators. The laws were the expression of the will of the people as declared in the centuries. The consuls and the senate had only certain limited rights and duties conferred on them in the administration and legislation, but the people was supreme and sovereign; it was limited and controlled by no legal power beside itself that might claim superiority or even equality to it. The de facto influence of the aristocracy, exercised by the magistrates and the senate, had no independent legal foundation, but was always dependent on the will of the people.

The comitia of centuries embraced the whole of the people, not a part only, like the comitia of curiae, in which the plebeian clients were only passive members, without the right of voting. Every Roman citizen was now competent to vote, according to the measure of his census. But this apparent political equality was far from filling up the gulf between the two classes of citizens. If the patricians and plebeians in the assembly of centuries had really been amalgamated into one people, and if at the same time the plebeians had been admitted to the senate and to the magistracy, the development of the constitution would have taken quite a different direction from what it really did. There would then have been no necessity for the plebeians to straggle for a separate, clearly defined, legal position in the state. The constant disputes for equality between the two classes would have been avoided, and the republic would have possessed from the beginning the strength which was displayed after the passing of the Licinian laws.

The facts were altogether different. The revolution which overthrew the monarchy led to the exclusive power of the patricians. The plebs was separated from the privileged class, and debarred from the advantages, rights, and honours which the patricians enjoyed. No bridge led across this gap. No service rendered to the state, no amount of wealth, opened to a plebeian the prospect of rising from the crowd and taking a part in the government. Marriages between patricians and plebeians were unlawful, as were those between freemen and slaves. The plebeian was excluded from the senate, and from all civil and religious offices of state, from the auspices, and even from the knowledge of the laws. He shared only the public burdens, especially those of the military service, which were becoming more and more oppressive from day to day.

Thus it is not surprising that, although the plebeians had their lawful share in the comitia of centuries, yet it was a very insignificant part they played. Limited, probably to the four lowest classes, they could make no successful opposition to the well-organised dominion of the patricians. The consular elections during the first period of the republic clearly show that the patricians were all-powerful in the comitia of centuries. Thus the plebeians were urged by necessity to organise themselves as a sepa­rate political body, that they might as a whole oppose the excessive power of the patricians. It is, therefore, not to be supposed that the right of appeal from the sentence of the consuls, which the Valerian law had established as a guarantee against the arbitrary exercise of authority, extended to the plebeians. It was this denial of justice which forced the plebeian class to create for themselves in the Tribunes of the People legal protectors of their own. The tribune, by his intercession against the sentence of the patrician magistrates, made up to his fellow­plebeians for the want of the right of appeal to the popular assembly, a right which, even if it had been possessed by the plebeians, would have been to them of little practical value, as long as they had so little in­fluence in the comitia.

 

CHAPTER II

THE TRIBUNES OF THE PEOPLE.

 

The abolition of the monarchy had raised the patricians to power. In possession of the republican offices, political and religious, exclusively represented in the senate, preponderating and dominant in the assembly of centuries, influential by their large landed possessions and by the numbers of their clients, they were absolute lords and masters of the commonwealth, in which the plebeians had scarcely a share or a legal standing. If such a state of things had continued, the Roman state must have been reduced to a powerless oligarchy, which, in a short time, the enmity of hostile neighbours would have overthrown.

From such a danger Rome was saved by the spirited opposition which the plebs as a class brought to bear against the tyranny of the patricians. Immediately after the overthrow of the monarchy, the struggles began between the patricians and the plebeians, which, if we compare them with the vehement party warfare and the excessive fluctuations in most of the Greek states, were carried on with a certain calmness, deliberation, and steadiness, corresponding to the firm, persevering, sober, practical character of the Romans.

The Roman historians, who, deceived by the state of things in their own days, looked upon the patricians of the old time as a nobility by no means numerous, represent the insurrection against Tarquinius and the establishment of the republic as a victory of popular freedom, that is to say, plebeian freedom over tyranny. The people revelled, it was said, in the enjoyment of the newly acquired blessings, and by the amicable dealings of the patricians, who, from political reasons, made some valuable concessions, the plebeians, together with the patricians, became the irreconcilable enemies of the expelled tyrant, and with united efforts opposed all attempts of the Tarquins to regain their power. But the narrative goes on to tell that they had hardly escaped all danger from the banished king and his adherents when the patricians showed themselves in their true light, as unfeeling, hardhearted oppressors of the people. The plebeians suffered great distress and boundless misery. Through continual wars, which laid waste their fields and reduced their farms to ashes, they were deprived of their regular means of maintenance; they were impoverished by the severe war taxes, and plunged into debt. Their creditors were the patricians, who, with reckless severity, administered the harsh law, drove then- debtors from their homes, loaded them with chains, kept them languishing in prison, and even tore their backs with ignominious stripes. At last despair drove the poor wretches to resistance. They refused the military service. While the Volscians were attacking Rome, and the senate was in vain devising means of defence, those plebeians who were imprisoned for debt escaped from the prisons and rejoiced in the trouble of their oppressors. Then the consul Servilius, who was friendly to the people, promised them temporary release from their debts, and protection against the harshness of their creditors, on condition that they should allow themselves to be enrolled in the legions. His proposal was accepted. The Volscians were driven back. The Sabines and Auruncans also, who made use of the same opportunity to attack Rome, were conquered in a short campaign. After a threefold victory the army returned to Rome. But forthwith the distress began anew. Again the plebeians filled the loathsome debtors’ prisons, and were subjected to all sorts of outrage and indignity by the heartless patricians. New wars threatened. The plebeians refused to serve. It was only through the nomination of M. Valerius as dictator that the senate could levy new troops. Valerius succeeded, by the promise of protection from their creditors, in inducing the plebeians to enlist. Ten legions marched under the dictator and two consuls against the Volscians, Aequians, and Sabines. Again a threefold victory was won, but, instead of the armies being disbanded, they were kept under military command and military law, lest the men should insist on the fulfilment of the promises of the dictator and on an abolition of debts. Then at length the patience of the plebeians was exhausted. One of the armies declined to obey, marched in military order to the right bank of the river Anio, in the immediate neighbour­hood of Borne, encamped there, and threatened to secede from Borne altogether. The danger was very great that the Roman state would fall to pieces and become a prey to its ever-jealous and ever-watchful neighbours. The senate now resolved to yield. It entered into negotiations with the insurgents. It convinced them of the necessity of a reconciliation, and agreed to the condition which they proposed. This was, that plebeian magistrates, called Tribunes of the Plebs, should be chosen, empowered to protect the plebeians from the unfair treatment of the patrician magistrates, and invested with personal inviolability under the sanction of religion.

The foregoing narrative, which is abridged from ten long chapters of Livy, and from sixty-eight much longer chapters of Dionysius betrays at first sight the boundless caprice and the unskilfulness of the annalists. Apart from the surprising detail in the descriptions, and from the elaborate speeches, in which Dionysius endeavours to show his rhetorical talent, the repetitions and exaggerations—the two most pardonable faults of the Roman annalists—are quite palpable. The occurrences of the first and of the second year of the plebeian insurrection are plainly the same. Each time a threefold war is ended by three victories with an army of Roman debtors. Ten legions are levied—an army, such as Rome, up to the time of the Punic wars, could hardly collect. It would be tedious and unprofitable to point out in detail all the absurdities which excite our indignation, when we are obliged to read the tedious and vapid speeches of Dionysius. We should be satisfied if, among irrelevant particulars drawn from the imagination, we could find a few credible hints in explanation of the facts, and an answer to the questions, which have reference to the political and social character of the movement. But the historians give us no consistent, intelligible, or probable report, either as to the time of the revolution, or the place where peace was concluded, or the number of tribunes elected, or the manner of electing them.

In the first place the date of the outbreak of the plebeian revolt is made to coincide with the death of Tarquinius, not on the ground of anything like a trustworthy tradition, the but because it seemed plausible to suppose that, during the life-time of the expelled tyrant, the patricians would avoid everything that could create discontent among the plebeians and make them regret the monarchy. It was therefore assumed that, as soon as Tarquin died, the systematic oppression began which drove the plebeians to resistance and mutiny. It is hardly necessary to remark that this calculation is very flimsy; that too little time is given for the sudden cruelty of the patricians to produce an effect, and that, after all, even the date of the death of Tarquin is quite uncertain. On the whole, the chronology of this period is in a state of confusion from which no ingenuity is likely ever to rescue it.

The locality where the insurgent plebs assembled, and where peace was concluded with the patricians, is perhaps a matter of indifference in the history of the secession. But it awakens an uncomfortable feeling, when we find that, while the received traditions mention the so-called Sacred Hill beyond the river Anio as the place in question, the Aventine is also named, and indeed both hills at once. These variations show a want of certainty in the tradition, which is the more striking as the Sacred Hill is said to have derived its name from the solemn treaty of peace which was concluded there, and as it must have been connected with this peace in the minds of the people.

The statements of the number of tribunes chosen in the beginning vary between two and five, and it is not possible to decide which is the most authentic. The internal probability is in favour of two plebeian tribunes, because they were in some manner opposed to the two patrician consuls; but a few years later the board of the tribunes consisted of five members, and we cannot learn how the number was raised from two to five.

The question which presents the greatest difficulty is that of the mode of election of the first tribunes. To this question even the ancients could give no satisfactory answer. In the absence of any real evidence and authentic tradition, we are thrown back upon conjecture, and every form of election has been proposed in succession. The question, it is true, relates only to the short period from 498 to 472, and it is, on the whole, of but small importance; but there seems to be no reason why we should not endeavour to answer it. For our own part we have a decided conviction that the plebeians alone in their purely plebeian assemblies—the comitia tributa—could elect their legal chiefs and protectors.

The distress of the plebeian debtors is almost universally given as the occasion of the insurrection. This distress is painted in the most glaring colours. One would think the plebs had been only a mass of insolvent debtors, and that they had reached the last stage of economical decay. We may ask, how could such distress arise so suddenly? If wars undermined the prosperity of the peasants, how could the patricians escape the consequences? Where could they get the money for the loans? Rome was not a commercial town, and in the earlier ages of the republic there was no artificial measure of value, excepting the heavy copper money, so that extensive money loans cannot be thought of. Nor can the debts of the plebeians be attributed, as has often been attempted, to the pressure of taxation. For, in the first place, as already remarked, money taxes were at that time either unknown, or very trifling, and, in the second place, it can hardly be imagined that the burden of taxation, if it existed, rested, as has been supposed, entirely on the shoulders of the poor. This would have been in direct opposition to the principle of the constitution of centuries, according to which the heaviest burdens of war had to be supported by the wealthier classes.

Supposing, however, that the great mass of the plebeians at that time were hopelessly languishing under the oppression of theirs debts, and had in consequence lost their property, and practically their freedom, is it probable that the Roman legions were formed of such men, who had still on their backs and hands traces of the stripes and chains of slavery? And, if even this were granted, can we imagine the Roman senate insane enough to propose casting again into debtors’ prisons these men, who had carried arms against the enemies of their country and had conquered in the field? The evident contradictions are multiplied at every step, as we proceed in examining the traditional story. But if we were to try to get nearer the truth by moderating the exaggerations, we should still go astray. For not only is it the excess of the misery of the plebeians which challenges our doubt, but we must question whether it was distress for debt at all that caused the insurrection. This doubt is justified, first, by the circumstance that, at the reconciliation of the two hostile parties, there is nothing said of removing the causes which are supposed to have produced the distress; and, secondly, by the fact, that nevertheless, from this time forward up to the burning of Rome by the Gauls, nothing is said of any indebtedness of the plebeians. The severe laws of debt we find unmodified in the Twelve Tables. It is therefore not likely, nor is it recorded, that the plebeians, at the time of their secession, urged the abolition of these laws, and we cannot understand that insolvency was the cause of the insurrection.

The true cause of the secession can therefore only be looked for in the political condition of the plebs, as above described, and not to any extent in the wretchedness of their economical position. Whatever that may have been, the plebeians were de facto not protected by the law. They were subject to the patrician magistrates, and without the benefit of the right of appeal? Those of them who were clients had a claim on the good-will and protection of their patrician patrons, but this claim was of no avail if a client wanted redress against his patron himself. It was evident that the plebeians stood in need of official patrons, who should, by virtue of their office, guard their rights, and interfere in their favour whenever they had to complain of injustice.

As to the character of the office of tribune of the people, which arose out of the secession, we are on the whole well informed. The tribunes of the people were so essentially different from all the other magistrates, that, strictly speaking, they could hardly be called magistrates at all. They were originally nothing but the official counsel of the plebs—but counsel who possessed a veto on the execution of any command or any sentence of the patrician authorities.

The tribune of the people had no military force at his disposal with which to inforce his veto. He had nothing to do with the army or war, and was entirely a civil officer. Only his official servants, who were armed neither with the ‘fasces’ nor with the axes of the consular lictors, obeyed his commands. There is no more striking proof of the high respect for law, which was inherent in the Roman people, than that it was possible for such a magistracy to exercise functions specially directed against the governing class and their interests, without encountering, more frequently than the tribunes did, the force and violent resistance of their political opponents.

To strengthen an official authority which was so much wanting in physical strength, the Romans availed themselves of the terrors of religion, which was always appealed to when the limits of secular authority were reached. The tribunes were accordingly placed under the special protection of the Deity. They were declared to be consecrated and inviolable (sacrosancti), and whoever attacked them, or hindered them in the exercise of their functions, fell a victim to the avenging Deity, and might be killed by anyone without fear of punishment. Such an arrangement, which aims at making a breach of the peace lawful, which places the observance of political order under the guarantee of open violence, is, in spite of all religious forms and sanctions applied to it, an open wound which never heals, and is harmless only so long as the body on the whole remains healthy and strong, but which, in case of sickness, is easily inflamed and endangers the whole community.

The tribuneship, by being placed from the very beginning above all laws by reason of the extraordinary religious protection which it enjoyed, served as a powerful engine for the progressive development of the constitution. The reign of freedom must always be preceded by the removal of restrictions, disabilities, privileges, monopolies, and all sorts of bad laws by which the legislators of a rude age have endeavoured to repress the natural instinct of men for freedom and equality, in behalf of a ruling class, under the pretext of maintaining order, religion, and prosperity. The tribunes of the people had a most arduous task assigned to them. They had to remove the legal inequalities among the two classes of citizens, caused by the gulf which separated the conquerors from the conquered. They succeeded in accomplishing this object after ages of political contests, for which a parallel is to be found only in the development of the English constitution. But, when their work was done, they did not retire. The tribuneship, established for the protection of the helpless plebeians, was not abolished, as it ought to have been, when the plebeians had risen to perfect equality with the patricians. It continued to exist, completely changed in its nature, though but little in its external form, and contributed materially to undermine the republic and re-establish a monarchy.

In the first years of the existence of their office the tribunes naturally kept within modest limits. All the stories of tribunician accusations and condemnations in the period immediately following the secession, related by Livy and Dionysius, are inventions of a much later period, and represent the tribunes as invested with powers which, in those early days, they did not possess.

But, in the legal protection of the plebs, which the tribunes maintained by the right of intercession against all the official acts of the magistrates, the germ of their future power lay concealed. It was evident that, if they could protect a single plebeian from the consequences of a general order, their interference in reality nullified that general order. Their mode of proceeding, therefore, soon changed from affording protection in single instances to interposing a veto on political acts of the magistrates and of the senate. In their hands grew up a power of stopping every public functionary in the discharge of his duty, and in fact of making all government impossible—a power which, like that of refusing the supplies to a ministry, should operate only as a threat, and not really be put into practice. Nor did the tribunes exercise it without moderation, and thus the establishment of this magistracy con­tributed materially to advance the development of the constitution.

 

CHAPTER III.

THE LEAGUE OF THE ROMANS, THE LATINS, AND THE HERNICANS.

 

If it is difficult to gain clear views as to the condition of Rome in the regal period, these difficulties, and the obscurity arising out of them, increase as soon as we turn our eyes away from Rome to the neighbouring country, endeavour to examine the internal condition of Latium as well as its relations to Rome.

Soon after the foundation of Rome, the legendary city the Latin of Alba Longa, the old capital of the Latin league, was destroyed. From that time it lay in ruins, out of which, to the present day, it has never risen. As the common sanctuary of the Latins, there remained standing the temple of the Latin Jupiter, on the summit of the Alban hill, visible from every part of the plain. There was celebrated at this spot an annual festival of all the assembled Latins, which preserved the memory of their original union, and of their descent from one common stock. There were also other religious centres in Latium, which perhaps point to still older leagues; for instance, the sanctuary of the Lares and Penates at Lavinium. From the beginning of the Roman republic the sacred grove at Aricia appears to have been the meeting-place of the Latin peoples. Authentic accounts as to the details of this league are wanting. The most probable conjecture is, that for a time dictators were at the head as commanders of the league, and that they afterwards gave place to two annually-elected prators. Still it was in the nature of this, as of every international league, that the individual members enjoyed more or less independent action in proportion to their size and strength, and that the security and power of the league were weakened in consequence.

It was precisely during the time which followed the expulsion of the kings from Rome that this weakness became highly dangerous. According to all appearances, several nations of central Italy at that period left their seats among the mountains, and moved southward and towards the coast. The memory of these migrations has been preserved in the legend of the ‘sacred spring’. In hard times, under the pressure of war, failure of the crops, and sickness, the inhabitants of the mountains, we are told, used to vow that they would dedicate to the gods all that was born in the ensuing spring. For the fulfilment of this vow the firstlings of cattle were offered; but the children, after a number of years, when they were grown up, were sent out of the country to find a new home for themselves. By such emigrations central and southern Italy was almost all conquered by the Sabine nations. The Aequians advanced towards the east of Latium, the Volscians towards the south. These two nations were, from this time forward up to the Gallic invasion, the constant enemies of the Latins and of the Romans.

It was therefore very natural that the latter nations should form for their mutual protection an offensive and defensive league. Such a league the legend refers even to the time of Servius Tullius. But now, for the first time, we meet with traditions respecting it which deserve credit. It is said that in the year of the secession a league was concluded between the Romans and Latins which the Consul Sp. Cassius negotiated for Rome. It stipulated that there should be everlasting peace between Rome and Latium, and that the two nations should assist one another in defensive wars. There can be no doubt that this league really existed, though we know nothing with certainty of the details of the treaty than what has just been mentioned. It was the first great political act of the Roman senate, which always conducted its foreign policy with wisdom and firmness. By this league a bulwark was erected between Rome and the Sabellian nations, which, it is true, was repeatedly broken through in the course of the everlasting wars, and could only be repaired with difficulty by the combined powers of the allied nations, but which generally kept the ravages of war from the immediate vicinity of Rome, and finally rendered it possible for the Romans to change their position of allies to that of masters over the exhausted and divided Latins. This result was brought about by the great losses sustained in the wars by the Latin towns. When the alliance was formed, the league of the Latin towns was unbroken, and they were able to treat with Rome on an equal footing. But the losses in the course of the war were only on the side of the Latina. The Latin towns conquered by the Volscians and Aequians were lost to the Latin league; on the other hand, all territories reconquered by the united efforts of the Romans and their Latin allies, were not simply restored to the latter, but in part claimed as the share of Rome. Thus the Latin league led the way to that dominion of Rome over Latium which existed for a long time de facto before the great Latin war (338 b.c.) caused it to be formally acknowledged.

The league between Rome and Latium was soon joined by the kindred race of the Hernicans. The territory of this people lay further in the eastern mountains in the valley of the Trerus, and was threatened on one side by the Aequians, and on the other by the Volscians. The league with them is said to have been concluded on the same terms as with Latium. Dionysius relates that the conclusion of the league was preceded by a war and a victory over the Hernicans. This is not at all likely to have been the real course of events. If the Hernicans had been conquered, they would not have been allowed to join the Roman alliance on an equal footing as an independent nation. But it was a usual practice with the Roman annalists (a practice with which we shall become sufficiently acquainted as we proceed) to suppose that it was beneath the dignity of Borne to conclude a treaty of peace and amity except after a preceding victory. As regards the Hernicans, the story goes on to relate that two thirds of their territory were taken from them. This statement is a palpable perversion or misunderstanding of a stipulation of the treaty between the Romans, Latins, and Hernicans, by which each of the three nations was to receive one third of the booty made in war, and therefore also of the conquered land.

The league of the three peoples existed as long as any serious danger threatened on the side of the Volscians and Aequians. When this danger disappeared, and Rome had grown strong, it was transformed into the acknowledged dominion of Rome.

 

CHAPTER IV.

THE WARS WITH THE VOLSCIANS.

 

The foreign history of Rome in the first century of the republic is one unbroken series of wars with the neighbouring peoples on the north, east, and south of Latium. The descriptions of these wars which we read in Livy and Dionysius bear the stamp of unscrupulous fiction to such an extent that a critical examination of them would be hardly profitable. They are fall of reports of the most heroic victories, of evident and palpable repetitions and inventions, of mendacious boasting, and of attempts to conceal the reverses which Rome and her allies had to suffer. If we may trust the stories of the annalists, as far as they describe the general features of these wars, we come to the conclusion, that, for the most part, they consisted of a succession of plundering excursions, in laying waste the open country, and in similar enterprises, which the unpaid citizen soldiers could accomplish at that time in the course of a few weeks of summer.

But the effect of such annual warfare, even on a small scale, must have been very harassing and ruinous. It is evident, even from the fragmentary and partial reports of the Roman annalists, that the Aequians, and still more the Volscians, gradually gained ground and conquered several of the towns of the Roman allies; that the war on several occasions visited the immediate neighbourhood of Rome; and that, finally, after the complete dissolution of the Latin league, a great portion of Latium was reconquered by, and thus became dependent on, Rome.

The memory of these wars was preserved among the Roman people by several legends, which the annalists endeavoured to transform into history, and to bring into harmony with their narratives. The most celebrated are those of Coriolanus and Cincinnatus. They show clearly what degree of belief the Roman history of this time deserves, and for this reason we select them for a more detailed examination.

The legend of Coriolanus runs as follows:—In the year after the secession of the plebs (492B.C.) there was a famine in Rome; for, during the civil contention, the plebeians had not cultivated their own lands, and they had laid waste the fields of their adversaries. There was therefore great distress among the poor plebeians, and they would have fallen victims to hunger if the consuls had not bought corn in Etruria at the cost of the state, and distributed it to the starving people. But even this was not sufficient, and the people suffered great want, till corn arrived from Sicily, which Dionysius, the Lord of Syracuse, sent as a present to the Romans.

There was at that time in Rome a brave patrician, whose name was Caius Marcius. He had conquered the town of Corioli in the preceding year, when the Romans were carrying on war with the Volscians, and for this reason his fellow-soldiers had given him the surname Coriolanus. This man set himself stoutly against the plebeians, for he hated them because they had won the tribuneship from the senate. He, therefore, now advised that the corn should not be divided, unless the plebeians would surrender their newly acquired right and abolish the office of the tribunes.

When the plebeians heard this, they were enraged against him, and wanted to kill him. But the tribunes protected him from the fury of the crowd, and accused him before the assembly of the people of having broken the peace which had been sworn between the classes, and of having violated the sacred laws. But Coriolanus mocked the people and the tribunes, and showed haughty defiance and presumptuous pride. Therefore, as he did not appear before the people assembled to try his case, he was condemned, and left Rome as an exile, swearing that he would be revenged on his enemies.

As the Volscians were then living in peace and in friend­ship with Rome, Coriolanus went to Antium, and lived there as the guest of Attius Tullius, the most respected and the most influential man among the Volscians. And the two men consulted together how they might excite the Volscians to make war on the Romans. At this time the great games were celebrated in Rome, in honour of Jupiter; and a great number of Volscians came to Rome to see the games. Then Attius Tullius went secretly to the consuls, and advised them to take care that his countrymen did not break the peace during the festivities. When the consuls heard this, they sent heralds through the town, and caused it to be proclaimed that all Volscians should leave the town before night. Astonished at this unexpected order, and exasperated at the outrage to their nation, the Volscians proceeded in a body to return home by the Latin road. This road led past the spring of Ferentina, where at one time the Latins used to hold their councils. Here Attius was waiting for his countrymen, and excited them against Rome, saying that they had been shut out unjustly from sharing in the sacred fes­tivities, as if they had been guilty of sacrilege, or were not worthy to be treated as allies and friends by the Roman people. Thus the war with Rome was decided on, and as commanders the Volscians chose Attius Tullius and C. Marcius Coriolanus. These set out with a large army, and conquered in one campaign Circeii, Satricum, Longula, Polusca, Corioli, Lavinium (the holy city of the Penates), Corbio, Vitellia, Trebium, Lavici, and Pedum. No Roman army offered any resistance in the field.

Thus the Volscians at last advanced to Rome, and en­camping near the Fossa Cluilia, five miles from the town, they laid waste the lands of the plebeians round about. Then the Romans were seized with despair, and scarcely retaining courage to defend the walls of the town, did not dare to advance against the Volscians, or fight them in the field. They looked for deliverance only from the mercy and generosity of their conquerors, and sent the principal senators as ambassadors to Coriolanus, to sue for peace. Sut Coriolanus answered that, unless the Romans should restore to the Volscians all the conquered towns, peace could not be thought of. When the same ambassadors came a second time, to ask for more favourable conditions, Coriolanus would not even see them. Thereupon the chief priests appeared in their festive robes and with the sacred signs of their office, and tried to calm the anger of Coriolanus. But they strove in vain. At last the noblest Roman matrons came to Veturia, the mother of Coriolanus, and to Volumnia his wife, and persuaded them to accompany them into the enemy’s camp, and with their prayers and tears to save the town, which the men could not protect with their arms.

Now when the procession of Roman matrons approached the Volscian camp, and Coriolanus recognised his mother, his wife, and his little children, his heart softened, and he heard the entreaties of the matrons, fell on the neck of his mother and of his beloved wife, and granted their request. He immediately led the army of the Volscians away from Rome, and gave back all the conquered towns. But he never returned to Rome, because he had been banished by the people, and he closed his life in exile among the Volscians.

Critical Examination of the Story of Coriolanus.

If we examine the particulars of the foregoing narrative, we find that no single feature of it can be considered historical, and that it consists altogether of baseless of a later period, which betray a great want of skill in the invention of a probable narrative, and even ignorance of the institutions and manners of the Roman people. The conquest of Corioli is evidently invented only to account for the name Coriolanus. In the first place it does not fit into the historical account of the Volscian war; and, in the second place, we know that surnames taken from conquered towns or countries came into use at a much later period among the Romans. For the whole of the alleged history of the campaign in which Corioli is reported to have been conquered, the annalists, as Livy himself admits, had no positive testimony. They found only the name of one consul of 493 B.C., viz. that of Sp. Cassius, in the treaty which at that time was concluded with Latium. They inferred from this that the other consul must probably have been absent in some war. They therefore made him carry on the war with the Volscians, and effect the conquest of Corioli. On such flimsy and baseless combinations the history of the wars of that time is made to rest.

The alleged famine of the year 492 is accounted for in the story by the neglect of agriculture on the part of the plebs, during the secession of the preceding year. But, according to Livy’s report, the secession lasted only a few days. There can, therefore, be no truth in the presumed cause of the famine. The story of the buying-up of the corn for the relief of the starving people is taken almost word for word from the stories relating to the years 433 and 411 b.c. And so thoughtless and ignorant were the Roman annalists, that they mentioned as the benefactor of the distressed Romans the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse. This chronological error was discovered by the learned archaeologist Dionysius, who was too well acquainted with the history of his disreputable namesake of Syracuse, to suppose that he could have sent corn to Rome about half a century before he was born. He therefore substitutes Gelo as the Greek tyrant who is said to have sent the corn. It is evident that the removal of a gross blunder does not amount to positive evidence, and the learning and ingenuity of Dionysius are therefore thrown away.

It has already been observed that the accusation and sentence of Coriolanus by the plebs, almost immediately after the first election of tribunes, was impossible. The tribunes had for a long time no other function than that of protecting their fellow-plebeians from the unjust treatment of the patrician consuls. The plebeians, who for a long time remained in a dependent and oppressed condition, had as yet no chance of exercising a power which would have placed at their mercy every patrician hostile to them.

The Volscians appear in the annalistic account to have been at war with Rome in the year 493 b.c., and to have lost the town of Corioli. At the time of the banishment of Coriolanus, however, in the following year, they live in profound peace with Rome, and appear in great numbers at the Roman games. The contradiction implied in this Dionysius attempted to remove by inventing a temporary truce between the two nations. The improbabilities of the story are most palpable in the nar­rative of the campaign of the Volscians against Rome under the command of Coriolanus. According to Livy, the Volscians conquered, in the course of one summer, twelve—and according to Dionysius, fourteen— Latin towns, overran the whole of Latium, and penetrated into the immediate neighbourhood of Rome. When we consider what a small measure of success usually followed a campaign; how difficult, even in the time of their undisputed supremacy, the Romans found it to reduce a single town, it may well be looked upon as a miracle that the Volscians took seven towns, as Dionysius says, in thirty days. And not less wonderful than the rapidity of the Volscian success, is the complete inactivity of the Romans, and of their allies, the Latins, who were at other times not accustomed to look on calmly when enemies invaded their country. Attempts have been made to account for this inactivity by the civil disputes of the Romans, as if these disputes during the many years of their continuance had ever hindered the Romans from offering resistance to the enemies of their country. But what is still more wonderful than the rapid conquest of so many Latin towns by the Volscians, is the ready restoration of them to the Latins. After the departure of Coriolanus the possessions of the Volscians and of the Latins are precisely the same as before; all the conquests of Coriolanus have melted away like snow, and nothing is left for us in explanation of this extraordinary event but to believe, with the author of the legend, that Coriolanus, at the request of his mother, retired from Rome, and restored all his conquests.

As a punishment for this treachery, which the Volscians, as it appears, were obliged to submit to, they were reported to have cruelly murdered Coriolanus at the end of the campaign. Yet another, and probably older, form of the legend says nothing of this revenge, but allows him to attain a great age among the Volscians, and to lament his banishment from his fatherland. The simple-minded old annalist saw nothing unnatural in the fact that a Roman exile should restore to the Romans towns con­quered by the military strength of the Volscians.

The germ from which the whole legend sprang is the story of the filial love of Coriolanus, and of the great authority exercised in olden times by Roman matrons over their sons and husbands. Now it is not beyond the range of possibility that, at one time or other, a Roman party leader, expelled in one of the numerous civil broils, may have joined the national enemies, and may have been induced by the tears of his mother and wife to desist from hostilities against his native city; but the story of Coriolanus, as given by Livy and Dionysius, relates things utterly impossible in Rome. The Roman senate could at no time have dreamed of sending an embassy of priests to ask for peace from a public enemy; still less can we reconcile a deputation of matrons with what we know of Roman manners and law, granting even that such a depu­tation was self-appointed, and not formally commissioned by the senate to act for the Roman people. Such misconceptions of the old institutions of Rome could originate only in later times, when people had vague and erroneous conceptions of the laws and manners of a bygone age, and when fanciful Greeks had begun to adorn the old annals of Rome with moral tales of their own invention.

If, then, there is nothing historical in the legend of Coriolanus, it can, of course, throw no light on the particulars of the wars with the Volscians. That these wars, in the first half century of the republic, turned out more and more unfavourable for Rome and the Latins, is quite evident from a careful examination of the accounts handed down to us, in spite of all the mendacious reports of victories. The light of truth begins to dawn even through the thick mists of fiction. At the time when the oldest family chronicles were composed, it was not yet forgotten that the Volscians had often defeated the Romans, had conquered many Latin towns, and threatened even Rome itself. These events took place during, and no doubt in consequence of, the internal disputes in Rome which preceded the decemvirate. The success of the enemy, however, was in the legendary accounts, by national pride, attributed to Coriolanus, a native Roman; and thus, perhaps, it happened that all the Volscian conquests were condensed into the history of one campaign.

Antium, a town on the sea coast, was one of the chief strongholds of Volscian power; another was Ecetra, on the mountain range which rises in the east of Latium. These two towns were the chief centres of the Volscians, and the headquarters from which they directed their attacks against the Latin league and against Rome. But after the decemvirate the strength of the Volscians decreases. We see them gradually losing the conquered towns one after the other. Rome became so secure from molestation on the part of the Volscians that she had leisure to attack Veii with all her strength. When Veii was subdued and the Romans had gained their first great accession of power in the fertile districts of southern Etruria, the Volscians had ceased to be dangerous to them.

The increasing weakness of the Volscians is perhaps due, at least in part, to the attacks of the Samnites, to which they were now exposed on the east and south-east of their territory. The Samnites were then spreading their con­quests over Campania; they appeared soon after in the history of Rome as the enemies of the Sidicines. It is most probable that they became very unpleasant neighbours to the inhabitants of the fertile districts in the lower part of the valley of the Liris, and that even before 354 b.c., when they concluded a formal alliance with Rome, they directed their attacks against the Volscians, and thus rendered a material service to Rome. This is what we may conjecture; but the scanty annals of that unhistorical period do not allow us to speak with certainty on this subject.

 

CHAPTER V.

THE WARS WITH THE AEQUIANS.

 

Contemporary with the wars of the Volscians are those of the Aequians in the first century of the republic. These mountaineers, closely allied to the Sabines, attacked the eastern frontier of Latium, but they seem to have been more intent on plunder than on permanent conquests and colonisation, like the Volscians. There were no towns of importance in the land of the JEquians. They lived more after the true manner of the Sabines, in open villages; and from their mountain fastnesses they made their periodical inroads into the neighbouring Latin territory. The wars of the Romans with such border plunderers, even if they were faithfully described, would be of very little historical interest. But the confused, exaggerated, and worthless statements of the Roman annals, with their endless repetitions and tedious monotony, have the effect of destroying even the scanty interest which they might possess if they were truthful pictures of the manners of the time. After examining them carefully, the critic turns from them with something of disgust and with sore disappointment for having lost so much time in seeking to discover a grain of wheat in a bushel of chaff. It will suffice to select one example as an illustration. We take the famous story of Cincinnatus, one of the most famous and most popular Roman heroes of the olden time, the true type of primeval virtue, abstinence, and patriotism. This story is admirably calculated to characterise the general quality of what is supposed to be the history of those wars.

Peace was concluded with the JSquians in the year 459 b.c., and the Romans expected no hostilities on that side. But soon after, the faithless Aerquians suddenly invaded the country of Tusculum, and their commander Gracchus Cloelius pitched his camp on the hill Algidus, the eastern spur of the Alban range, from whence he laid waste the land of the Roman allies. Here Quintus Fabius appeared before him at the head of an embassy, and demanded satisfaction and compensation. But Cloelius laughed at the ambassadors, and, mocking them, said, they should lay their complaints before an oak-tree, against which his tent was pitched. Then the Romans took the oak and all the gods to witness that the Aequians had broken the peace, and had begun an unrighteous war. Without delay the consul Minucius led an army against the Aequians. But the chances of war were not in his favour. He was defeated and blockaded in his camp. At this news terror prevailed in Rome, as if the enemy were at the very gates; for Nautius, the second consul, was far away with his army, fighting with the Sabines, the allies of the Aequians.

Then there was nothing to be done but to name a dic­tator, and only one man seemed to be fit to fill the post. That was Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus, a noble patrician, who had filled with distinction all the posts of honour in the republic. He was then living quietly at home, and, like noble Romans of the good old time, cultivated his small estate with his own hands. Now, when the messengers of the senate came to Cincinnatus, to bring him the news that he was nominated as dictator, they found him ploughing his field, and he had taken off his garments, for the heat was very great. Therefore he first asked his wife to bring him his toga, that he might receive the ambassadors of the senate in a becoming manner. And when he had heard their errand, he went with them into the town, accepted the dictatorship, and chose for the master of the horse Lucius Tarquitius, a noble but poor patrician. And he ordered that all the courts of justice should be closed, and all common business suspended, bill the danger was averted from the country. Thereupon he summoned all men who could bear arms to meet in the evening on the Field of Mars, every man bringing twelve stakes for the ramparts and provisions for five days, and before the sun went down the army had started off and reached Mount Algidus at midnight.

Now when the dictator saw that they were drawing near to the enemy, he bade the men halt and throw their baggage in a heap, and he quietly surrounded the camp of the Aequians, and gave orders to make a ditch round the enemy and drive in the stakes. Then the Romans raised a loud cry, so that the Aequians were overcome by terror and despair; but the legions of the consul Minucius recognised the war-cry of their countrymen, seized their arms, and sallied forth against the Aequians, who, being thus attacked from both sides, and seeing there was no escape, surrendered themselves and prayed for mercy. Cincinnatus granted them their lives, and dismissed them, making them pass naked under the yoke; but Gracchus Cloelius and the other commanders he kept as prisoners of war, and he divided the spoil among his victorious soldiers. In this manner Cincinnatus rescued the blockaded army and returned in triumph to Borne; and when he had delivered his country from its enemies, he laid down his office, on the sixteenth day, and returned to his fields, crowned with glory and honoured by the people, but poor, and contented in his poverty, as he had been before that time.

Critical examination of the Story of Cincinnatus.

That this story belongs less to the region of history than to that of fancy is evident from the physical impossibilities it contains. The distance between Borne and the hill Algidus is more than twenty miles. This distance the Boman army under Cincinnatus is said to have accomplished between nightfall and midnight, though the soldiers were burthened with three or four times the usual number of stakes for intrenchments. Then, after such a march, the men were set to work to make a circumvallation round the whole Aequian army, which itself inclosed the army of Minucius, and must, therefore, have occupied a considerable extent of ground. The work of circumvallation was accomplished in the same night, uninterrupted by the Aequians, though the Romans at the very commencement had raised a shout to announce their arrival to the blockaded army of Minucius. With these details the story is, of course, mere nonsense. But if, following the example of Dionysius we strip off from the popular legend all that is fanciful, exaggerated, or impossible, and place the heroic deed of Cincinnatus on such a footing that it assumes an air of probability, we shall gain nothing, because by such a rationalising process we shall not be able to convert a legend into genuine history.

We arrive at the same conclusion by observing the fact that the story of Cincinnatus, in its general and characteristic features, is related no less than five times.

The wars of the Aequians, like those of the Volscians, lasted during the first century of the republic. Sometimes, among the periodical enemies of Rome and Latium, the name of the Sabines occurs—a name by which, in all probability, no other people than the Aequians are to be understood, just as the Volscians are sometimes called Auruncans. We have already noticed it as probable that in some of the family chronicles the name Sabine was employed, instead of the distinctive names of the particular branches of the Sabine stock, and that in this way the Latin war of the year 503 b.c. is also called a Sabine war. Thus the Sabines were now and then introduced into the Aequian wars; and we have no means of knowing where the seats of these Sabines were and what their relation was to the Aequians.

This is particularly evident in the story of the seizure of the Capitol (460 b.c.) by the Sabine Appius Herdonius. It is related that Roman exiles and slaves, under the command of Appius Herdonius, surprised and took the Capitol by night; but to which party the exiles belonged is not explained. It is very unlikely that the enemies who seized the Capitol were Roman exiles at all. For, however hot the quarrel between the classes may have been, it is certain that it did not lead to the banishment of great numbers? The mentioning of the slaves is still more mysterious. Revolts of slaves, at a time when there are comparatively but few, are highly improbable. On the other hand, sudden invasions and the taking of strongholds seem not to have been very unusual in the wars of those times. In the year 477 b.c., the Janiculus was taken possession of by the Veientes; in the year 459 b.c., the Aequians stormed the fort of Tusculum; and soon after, Corbio was taken by them in the night. Probably it was these Aequians who by a sudden attack took the Roman Capitol, for this occurrence happened just in the midst of the quian wAear. But as P. Valerius, the son of Publicola, was then consul, and was killed at the retaking of the Capitol, the domestic annalist of the Valerians named a Sabine instead of an Aequian, as the enemy who had taken the Capitol. To the Romans, moreover, it appeared less humiliating to think that the Capitol had been taken by Roman exiles, or even by Roman slaves, than that it should have fallen into the hands of the enemies of their country.

From the time of the decemvirs downwards, the attacks of the Aequians, like those of the Volscians, decrease in vigour. Rome, after having been on the defensive so long, now takes the offensive, and by degrees gains an undoubted superiority.

 

CHAPTER VI.

THE WARS WITH VEII

 

While the wars with the Aequians and Volscians were almost annually repeated in the first century of the republic, and filled the annals with monotonous and tedious state narratives, the Etruscans, the northern neighbours of Rome, seem to have lived in peace, and not to have thought of making conquests in Latium. The once powerful nation of the Etruscans was in its decline. Expelled in the north from the valley of the Po by the Gauls, from Campania in the south by the Sabellians, from Latium by Rome and the allied Latins, weakened in the interior by dissensions and divisions, injured in their maritime trade by the rivalry of the Greeks, the Etruscans were no longer in a position to be dangerous to their southern neighbours. The confederation intended to bind together the different Etruscan communities could no more stand the test of dangerous times than similar confederations have done in ancient and modern times. The towns lying to the north took little interest in the fate of those lying to the south; they had always enough to do to ward off the Gauls, who were becoming more and more troublesome. We therefore find Rome from time to time involved in wars with Veil alone, and in wars, too, which on the part of the Veientes were merely defensive.

In one of these wars (483-474 b.C.) the Roman house of the Fabii plays so prominent a part as to justify the conclusion that the story originated in the family chronicles house, of this great race, the name of which had not appeared in the Fasti before this time, but which was destined to leave a lasting impression on the annals of the republic. The particulars of the wars with the Veientes are related in the same manner as the other contemporary wars, and are not a whit more trustworthy. They furnished materials for popular legends, of which the most celebrated was the story of the destruction of the Fabii at the river Cremera.

The war with the Veientes, says the legend, was more harassing for Rome than dangerous. The Veientes confined themselves to keeping Rome in a continual state of alarm by constant invasions, driving away the flocks, destroying the crops, and cutting down the fruit trees. In order to protect the community from such annoyances, the noble house of the Fabii offered to undertake the war themselves. The consul Kaeso Fabius placed himself at the head of his kindred; with 306 men of patrician rank he left the town, followed by the blessings and good wishes of the admiring people. He erected a fortified camp in the territory of the Veientes not far from the chief town of Veii on the river Cremera. From this spot the Fabii made the territory of the Veientes insecure, and at the same time kept the enemy from attacking Rome. But the Veientes enticed them out of their fortress into an ambush, and attacked them from all sides with overwhelming force. Not one of the valiant band escaped. The whole race would have become extinct, if it had not been that one boy had been left behind in Rome, who preserved the name and the race of the Fabii. The memory of the unhappy day on the Cremera was never effaced from the minds of the people. It was remembered that the brave band, on their march out of Rome, passed through the right opening of the Porta Carmentalis, and from that time . this passage acquired the name of ‘the unlucky way’, and was avoided by all with religious awe.

In consequence of the massacre of the Fabii, the fortune of war turned for a time to the side of the Etruscans. They defeated the consul Menenius, and occupied the Janiculus, from whence they spread alarm and terror in Rome itself. The Romans succeeded at length, after a severe struggle, in driving them away again from the stronghold of the Janiculus, and, after some time, concluded a truce of forty years with Veii, during which time each people kept within the bounds of its own dominion.

The stories of the wars with the Veientes have no greater claim to authenticity than traditions of other wars of that period. Here also we can discover in the accounts two sources of error rather than of historical truth, which combine to make up the commonly received story. We can trace on the one hand the popular legend, and on the other the invention of the annalists. The destruction of the 306 Fabii is wholly and entirely legendary. Legends take but little count of probabilities; they delight in what is most striking, wonderful, and improbable. We have already observed this in the legends of Coriolanus and Cincinnatus. It is no less clear in that which relates to the Fabii. The Fabian house is said to have consisted of 306 men capable of bearing arms, and one boy under the military age. This alone is so unnatural that it tends to condemn the whole story. These Fabii were, in the oldest form of the legend, all patricians. This is plainly an exaggeration, for such a number of men capable of bearing arms in one single house is impossible, especially among the Fabians, who up to this time could only produce as consuls the three brothers Kaeso, Quintus, and Marcus. We gain nothing by supposing that among the 306 Fabii the clients of the Fabian house were also reckoned. The story must be taken or rejected as it is. Nor is the statement of Dionysius more than a guess, that the Fabii with the clients numbered 4,000 men, i.e. they formed a legion. Another writer, who may have thought that a legion at that time consisted of 5,000 men, gives that as the number of those who , marched out of Rome, and were killed at the Cremera.

Independently of the difficulties presented by the reported numbers and the particular circumstances, the whole proceeding, as it is related, is irreconcilable with the Roman public law, or at least custom. The expedition of the Fabii is an expedition of volunteers, and at their head is the consul for the year. Such a thing was impossible. The consul could only take the field after a formal decree of the senate and the people. The military organisation of the Romans was incompatible with private undertakings of the kind ascribed to the Fabii. It is a sign of a declining state when a war is carried on by officers who have no special commission from their government.

For this reason we cannot venture on any conjectures as to the real intentions of the Fabii; whether, as Niebuhr says, they wished to found a sort of private settlement of their own, or whether they wished only to establish a permanent military post, as was customary among the Greeks. The story offers no materials which would enable us to judge of the possible facts which may have given rise to it.

The wars with the Veientes cease from the year 474 b.c. till the war which, in 431 b.c., ended with the destruction of Veii.

 

CHAPTER VII.

THE AGRARIAN LAW OF SPURIUS CASSIUS.

 

The soil of a country is not the produce of human labour. Individual citizens cannot therefore naturally lay any claim to lawful property in land as to anything produced by their own hands. The state, as the representative of the rights and interests of society, decides how the land is to be divided among the members of the community, and the rules laid down by the state to regulate this matter are of the first and highest importance in determining the civil condition of the country and the prosperity of the people. Where the land is considered the property of the sovereign, the consequence for the people is abject poverty and slavery. If only one class among the people is privileged to have property in land, a most exclusive oligarchy is formed. Where the land is held in small portions by a great number, and nobody is legally or practically excluded from acquir­ing land, there the elements of democracy are provided.

According to the strict right of conquest in antiquity, the defeated lost, not only their independence, but, if the conquerors thought proper, their personal freedom, their movable and landed property, and even life itself. In practice a modification of this right took place in the interest of the conquerors themselves. Extreme severity was applied only in extreme cases; for instance, as a punishment for treason. The conquered had generally not only life and freedom left them, but also the means of livelihood, i.e. some portion of their land. The conquerors did not take the whole, but either one-third, or a half, or two-thirds, according to circumstances. Such we must imagine to have been the proceeding at the foundation of the Roman state. One portion of the original inhabitants which the Sabine conquerors found there probably remained in possession of their hereditary farms, subject to no restrictions and services save those which the state required of all its members, such as serving in the field and contributing the war taxes. These people formed the nucleus of the plebs—the freemen who were members of the Roman state without actually having any political rights. The land which the victors took from the vanquished being partly arable, but to a far greater extent pasture land, was either cultivated by the conquerors with their own hands, or given for cultivation to the former possessors on condition that they should pay part of the produce as rent. In this way arose the clientela, the social, political, and economical dependence in which a great part of the plebs stood with regard to the patricians, and which could remain in its original vitality only so long as the clients depended for their subsistence on land held not as freehold, but by an imperfect title, and subject to the seignorial rights of their patrons. The extent of the plebeian farms in the oldest times is stated to have been two jugera. This statement may the more readily be accepted as derived from authentic tradition, since the same amount of land was repeatedly given in historical times to the settlers in new colonies. So scant a measure of arable land would scarcely have sufficed for the support of a family, without a share in the common pasture. It may therefore be taken for granted that the plebeians had the right to use the common pasture on paying a tax to the state.

As long as the people of Rome depended less on agriculture than on the breeding of cattle, these regulations were natural and satisfactory. But with the advance of civilisation, agriculture was developed more and more, and as population increased, the grazing lands belonging to the government were inclosed by degrees. The plebeians now found themselves exposed to a double hardship. In the first place, the pasture lands being brought into cultivation, the extent of land available for grazing became smaller, and, in the second place, the patricians claimed the exclusive right of inclosing and occupying (occupatio) public land (ager publicus). This claim might be allowed, and, to a certain degree, be well founded, as long as the patricians alone formed the people (the populus) and bore the burdens of the state. But when the plebeians were gradually made to take their share in the military service, and when the Servian constitution substituted for the old patrician populus a new people, consisting of plebeians and patricians alike, the time for making a distinction between patricians and plebeians in the use of the public land had passed. Its occupation ought to have been granted to the plebeians as a right, or it should have been divided fairly among all the citizens, and the pernicious custom of occupation should have been abolished.

This system of occupation or squatting, in which every one may take possession of the land which he chooses, appears possible only where there is uncultivated land in abundance, and where the state offers undisturbed possession to the cultivator as a premium upon cultivation. Where, however, the reserved land is limited in quantity, and where the population has urgent need of it for purposes of agriculture—in other words, where land has a high value—disputes cannot possibly be avoided among those who wish to take possession, without the enactment of very precise rules and regulations, directing the process under which occupation is to take place. What these rules and regulations were in Rome we have no means of judging, as they are never even hinted at by the historians. We only know that the law sanctioned the occupation of waste and uninclosed land, and that it protected the bona fide occupier in his possession, without, however, acknowledging his possession as property. The state remained the owner of the public land, even after it was occupied by individual citizens. It had the right to impose an annual tax, as an acknowledgment of its paramount right of ownership, and it could at any time re-enter into possession and compel the occupiers to restore the land, without even a claim to compensation.

The right of occupation was claimed, as we have seen, by the patricians for themselves. The plebeians, however, did not allow this claim, and always called this proceeding of the patricians a crying injustice. Out of these conflicting interests arose the quarrels about the agrarian laws, which extend through the whole republican period, and mark a very sore spot in the social system of the Romans.

Already in the history of the regal period we hear much of allotments of land to the citizens. None of these accounts, however, have any weight. The first apparently credible mention of an agrarian law belongs to the third consulship of Sp. Cassius, 486 b.c. Although this law must have been of the greatest importance, although it was the cause of the death of Cassius, and, year after year, gave rise to the agrarian agitations of the tribunes, we know really nothing of its contents, and must be satisfied with conjecture. Sp. Cassius, in proposing it, was in opposition to the ruling party in the senate, as, after the expiration of his year of office, he was called to account, and fell a victim to the vengeance of his fellow-patricians, who made his fate a warning example for all members of the aristocracy that should feel inclined to place the well­being of the state higher than the advantage of the ruling class. It seems probable, therefore, that Cassius brought his agrarian law before the people without the consent of the senate, which he was legally justified in doing. But though the law was sanctioned by the comitia without the concurrence of the. senate, it could not be carried into effect without the. approval of the senate, the patrum auctoritas. If Cassius attempted to do this, or if, in calling the people together and laying his bill before them for acceptation, he was opposed by his colleague, and, regardless of this veto, persisted in his course, he was guilty of an infringement of the law which may have been the plea for his condemnation.

How confused, wild, and thoughtless are the stories of the Roman annalists which refer to this period is plainly seen from the accounts which Livy and Dionysius give of the measure of Spurius Cassius.

According to Livy, Cassius conquered the Hernicans, and concluded a treaty with them, by which they gave up two-thirds of their land. This land Cassius proposed to divide between the Latins and the Roman plebs. The plebeians would have had no objections to urge, if it had been proposed that they alone should have the conquered land, but they could not make up their minds to share it with the Latins, and therefore they condemned Cassius to death; although, apart from the intended boon of the agrarian law, he had thought to win their favour by proposing that the money which they had paid for the corn sent from Sicily in the year of the famine should be restored to them. The whole of this story is mere moonshine. The war with the Hernicans was invented to account for the well-known treaty with them, as we have already seen, and the alleged proposal to divide the money paid for the Sicilian com among the plebs is as unauthentic as the whole story of the famine of the year 493 B.C., as the conquests of Coriolanus, and as the gift of the Sicilian tyrant. Perhaps Niebuhr is right in his ingenious conjecture that this feature of the story was borrowed from a similar proposal of C. Gracchus in 122 B.C., and was therefore of very recent date.

Still wilder than the account of Livy is that of Dionysius. According to him, Sp. Cassius proposed to give away two-thirds of the Roman public land to the Latins and Hernicans, and to divide the remainder among the Roman plebs. This astounding misrepresentation is, like the report of Livy, an inference from the same treaty of Rome with the Latins and Hernicans. And in the story of Dionysius also we can trace, as in that of Livy, a reminiscence of the civil disturbances of the second century B.C. Dionysius says that Cassius, in order to carry his law, invited the Latins and Hernicans to an assembly of the Roman people, and that, by an edict of the consul Virginius, they were prevented from taking part in the Roman comitia. This feature of the story is plainly borrowed from the year 123 b.c., not less than 363 years later, when C. Gracchus invited the Latins and the Italian allies to come to Rome to vote, and when the Consul Fannius ordered them to leave the town. Such are the reports of one of the most important measures, which gave the first impulse to an agitation calculated to shake the republic to its very foundations. We know with certainty nothing more than the fact that an agrarian law was proposed by Sp. Cassius and frustrated by the patricians; and we can only suppose that that far-seeing statesman proposed what subsequently the plebs perseveringly struggled for, viz., a limitation of the exclusive right of the patricians to occupy the public land, and the admission of all citizens to a share in what was thus rescued from the grasping monopoly of the privileged class.

As to the end of Cassius, our authorities are partly contradictory, partly so vague that we are obliged to give up altogether the attempt to understand it, or to rest content with conjecture. It is universally reported that Sp. Cassius, after the expiration of his third consulship, was accused by the quaestors L. Valerius and K. Fabius of trying to obtain absolute power, but we are left quite in the dark as to the comitia that tried him. It is not likely that he was condemned in an assembly where, as in the comitia of centuries, the plebeians were numerous ; for, in spite of all that Livy has to say about the discontent of the plebeians on account of the liberality of Cassius to the allies, he acknowledges that they suffered a defeat in his condemnation. It is, therefore, most likely that Cassius was accused before the patrician curiae, and judicially murdered by the exasperated party of the nobility, under the always ready and easily proved accusation of an attempt to obtain absolute power.

There was, however, another, and a totally different, account about the end of Sp. Cassius, namely, that he was sentenced and put to death by his own father. It is difficult to say what we are to think of this story; we see, however, in it a new and striking example that the sources of our information are still far from being clear, consis­tent, and trustworthy.

 

CHAPTER VIII

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION BEFORE THE DECEMVIRATE.

 

The establishment of the tribuneship of the people had apparently introduced no new principle into the constitution of the republic. The authority of the patrician consuls, of the patrician senate, of the assembly of cen­turies, in which the patricians were paramount, remained what it had been before. The plebeian magistracy of the tribunes of the people was intended only to inforce the carrying out the law which granted lawful protection to the plebeians. It was, therefore, not hostile to the spirit of the old constitution, but rather in conformity with it.

Yet, in spite of this apparent preservation of the old institutions of the state, the beginning was made of a great revolution. The plebeians had already become so important a body that the apparently small privilege which secured to them nothing more than the right of protection became a weapon in their hands, by which they could gradually obtain full and equal rights with the old citizens. In the first place, the election of plebeian magistrates by the plebs was formally acknowledged and recognised by the patrician consuls and senate. This implied the recognition by the state of the plebs as a distinct and legally constituted body, as one of the constituent parts of the Roman people. The plebeian tribes, no doubt, had been self-governing bodies from the very beginning; and had managed their own affairs in their plebeian assemblies, without interference on the part of the patricians ; but of their proceedings hitherto the consuls and the senate had taken no notice. Their resolutions had had no more weight or legal effect on the officers of the state than the resolutions carried by an association or society not recognised by law or not invested with political functions. The chief officers whom the plebeians had hitherto chosen for themselves were not invested with any authority to co­operate with or to control the patrician magistrates; they were, in the eyes of the latter, nothing more than private individuals. This was altered now. Since the represen­tatives of the plebs were, by a solemn covenant with the patricians, endowed with specified rights and functions, which could not be ignored by the patrician magistrates, and since their persons had received a special dignity and inviolability, the elections of the plebeian officers were binding on the whole state, and the plebeian comitia as such took a part in the political transactions in which the sovereignty of the Roman people was expressed. The immediate consequence of the tribuneship of the people was the organisation of the assembly of tribes, the comitia tributa, whereby they lost their former character as factional or party meetings, and were raised to the dignity and functions of assemblies of the Roman people.

In what way this constitution of the comitia of tribes was effected cannot be shown with certainty. Even the mode of election adopted for the first tribunes during the secession, and for their successors until 471 B.C., is by no means ascertained beyond doubt. Livy, who often carefully avoids or skilfully conceals difficulties, does not say by which assembly the first and the succeeding tribunes were elected, and in his account of the year 471 b.c. he mentions for the first time that, in consequence of the Publilian law, the tribunes were from this time forward elected in the comitia of tribes. Dionysius, who endea­vours to compensate for the deficiency of his sources by his rich imagination, states that the first tribunes were elected in the comitia of curies; and Cicero, who is not always a trustworthy witness on Roman antiquities, agrees with him in this statement.

Modern historians have ventured to question this account, especially on the ground that the patrician comitia of curies would hardly have been suitable to choose the representatives of the plebeians, whose special duty it was to act as a check on the unfairness of the patrician magistrates. In truth, this view can be held by those only who accept the theory of the ancient writers, that the comitia of curies in the regal period were of a democratic nature, and included the plebeians. Yet, even this theory does not remove all doubts. Above all things, we may naturally ask how it happened that this assembly of the curies, which, since the establishment of the republic, was superseded in all legislative and elective functions by the assembly of centuries, was revived for the purpose of serving for a newly established office like that of the tribunes.

After duly weighing all the arguments that can be brought forward in favour of the different modes of electing the first tribunes, we come to the conclusion that the plebeians, who before this period had no other assemblies than those of their tribes for the election of their own plebeian officers, made use of the same comitia tributa for electing the tribunes, who were in all probability their old officers invested with new rights, and now for the first time formally recognised by the patricians, as representatives and patrons of the plebs. The assemblies of the local tribes thus attained an importance which they had never had before, and it was most natural that the patricians, who, according to their places of residence, were, like the plebeians, included in the local tribes, laid claim to have a share in the choice of the tribunes.

If the plebeians had agreed to this, the tribuneship of the people would have changed its character altogether. Under the influence of the patricians it would not have remained the weapon of offence and defence of the plebeians. It would have become a common magistracy of all citizens of Rome, and would not have been a wedge driven in between the two principal elements of the Roman people, destined to keep them distinct and at enmity one with another. The patricians often made the attempt to amalgamate these two elements. Whether they themselves frustrated their own object by having the interest of their class more at heart than the common weal, we do not know. But this is possible, and even probable, and they were therefore most to blame for the continuance of a schism which their cruelty and oppression had called forth. The circumstances which, in 471 B.C., led to the passing of the Publilian law, seem to indicate that even at that time the attempt was made by the patricians to change the original character of the tribuneship of the people, and to open it to the patrician class. The patri­cians intruded themselves in the assembly of the plebeians,’ surely not for the purpose of making a disturbance, as it is represented, but to enforce a contested right, by which they claimed to take part in the comitia of tribes. Their claim affected the organisation of the comitia materially, and it was of the greatest importance to decide, once for all, how these should be constituted, and what privileges they should have. This question was decided by the Publilian law, which excluded the patricians from the comitia tributa, and specified the privileges of these comitia, now admitted to be purely plebeian. To these privileges belonged the right of discussing all questions affecting not only the plebeian order but the community at large, and the right of electing the plebeian magistrates, including, of course, the tribunes of the people.

The Publilian law was, therefore, not so much a further acquisition of the plebeians, as a legal interpretation of the rights which belonged to them in consequence of the sacred laws. These were the right of meeting together unmolested in separate purely plebeian comitia, the right of freely and independently electing their representatives, the right of discussing and settling their own affairs, and in certain matters of passing resolutions which affected the whole community. These resolutions were of course not binding on the state, they had more the character of peti­tions than enactments, but still they were the formal expression of the will of a great majority of the Roman people, and as such they could not easily be set aside or ignored by the patrician government. It was natural that in a short time a custom should spring up regulating the manner in which such resolutions were to be laid before the senate. Once introduced into the senate, the resolutions of the tribes were launched on the road which all the laws of the state had to pass, and so it was possible that, without any further legal privileges, the tribunes of the people parti­cipated in the sovereign right of legislation through the assembly of tribes.

The first use of this right was made by the plebs, under the direction of their tribunes, for the purpose of passing the Terentilian rogations.

 

CHAPTER IX.

THE DECEMVIRS AND THE LAWS OF THE TWELVE TABLES.

451 B.C.

By the treaty of peace concluded by the two orders of citizens on the Sacred Hill, the demand of the plebeians not to be subject to the caprice of the patrician government, but to the existing laws, was granted. As a guarantee of this legal position they received the consecrated magistracy of the tribunes. But when the tribunes were called upon to put their veto upon any unfair or illegal decision of the patrician magistrates, they found themselves insufficiently acquainted with the law, and it was no doubt easy for the patricians, by appealing to a law known and accessible only to themselves, to frustrate the intercession of the plebeian tribunes.

The knowledge of law was guarded as a sacred mystery from the profane eye of the plebeians. It was cultivated in the patrician families as a kind of secret science, and, like the precepts of a priesthood jealous and ambitious of power, it was strictly preserved from being written down and published. This exclusive possession of the principles and formulae of law was one of the greatest supports of patrician authority, and kept the ignorant masses in a state of de­pendence from which even the protection of the tribunes was not able to deliver them.

It could not, therefore, be long after the establishment of the tribuneship before the plebeians felt the necessity of putting an end to the exclusive possession of the laws which the patricians enjoyed, and to make them the common property of the whole nation. This could only be done by writing them down and making them public. A proposal was accordingly made in the assembly of the tribes by the tribune C. Terentilius Arsa (462 b.c.) to appoint a commission for the purpose of committing to writing the whole of the laws. The proposal was by no means revolutionary; it was, on the contrary, conservative. A reform of the state, like that which Solon was commissioned to effect in Athens, was not contemplated by the movers of the law. The proposal did not at first affect the constitution at all, but only the civil law. Nor was it intended that this should be remodelled after new principles. Nothing was proposed but a codification and publication of the law which was then in force. Such a work is, indeed, not easy, even under the most favourable circumstances, and it is a convincing proof of the spirit and strength of will of the Roman plebs that they so early insisted on carrying a measure not less difficult than salutary.

It is not wonderful that the patricians opposed with all their strength a measure which would wrest a most powerful weapon out of their hands. As yet the plebs had no share in the regular course of legislation. Their representatives, the tribunes, had neither the right to summon the senate, nor to lay before it proposals respecting new laws. In all probability they were not even en­titled to enter the hall of the senate, and had to be satisfied with the modest privilege of listening outside to the proceedings. They could indeed speak to their fellow­plebeians in public meetings of the necessity of the proposed reform, and so they could exercise a pressure on the senate and the patricians, but the decisions in the assembly of tribes were not binding and might be ignored by the senate. Only, as they expressed the opinion of the great majority of the Roman people, which, if entirely disregarded, might possibly lead to a violent revolution, they exercised on the better and more intelligent part of the nobility an influence that, under continued agitation, promised success. For this reason the contest for the passing of the bill of Terentilius lasted, according to tradition, not less than ten years, and all means of open and secret opposition and of partial concession were made use of to elude the claims of the popular party. The attacks of foreign enemies, of the Volscians and Aequians, which just at this time were most alarming, often supplied the patricians with a plea for letting internal dissensions rest for a while. This was the period when the Volscians penetrated into the heart of Latium, and broke up the Latin league. Even Rome, no longer protected and shielded by Latium, was exposed to the attacks of the enemy. The Aequians succeeded one night in gaining possession of the Capitol by a bold assault, while the patricians and plebeians were in the midst of their civil dissensions. Such events were eminently calculated to convince even the staunchest patricians that it was high time to conciliate the warlike plebeians, and to put an end to the internal dissensions of the republic. They contributed, no doubt, to give the necessary weight to the popular demands, and to smooth down difficulties which might be involved in any irregu­larity or informality in the mode of proposing the law.

We hear, therefore, of various concessions made by the patricians before they accepted the principle of the new law. Among these must be reckoned the increase of the tribunes from five to ten (457 BC..), by which a greater number of plebeians came within reach of the protection of the tribunes; moreover, the giving up of the Aventine hill to the sole use of the plebeians, a measure by which the patrician possessions on that hill were resumed by the state, and portioned out to plebeians. Shortly after this (454 b.c.) a law was proposed by the consuls themselves, i.e. the patrician party, which, quite in the spirit of the Terentilian proposals, regulated the amount of fines which the consuls should have a right to inflict, and thus limited, in one direction at least, the consular authority. The maximum was fixed at two sheep and thirty bullocks, a measure which casts a light on the domestic condition of Rome at this period, and shows that we must picture Rome to ourselves as engaged in agriculture, and far re­moved from an imposing town life. It was not till twenty-four years later that these fines were fixed in money.

But all these concessions failed to satisfy the plebs. Although Terentilius, the original proposer of the motion, is never named again after the first year, and may therefore be supposed to have died, his proposal was taken up by the succeeding tribunes year after year. It is possible that, during the course of these years, some modifications were made in the original motion. Still we may presume that, essentially, it remained the same, as eventually, after a ten years’ struggle, it was passed into law. It proposed that a commission of ten men, being partly patricians and partly plebeians, should be appointed, for the purpose of arranging the existing law into a code. At the same time the consular constitution was to be suspended, and the ten men to be intrusted with the government and administration of the commonwealth during the time that they acted as legislators. By the same law the plebeian magistracy of the tribunes of the people ceased likewise, and the ten men became a body of magistrates intrusted with unlimited authority. The Romans thought that the difficult task of compiling a code could not be accomplished unless those who were intrusted with it were unfettered. More especially the tribunes of the people, whose particular function and duly it was to act as a check on the magistrates, might have frustrated the whole scheme of legislation, if it had not been agreed to suspend the office of tribunes for a time.

But the patricians did not act entirely in good faith. Confident of their influence in the assembly of centuries, they consented that men of both orders should be eligible for the office of decemvirs, but, this done, they carried the election of ten patricians. The plebeians, therefore, were without their tribunes, and found themselves and their interests at the mercy of ten patrician magistrates. Having, however, obtained this advantage over the credulity of their opponents, the patricians made no attempt to use it insolently as a party victory. The decemvirs proceeded with wisdom and moderation. Their administration, as well as their legislation, met with universal approval. They published on ten tables the greater part of the Roman law, and after these laws had met with the approbation of the people, they were declared by a decision of the people to be binding.

Thus the first year of the decemvirate passed, and so far the traditional story is simple and intelligible. But what now follows is so confused and unnatural that we must suspect it to have been largely corrupted by idle tales and partial misrepresentations. It runs as follows:—The decemvirs had not quite finished their task. It was therefore agreed to choose decemvirs for the following year also, that the statutes might be completed. The patricians made the greatest efforts to elect the most eminent men of their order into this commission, and these candidates availed themselves of the usual means for obtaining the votes of the people. But a formidable rival came in their way, no other than Appius Claudius himself, who was regarded as the principal support of the patricians. This man had been a member of the first decemvirate, and had decidedly taken the lead in it. He now conducted himself as a sincere friend of the people, and contrived to obtain adhe­rents among the leaders of the plebeians, the Icilii and Duilii, the former tribunes. To prevent his re-election, his patrician colleagues conferred on him the office of presiding at the comitia, hoping that he would observe the usual custom, and, as presiding magistrate, would not accept votes for himself. But this ruse did not succeed. Appius Claudius not only allowed himself to be elected, but also frustrated the election of the principal patrician candidates. Thus the result of the election was that, besides Appius Claudius, only men of inferior weight among the patricians obtained seats in the commission, and that half of the members were plebeians. The new decemvirs had, however, scarcely entered office when they began a perfect reign of terror. They appeared on the Forum with a band of a hundred and twenty lictors, and these carried axes among their rods as a sign of unlimited power over life and death. Nor was it only for show, or to inspire terror, that Appius and his fellow-decemvirs assumed this emblem of regal authority. Neither their lives nor the property of the citizens, especially the plebeians, were safe from their tyranny and greed. The senate was hardly summoned at all. They ruled like ten kings, and their caprice was their only law. They gave so little thought to the completion of their task, that only towards the end of the year did they draw up two more tables of laws, to be submitted to the assembly of the people.

When their time of office expired, Appius and his colleagues declined to abdicate. Their rule was now an undisguised tyranny. No one, however, dared to oppose them, until by two acts of infamy they excited the people to take up arms against them. A war had broken out with the Sabines and with the Aequians. While Appius, with one of his colleagues, carried on his rule of terror in the town, the remaining decemvirs led the army into the field. Here they caused a brave soldier, named Siccius, formerly a tribune of the plebs, who by his repeated complaints against the tyrants had roused the discontent of the people, to be murdered. Meanwhile, in Rome, Appius Claudius broke his oath and the law by pronouncing a wilfully false sentence from the seat of judgment. He declared a freeborn Roman virgin, the daughter of Virginius, to be a slave and the property of one of his clients, whom he had suborned to claim the girl, in order that he might get her into his own power. Virginius, seeing no way of shielding his daughter from disgrace and dishonour, killed her before the judgment-seat of the tyrant and before the eyes of the people. A storm now broke out against the decemvirs, which they were net able to withstand. The senate took courage and compelled them to resign. The people left Rome in a body, went a second time to the Sacred Hill, and did not return till the old constitution and the sacred laws had been re-established and the tribuneship of the people restored. The decemvirs suffered for their crimes. Appius Claudius and Spurius Oppius, the most guilty of his accomplices, were accused of having broken the laws, and died in prison by their own hands. The rest were punished with banishment and forfeiture of their property.

This is, in a few words, the story which Livy and Dionysius have ornamented with a great mass of rhetorical detail. Unfortunately we have no full report of the events independent of these two narratives, and we are obliged to use the few faint hints given us to shape the crude mass of confused and conflicting statements into something which can be accepted as at least a possible history of the time.

We start from the peculiar part which Appius Claudius played during the decemvirate. Though he is painted in the glaring colours which mark all the Claudii of the older annals as enemies of the plebeians, yet he appears nevertheless in Livy’s account to be decidedly opposed to the ultra-patrician party. He even enjoys the favour of the plebs, and thereby exercises the chief influence among the decemvirs of the first year. He has become entirely a fidend of the people; he agitates against the nobles, and for the candidates of lower station and less influence; he associates with the leaders of the plebs, the former tribunes. Thus he not only brings about his own re-election, but frustrates the nomination of the most zealous and influential patricians. Finally he succeeds so far that three plebeians are chosen among the second decemvirs. These features of the story, in which Appius bears a character differing so widely from that usually ascribed to the Claudii, deserve the more credence as it would have been easy to describe Appius Claudius in the whole story as a consistent enemy of the plebs. It appears, therefore, that in the traditions respecting the decemvirate, the de­mocratic principles of Appius Claudius were too distinctly and too strongly expressed to allow the annalists to exhibit him in this respect with the traditionary characteristics of his family. If, therefore, we may believe any one single feature of the story, it is this prominent importance of Appius Claudius in a policy carried out in opposition to the wishes of the narrow-minded and short-sighted nobility.

What then, we may ask, was the intention of Appius Claudius? It is clear that he could not have been, as he is represented, at one and the same time, an enemy of the leaders of the nobility and a tyrannical oppressor of the common people. The two characters cannot be united in one person. From whom could Appius and his adherents have expected support, if they had estranged both nobles and people? Here is evidently a perversion of the truth, and we must decide whether we wish to accept the account of his enmity or of his friendship for the people. If it be admitted that, through the influence of Appius Claudius, three plebeians were elected among the second decemvirs, and the leaders of the extreme patrician party excluded, his intention must have been, in the spirit of the Terentilian law, to establish harmony between the two orders. At the election of the first decemvirs, the patricians had succeeded in excluding the plebeians, thereby violating the agreement which had ended the long disputes about the Terentilian rogations. By the mixed composition of the second decemvirate, the long-wished-for equality of rights between the two orders might be obtained. This was probably the object of Appius Claudius. We venture to think that by such an equality of rights, he hoped to fill up the gap between the two orders of citizens, so that the tribuneship, being henceforth superfluous, need not be re-established.

But in this attempt Claudius had to encounter the whole influence of the party of the uncompromising patricians. He did not succeed in winning their approval for his scheme of regulating on an equable footing the respective rights of the plebeians and patricians. The two last tables which were yet wanted to complete the whole decemviral legislation could not be passed by Appius and his colleagues, no doubt because his draft contained regulations unpalatable to the old aristocracy. When they were finally passed, after the downfall of the decemvirs, under the con­sulship of Valerius and Horatius, they certainly contained such unpopular laws as the one which forbad marriages between patricians and plebeians. But it appears that Claudius, with characteristic firmness, persevered in his purpose, and when the year of office of the decemvirs had expired, he declined to retire with his colleagues before his laws were accepted and published. He thereby placed himself in a false position, and no longer had the formal law on his side. It was now easy for the patricians to overthrow the bold innovator and his colleagues, as well as to frustrate his plans. But only a compulsory resignation, and not by any means a revolt of the people, put an end to the decemvirate. The secession which took place at this time was surely not directed against the man who, like Sp. Cassius and other Roman patricians, had the mag­nanimity and the political wisdom to oppose the presumed advantages of the privileged party. If we are not mistaken, the rising and the secession of the plebs did not take place before the abolition of the decemvirate. Then the two last tables, containing the unpopular laws, were drawn up by the consuls Valerius and Horatius, and while the old consular government was restored, the attempt was made to prevent a restoration of the tribuneship. Taking this view of the events we must of course reject the story of the accusation of Appius and his colleagues by the tribunes of the people, and of his suicide in prison. We shall have the less scruple in doing this, as the impeachment and suicide of Appius are related by the annalists for the year 470 BC. also. If Appius died a violent death, it was not the plebeians who drove him to it, but men of his own order, who persecuted in him the traitor and apostate. The annals of the aristocratic families have concealed this fact, as they have also concealed facts regarding the punishment of other friends of the people?

This is our view of the history of the second decem­virate. It is a view which makes that history appear to some extent possible and intelligible. Of course it follows that Appius cannot have been accused by the popular party of the crimes said to have been committed against Siccius and Virginia. Such charges may well have been fabricated against him by the patricians, who wished to make his name infamous. The whole history of the decemvirate is in a state of hopeless confusion, and our conjec­tures cannot be adduced as proved facts. But, however this may be, the story of Livy and Dionysius is so absurd that we must sacrifice it for any hypothesis which does not require us to accept palpable contradictions as facts, and the imaginations of a feverish dream as history.

 

CHAPTER X.

RESTORATION OF THE CONSTITUTION AFTER THE DECEMVIRATE.

 

It is almost surprising that we have such scanty informa­tion regarding the events which preceded and followed the decemvirate. The movement stirred the Roman people even to the very heart. For the first time the idea was discussed that patricians and plebeians were members of one and the same political body, and entitled to the same rights. The claim that both ought to share in the government of the state was made and allowed. The plebeian decemvirs were the first chief magistrates of the republic, who belonged to the inferior, and hitherto subject, class of the population. For the first time plebeians sat on the curule chairs by the side of their patrician colleagues, conducted the deliberations of the senate, and led the legions of the republic in the field. The change was rapid and too great to last. When we bear in mind how, some time later, after the establishment of the military tribunes, the patrician blood boiled up at the idea of seeing the descendants of their former clients by the side of the scions of the old nobility, wearing the insignia of the highest office; and how, in the face of the law, they persevered during half a century in excluding the plebeians from this dignity; how half a century later they could hardly endure plebeian consuls, and repeatedly succeeded, in spite of the Licinian law, in getting two patricians elected—if we bear this in mind, a strong reaction on the part of the narrow-minded nobility against the spirit of the decemviral legislation, and especially against plebeians having any share in the chief magistracy of the republic, becomes most natural. The patricians insisted on the retirement of the decemvirs, and on the restoration of the old constitution. Perhaps they pleaded that the tribunes were now no longer needed, since the legal protection which they were appointed to give was guaranteed by the laws of the twelve tables, which restrained the patrician magistrates from any further caprice and injustice. It was, as we have seen, only against such pretensions as these that the rising and the secession of the plebs were directed, not against the decemvirs, who themselves were at enmity with the senate. The consequence of the secession was the re-establishment of the plebeian liberties, that is, of the tribunes, and of personal protection against the caprice of the patricians.

But with this the plebeians were no longer satisfied. They had learned their strength. In spite of their violent opposition, the patricians had found themselves compelled to consent to the compiling of the code of laws. Still more: they had been obliged to consent to the election of plebeians to the decemvirate, which was, for the time being, the highest political office. The plebeians had no intention of returning simply to the same position which they had obtained for themselves by the first secession. They had grown stronger. The patricians had lost in numbers and moral influence. The plebeians now laid claim not merely to toleration and protection against tyranny: they insisted on having a share in the government of the state, of which they were the chief support, and which they could deprive of all vital power by the simple means of a secession. The time had now come when a real union of the two classes, and a division of power, might have spared the state a long period of internal discontent; and this was, as we can plainly see, the object which some of the wisest men in Rome had in view. But the parties were not sufficiently reconciled to one another for such a union, and it appears that on the one side patrician selfishness and pride, on the other, plebeian distrust, were the great obstacles. There was therefore no choice left hut to go on with that dualistic development of the constitution, which had been begun at the first secession of the plebs, to strengthen and complete the organisation of the latter as a separate power in the state, and, by opposing it to the old patrician body, to establish a balance between conflicting forces and interests. The creation of the tribuneship of the people was now followed up by a second measure of equal importance. The plebeian assembly of tribes had hitherto been recognised only as an assembly of the plebeians. Their resolutions could bind only plebeians. Only in so far as the tribunes elected by them were invested with authority to control even patrician magistrates, were the votes of the plebeian assembly of tribes recognised as law by the whole of the community. Their resolutions on other matters had no weight but that of petitions, and might be rejected as impertinent interferences in state affairs. The comitia of tribes were now raised above this doubtful and unsatisfactory position. It was a great step in the development of plebeian freedom when, in consequence of the second secession, the consuls Valerius and Horatius caused a law to be passed in the comitia of centuries, that the resolutions of the plebs in their tribes should be binding on the whole people.

By this law the tribuneship was not simply renewed, but weapons were put into the hands of the tribunes with which they could successfully attack, and by degrees could conquer, the stronghold of patrician privileges. For the first time the tribunes had now a firm legal ground under their feet for this purpose. Mere defence and protection were no longer their exclusive business. Their whole position in the state was altered. The body of plebeians as such was now called upon to co-operate in legislation. It is true, its powers were still limited. The election of consuls, the declaration of war, the jurisdiction over life and death were, and remained in, the hands of the centuries under the presidency of the consuls; the resolutions of the tribes, confined as they were to internal and civil questions, were moreover subject to the approval of the senate (patrum auctoritas), just like the resolutions of the centuries; but this very co-operation between the senate and the assembly of tribes made it necessary that the tribunes should from this time forward stand in a legal and regular relation to the senate. It was necessary for them to have the opportunity of bringing the resolutions of the tribes in proper form before the senate for confirma­tion ; and accordingly it became the ordinary practice that the propositions of the tribunes should be first submitted to the senate for discussion, and then to the decision of the people. Henceforth therefore we find the tribunes taking part in the deliberations of the senate, at first only as tolerated listeners, sitting before the door of the senate ­hall, but very soon after admitted to the interior and obtaining a full share of influence.

The original function of the tribunes, which consisted in rendering legal assistance to plebeians in individual cases of hardship or oppression, was also changed by degrees. They began to interpose their veto on resolutions of the senate and administrative measures of the consuls.If the opposition of the tribunes was apprehended—for instance, against the levying of soldiers—it must have been preferable for the magistrates to meet this opposition at the very outset—that is, in the senate—where it might possibly be overcome either by argument or by direct personal influence, than to see themselves checked in the carrying out of the resolution. But if the opposition of the tribunes could not be overcome, it was expedient to desist from such measures altogether.

The right of legislation was inseparable in antiquity from that of jurisdiction. It was therefore natural that the comitia of tribes, as soon as they had power to legislate for the people, acquired also the right of a popular court of justice. Now, therefore, begin the tribunician impeachments of patricians before the comitia of tribes. The jurisdiction in capital cases, it is true, was reserved for the comitia of centuries by a law of the twelve tables, and the tribes could inflict only fines; but, even with this restriction, the plebeian court of justice proved, in the hands of the tribunes, who naturally acted as prosecutors, a terrible weapon not only of defence but also of attack. Through the right of impeachment, which was practically the right of punishing their antagonists, the tribunes gradually lost their original character, and, from public protectors, came to be more and more public prosecutors. Nor did they confine themselves to prosecutions which had for their object the punishment of attacks on plebeian rights, but they soon arrogated to themselves the right of bringing before their forum faults and offences of the magistrates which in no way concerned the plebs as a class. Thus it was, without doubt, a palpable straining of the law if they brought an impeachment against a consul for bad management in war; for, however the interests of the state as a whole might be affected by such an offence, it could hardly be maintained that any plebeian individually, or the plebs as a body, had been especially wronged.

With the recognition of the plebeian comitia of tribes as a popular court of justice was connected a further important extension of plebeian liberties. By it a court was formed, to which the plebeians could appeal from the decisions of patrician judges. Accordingly a law of appeal is reported to have been given by Valerius and Horatius. The object of this law could not have been to confirm the right of appeal, which the patricians already possessed by virtue of one of the Valerian laws. For the restoration of the consulship after the decemvirate would have been no bona-fide restoration if it had not included that clause of the Valerian laws which limited the authority of the consuls, by giving to the patricians the right of appeal from their decisions to the people, i.e. the centuries. The new law of Valerius and Horatius, which is apparently identical with the old Valerian law of appeal, can therefore apply only to the plebeians. These were now allowed to share a right which the patricians had enjoyed from the beginning of the republic as members of the sovereign people. Nor was this new right anything but the application of the principle of constitutional law, which gave to the plebeians in the assembly of their tribes a share in the sovereignty of the Roman people. As this assembly was henceforth called upon to discharge some of the duties of legislation and the election of magistrates, it was likewise made to par­ticipate in the jurisdiction exercised by the Roman people. The comitia tributa constituted henceforth a tribunal qualified to guarantee the plebeian rights. No obstacles were therefore left which, before the decemvirate, had prevented the extension of the right of appeal to the plebs, and the difference between plebeians and patricians which made them unequal in point of legal security ceased to exist.

This improvement in the legal position of the plebs might have been a motive for abolishing the tribuneship. For, as we have seen, the principal function of the tribunes was to provide that legal protection which for the ple­beians was to take the place of the right of appeal. The tribuneship nevertheless remained, and the tribunes directed less attention to the protection of the civil rights of the plebeians than to the obtaining political equality between them and the patricians. When, after the lapse of about 100 years, this object was attained, the tribuneship was transformed into an organ of the government, by which the new nobility controlled the servants of the state, until at a still later period the greatly increased power of the tribunes provided the demagogues with the means of overthrowing the republican constitution.

It has been supposed by modern historians that, after the decemvirate, the patricians voted with the plebeians in the assembly of tribes. But for this supposition no argument can be brought forward that will bear examination. For although the patricians were included in the tribes for administrative purposes—as, for example, in assessments for the public taxes—and although, therefore, every patrician was a member of a particular tribe, it is not a necessary consequence that they were allowed to vote in the assembly of tribes with the plebeians. The English peers are also members of certain parishes, which form part of the parliamentary divisions of counties; but they have no vote in parliamentary elections. On the other hand, the wording of the laws themselves serves as a proof that the patricians were excluded from the assembly of tribes. The law of Valerius and Horatius of 449 b.c. declares that the resolutions of the tribes should be binding on the whole state, i.e. patricians as well as plebeians. This declaration would have been superfluous, if the patricians as well as the plebeians had been included in the assembly of tribes. Nor do we find a single instance of a patrician voting in the assembly of tribes; but it often happened that they tried to influence their friends and adherents who had votes.

The assemblies of the tribes therefore, although always purely plebeian, assumed more and more the character of general assemblies of the people. This is the more easily explained, as the votes in the bribes were taken by heads, and the patricians, who were continually becoming fewer, could have no direct influence on the result of the voting. They found it more convenient to rely on that indirect in­fluence which cannot be taken away from the rich and powerful by any electoral law. By this means the comitia of tribes became, in time, like the tribunes of the people, an instrument of government in the hands of the nobility, in the same manner as the English House of Commons has generally served the interests of the aristocracy of England.

 The assemblies of tribes were now no longer convened exclusively by plebeian magistrates—the tribunes and their assistants, the aediles—but also by the higher curule magistrates, who were originally purely patrician. In such cases they had a resemblance to the old assemblies of Roman citizens, especially on account of the religious ceremonies with which they were opened by the patrician magistrates. Plebiscites, however—i.e. plebeian resolutions properly so called—were only those which the plebs made under the presidency of plebeian magistrates.

Simultaneously with the new order of things brought about by the second secession of the plebs (449 BC.) an innovation took place, which was the first step in the direction taken by the subsequent constitutional reforms. It appears that till now the consuls had had the free disposal of booty made in war, and of the war treasury, if such a thing then existed. In the wars of that time, in which rapine and plunder played a great part, the booty was of the highest importance for the unpaid soldiers. We may believe Livy, that party interest often determined the mode in which the consuls acted with regard to the division of the spoils. In order to take away from the consuls this arbitrary power, and to give to the people a more direct influence in this matter, the new office of quaestors was now established, and the nomination for this office was intrusted to the comitia of tribes, with this restriction, however, that they should only elect patricians.

 

CHAPTER XI.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE RIGHTS OF THE PLEBEIANS.

 

The laws of the Twelve Tables form the first unmistakable landmark on the confines of legend and history. The alleged documents of the earlier period are all either falsely interpreted or downright forgeries. Even the oldest annalists possessed no real documentary evidence from the time preceding the decemvirate. But the twelve tables were for a long time well preserved and universally known. At the same time we are approaching a period which made so deep an impression on the imagination of contemporaries that the memory of it was not obliterated when the first attempts were made at historical writing.

Though the details of events cannot yet be sharply and distinctly recognised, the relations of the contending parties are now represented, on the whole, with increasing accuracy. There was still no reconciliation or union between patricians and plebeians. The patricians had still exclusive possession of the senate and of the high offices of state and of religion. The plebeians, as a com­pensation for this exclusion from the government, had obtained a complete internal organisation of their own body. They had a share in the sovereignty of the Roman people, and they had their own assemblies, their tribunes and aediles, to a certain extent counterbalancing the patrician consuls and quaestors. The tribunes had gained admission to the senate, and no public question could be discussed or settled without their concurrence. Through their right of intercession they had obtained an influence which bears some resemblance to the power exercised by representative chambers in the present day. They were backed by the plebeian comitia of tribes, and their prin­cipal weapon was the jurisdiction of the same comitia through which they could strike terror into their oppo­nents.

If the decemvirs intended by their legislation to es­tablish equal rights for the two classes and to blend them into one, they entirely failed in their object. But the plebeians now began in earnest, and with success, to attack and abolish the exclusive privileges of the patricians. Nothing shows with greater distinctness the opposition which originally existed between the patricians and the plebeians than the inadmissibility of a legal Roman marriage (connubium) between members of the two classes. It was not the twelve tables which, as the Roman historians erroneously relate, first prohibited such marriages. The prohibition existed from the commencement of the Roman state as a natural consequence of the difference of rights between the people or patricians, the original founders the Roman state, and the subject plebeians. As the patricians had their own religious worship to which the plebeians were not admitted, and as they considered that they alone were in possession of the auspicia, by means of which the divine protection was secured to the Roman state, they had, as a kind of privileged caste, kept themselves pure from any mixture of plebeian blood.

On this purity of noble descent, and the religious sanctity supposed to be inherent in it, was based in great measure the preponderance which the patricians knew how to make use of in their dealings with the plebeians. If this ideal advantage were taken from them—if, from privileged beings of a high and favoured race, they were to become common men—if plebeians were admitted into the consecrated circle—the old superstitions, from which the patricians derived so many advantages, must give way and disappear.

It seems to have been principally from such considerations, of a purely political character, that, soon after the restoration of the consular constitution (445 b.C.), the tribune Canuleius proposed a law to legalise marriages between the two classes, so that the father should retain the full paternal authority over the children, and that, therefore, the children of a patrician father and a plebeian mother should belong to the father’s class; whereas, in the case of such mixed manages, all the children formerly took the lower station, that is, they became plebeians, it being all the same whether the father or mother was plebeian.

It is clear, and this fact could not escape the plebeians, that the plebeian class as such would not gain strength, if in this manner the patricians grew in numbers and were invigorated by new blood. But the weakening or destroying of the patrician class was not the object of the plebeians. They wished only to do away with the distinct position and privileges of the patricians; they wanted to obtain for themselves admission to all their honours and rights, and for this reason they considered it necessary first of all to break through the barrier which hemmed in the privileged class and separated it from the rest of the people. This motive is evident from another demand of the plebeians put forward at the same time, a demand which pointed to the final aim they had in view, but which it took two more generations and the hottest contests to realise—the demand of a share in the highest office of the state, the consulate.

These two motions, brought forward so soon after the decemvirate, show how strong and enduring in its effects the movement had been which had led to the decemviral legislation. The plebeians had (though only for a time) raised themselves to an equality with the privileged class. The tide of the reaction could not sweep them down permanently into the old state of subordination. Only four years later the plebeians were bold and confident enough once more to strive for the highest of all prizes. The course of events now showed how much the plebs had gained in strength by the recent reform, on the one hand by the growing power of the assembly of tribes, on the other by the increasing authority of the tribunes, and their influence in the senate. After a violent but short opposition, the patricians were obliged to yield on both these points. The demand of the right of intermarriage was granted (445 b.c.) without reserve; and with this concession all claims resting on the exclusiveness of the patrician class and the purity of patrician blood were altogether overthrown. From this time forward the richest and most prominent families of the plebs contracted alliances with those of the old nobility; and there can be no doubt that the latter by this union, against which they had so obstinately struggled, gained a great accession of strength, which was of material service to them in subsequent civil disputes.

The second demand of the plebeians, which was directed to a share in the consulship, the patricians met neither by straightforward concession nor by direct refusal. They hoped to save for themselves the reality of political power by allowing to the plebeians the formal right of sharing it. They accordingly modified the proposition of the tribunes to this effect, that in future the people should be free to elect either consuls—that is, patricians according to the old law—or in their place other officers, under the title of military tribunes with consular power consisting of patricians and plebeians. In this form the law was passed. It is not reported in what respect the official competency of the consular tribunes was to differ from that of the consuls. Still so much is plain, that the difference con­sisted not alone in name. The number of the consular tribunes was in the beginning fixed at three, and it seems that one of these three offices—that for the administration of justice (the future praetorship)—was in­tended to be reserved for the patricians; at any rate one place at least always remained patrician.

A further limitation of the concession made to the ple­beians consisted in the establishment of a new patrician office, the censorship, whose official duties had hitherto belonged to the consulship, but were not transferred to the military tribunes.

The right thus attained by the plebeians of electing consular tribunes of their own order proved—as no doubt the patricians had expected from the beginning—a dead letter for a long time. So great was the influence of the old nobility in the elections that, for the space of forty-four years, down to 400 BC not a single plebeian was elected to the office. Only in the very first year (444 BC.) it appears that, in the flush of recent victory, and in the excitement produced by the passing of the law, the plebeians succeeded in raising one of their order to the new office. But even this first success they were not allowed to enjoy long. For, two months after the election, the patricians came forward and declared that the election was vitiated by some formal irregularity, and they compelled the consular tribunes to lay down their office, whereupon the senate contrived that in their place consuls, i.e. exclusively patrician magistrates, should be elected. The gain, therefore, which the plebeians derived from the reform was, in reality, of very little practical importance. They had indeed, under bold leaders, favoured perhaps by particular circumstances, under the impression which the decemviral legislation and the secession had made, obtained a constitutional right; but the excitement of the contest, it appears, was succeeded by a time of exhaustion, and the patricians remained practically in possession of the power which they had legally resigned.

The gains In order to explain this remarkable phenomenon we ought to be intimately acquainted with the influence which the patricians still possessed through their wealth, their political organisation, their experience and capacity, and their firmly rooted power. We can only form conjectures on these points; but this can be plainly seen, that, by the forms of the constitution, especially by the exten­sive discretionary powers of the presiding magistrates, the patricians had the means of exercising a decided influence on the issue of the election.

The presiding magistrate had the right to refuse votes which fell on a candidate he disapproved of. He could even decline formally to declare the result of an election, and thus was able to treat it as null and void. If such a course was unadvisable, it was open to the senate to refuse its sanction (patrum auctoritas) and the body of patricians could decline to confer the imperium by the lex curiata. Where none of these means seemed likely to produce the desired result, there was another pretext in the religious formalities, by which an election could at any time be declared vitiated. If the nobility unscrupulously applied all these legal checks in addition to their own private influence, and at the same time dextrously made use of the foreign relations of the republic to carry out their party politics—if they understood how to frighten or to humour the plebeians by the prospect of wars, conquests, alliances, or colonies—we can well understand how the plebeians, with mournful resignation, might yield to what was inevitable, and rather renounce the carrying out of a hard-won law, than endanger the internal peace and perhaps the safety of the state by stubborn opposition. As a last resource the tribunes of the people might have used their right of intercession, by which they could stop the elections; but, in such a case, if the patricians would not yield, an interregnum or dictatorship became inevitable; and thus the patricians finally succeeded in exhausting the patience of the plebeians, and in com­pelling them to give up the contest.

Six years after the establishment of the consular tribunes (439 b.c.), an event took place which throws much light on the character of the civil struggles then raging in Rome. It is the melancholy end of the popular leader, Spurius Maelius. We will endeavqur to clear it of the misrepresentations by which the partial historians, writing in the interest of the aristocracy, have made it almost unintelligible.

 

CHAPTER XII.

SPURIUS MAELIUS.

 

In the tenth year after the decemvirate, Livy relates, there was a famine in Rome. Everything was tried to check the misery of the people, and the necessary measures this purpose were intrusted to L. Minucius, an officer especially appointed as master of markets (praefectus annonae), who took a great deal of trouble to get the price of com reduced. He bought large supplies in foreign lands, ordered that every citizen should sell whatever com he might have in excess of one month’s consumption, limited the rations of slaves, and acted with severity towards the usurers. But all these means were of little use. The misery of the poor increased, and many threw themselves into the Tiber, to escape by a quick death from the tortures of hunger.

Then a man from among the people took compassion on his suffering countrymen. Spurius Maelius, a rich plebeian from the class of knights, bought com in Etruria through his friends and clients, and distributed it gratis, or at very low prices, to the starving plebs. In this way he won their unbounded gratitude and attachment, and it appeared that the people would withhold nothing from his ambition, and that he had at least a prospect of being made consul as a reward for his generosity. But Maelius aimed higher. He thought that, in order to attain to this dignity, he must encounter the opposition of the patricians, and it did not seem to him a much more difficult task to make himself the absolute master of the state. Such plans and intentions could not long remain secret, and were made known especially to Minucius, whose exertions on the part of the government to ameliorate the misery of the people were quite thrown into the shade by the splendid generosity of Mselius. Forthwith Minucius reported to the senate that in the house of Maelius arms had been collected, and that secret meetings of conspirators were taking place. The tribunes were already bribed, he said, to betray the liberty of the republic. The projects for restoring the royal power were notorious; only the conspirators had not yet agreed as to the time of action. There was danger in delay, and he had waited too long already in making his report. In this state of affairs the senate determined to adopt the last measures for the defence of the republic. The aged Cincinnatus was immediately appointed dictator, and he chose C. Servilius for his master of the horse. Surprise and consternation seized all the people when, on the following morning, the dictator mounted his tribunal in the Forum. With anxious curiosity the people crowded together, and among them also Sp. Maelius. Nobody knew against what internal danger or against what enemy the extraordinary dictatorial power was directed. Then Servilius forced his way into the crowd, with a number of patrician youths, and challenged Maelius to appear before the tribunal of the dictator. Mselius saw the danger which threatened him, and implored the protection of the people. But Servilius drew a dagger from under his armpit, and stabbed Maelius before the eyes of the people, who were paralysed with fright. Sprinkled with the blood of the murdered man, he appeared before the tribunal of the dictator, and announced the death of the traitor. The people now became uproarious, and thronged around the seat of the dictator, threatening vengeance. But Cincinnatus, undaunted and defiant, justified the deed of Servilius; ‘for’ said he, ‘even if Maelius was innocent of the crime of treason, of which he was, on good information, accused, he still deserved death, because he disobeyed the commands of the dictator, and feared the judgment of the people.’ He then commanded that the house of Maelius should be pulled down and levelled with the ground’; and the corn which Maelius had accumulated, Minucius, the master of the markets, distributed among the people at a low price, thus relieving the distress, and making himself so popular that a bull with golden horns was dedicated to him as a sign of the gratitude of the people. Yet the people felt that Maelius had been put to death unjustly, without a trial, and that no proof of his guilt could be produced, and their anger turned against Servilius. He was compelled to go away from Home, and after some years, a tribune, named Sp. Maelius, a relation of the murdered man, proposed a law to confiscate the property of Servilius, and to inflict the same punishment on Minucius, as a fake accuser.

Thus runs the story of Sp. Maelius, as told by Livy, our chief authority. The tradition, however, is not quite the same with different writers. The report of Dionysius exhibits some important deviations. He knows nothing of the dictatorship of Cincinnatus, but relates that the young Servilius, commissioned by the senate, got rid of Maelius by cowardly assassination, approaching him under pretence of conversing with him, and piercing him with a dagger. In spite of this variation, which cannot be wondered at, considering the nature of the authorities at that period, the event comes out with tolerable clearness. It had, in a variety of forms, been deeply imprinted in the memory of the Roman people, and the broad facts were undoubted that, soon after the establishment of the con­sular tribunes, Sp. Maelius, a rich and respected plebeian, was murdered in a party conflict by the patrician, C. Servilius Ahala.

How the Romans of later times looked upon this act appears plainly from the remarks of Cicero, Livy, Valerius Maximus, and other writers. The Roman historians are almost without exception partisans of the aristocracy; the tribunes are generally represented as turbulent, and often as venal demagogues; the people appear selfish and base; the senate, on the contrary, and the true leaders of the nobility are lauded as high-minded, self-sacrificing, and patriotic. The deed of Servilius Ahala is, therefore, celebrated as an act of heroism; and Maelius is universally described as an enemy of freedom, who wished to bribe the Romans by the paltry present of a few pounds of bread to submit to the yoke of a tyrant.

In spite of the few criteria by which we can judge of the motives of Sp. Maelius, we must not hesitate one moment to cast aside this verdict, and to look upon the murdered plebeian as the victim of a party which, with a haughty contempt of justice, made use of any weapon, however dishonourable, in a base endeavour to evade or violate the law—a party which was not ashamed to extol bloody crimes, committed in its interest, as patriotic exploits, and to stigmatise its murdered enemies in their graves as traitors or common criminals.

It is clear, at the very outset, that the accusation of having aimed at royal power when the republic was firmly established hardly deserves our notice. It is not even likely that such a charge was ever seriously brought against Sp. Maelius; it must have had its origin in the distorted narrative of the annalists. How could a citizen, who, like Sp. Maelius, had never had the direction of the government, who had never been even tribune, who with the exception of his wealth possessed no means of influence, who appears not to have had numerous adherents, and to have led no party,—how could such a man be suspected of aiming at the overthrow of the republic, and at the restoration of the regal power in his own person? And if it be granted that he did this, if it be granted that he had collected partisans, arms, and mercenaries, would he in that case have exposed himself unarmed to the dagger of a fanatical enemy? Would he have gone to the Forum without a retinue of trusty followers, and without con­certing plans for resistance or attack? If proofs could have been produced of a treasonable conspiracy, it would have been easy to bring the simple plebeian to justice, and the people would not have spared an enemy of their freedom. But the people were convinced of his innocence. Intimidated at the moment by the display of dictatorial authority, they soon recovered spirit and courage to force the perpetrator of the bloody deed into exile; and the patricians were compelled to sacrifice to the popular vengeance the man who had acted as their champion, and whom they continued to praise as the deliverer of his country.

It is true, Sp. Maelius was not altogether innocent in the eye of the patricians; no doubt he had committed a crime which, by their code, was punishable with death. What this crime was we can guess with tolerable accuracy. Just then was the time when, after severe struggles, the plebeians had been declared eligible for the office of consular tribunes. In spite of this concession, the patricians strained every nerve to reduce this right to nothing in practice, and, as we have seen, they succeeded so far that, during forty-four years, none but patricians were raised to this office. What means they used to attain this end, we have already hinted. Now, however, in their proceedings against Sp. Maelius, we discover, if we are not mistaken, a new method of controlling the elections, and a very effective one for keeping off plebeian candidates. The crime of Sp. Maelius was, we may be sure, no other than this, that by his wealth and generosity he had acquired great popularity among the people, and that at an election of military tribunes he was in a fair way of gaining for himself the votes of the centuries. This fully explains why he was so obnoxious , to the enemies of popular rights, and why he shared the fate and the opprobrium of Sp. Cassius and M. Manlius, the forerunners, like himself, of the Gracchi.

 

CHAPTER XIII.

THE CENSORSHIP, 445 B.C.

 

The reform of the year 445 b.c. was followed, as appears most probable, by the establishment of the censorship as a separate office. For, the plebeians being admitted to the office of consular tribunes, it was in the interest of the patricians to weaken this office by separating from it a certain class of functions, and constituting for them a new purely patrician office.

Till now the consuls had. from time to time held the census, by which they not only regulated the military ser­vices of every citizen, but also revised periodically the general assembly of centuries. The nomination of new senators had also till now been one of the functions of the consuls. On them depended, therefore, the rank and consideration of every single citizen in the state. These im­portant privileges the patricians had no .intention of relinquishing when they were compelled to admit the right of the plebeians to the office of consular tribunes. That part of the former consular power, therefore, which referred to the nomination of senators and to the holding of the census was not transferred* to the consular tribunes; but a new patrician office, the censorship, was established for its exercise. The censors were to be two in number, and the term of their office was to range over five years. It is not easy to decide with accuracy what were the offi­cial duties of the censors in the first period of their exis­tence. No doubt many duties were in course of time added which were foreign to the first censors, especially when, with the increase of wealth, the finances of the state became more complicated and more important, and when Rome became not only more powerful, but richer and more luxurious. From this time the administration of the state domains, the farming out of the indirect taxes, and the management of public works constituted alone an office of the greatest importance. A special branch of the duties of the censors was that of watching over the preservation of public morals, or rather of the customs and habits of the good old time, a duty which they vainly endeavoured to discharge by all sorts of restrictions on expenditure and luxurious living. These censorial functions, which are generally much overvalued in their practical effect and usefulness, were probably due to the gradual development and increasing dignity of the office, and not contemplated at the time of its establishment. Yet the censorship ranked, even from the beginning, in dignity and importance, next to the consulship; and in those years when military tribunes, and not consuls, were chosen, the censorship ranked first. Nor can it be supposed that an office especially instituted to protect the most important privileges of the patricians could be thought lightly of.

After the establishment of the offices of military tribunes and censors, a long pause took place in the further development of the constitution. The plebeians having succeeded in doubling the number of the quaestors from two to four in the year 421 b.c., and in securing their own eligibility for this office, directed their attention, not so much to obtain new privileges by new laws, as to try the working of their legally acquired privileges, and to make the constitution a reality.

Year after year the question had now to be discussed and settled, whether for the ensuing period of office consuls or military tribunes should be elected. The first object of the senate always was to try to obtain the election of consuls, and it succeeded in this twenty times during thirty-five years, from 444 B.C. till 409 B.C. When the aristocracy felt compelled to yield to the pressure of the tribunes, and to give their consent to the election of consular tribunes, no stone was left unturned to have only patricians elected to the office. With what obstinacy and with what success they persisted in this perfidious and illegal practice may be seen from the fact already referred to that, till the year .400, i.e. in four and forty years, during which period consular tribunes were elected twenty-three times, no plebeian ever filled that office.

The patrician policy during the whole of this period bears an undignified character. It is the policy of shrewd­ness and of meanness; still more, it is a continued and systematic violation of the law, a sham constitutionalism, such as we see so frequently in the present day. Not only the positive law, but also the honour, the well-being, and even the safety of the state, were sacrificed to the interests of a party whose day was past, whose strength was undermined, and the continuance of whose privileges had become unendurable and injurious to the state.

In spite of the apparent exhaustion of the plebs, it is clear that they only needed time to recover themselves before again trying their strength. The stifled fire flickered up again afresh from time to time. The plebeians submitted to their fate with indignation and impatience, and the nobility, although all-powerful for the moment, received now and then a warning which made them tremble for the future. After the second censorship, in the year 434 b.c., the quinquennial term of this patrician office was cut short, and on the proposition of the patrician consul Mamercus Aemilius, it was determined that every fifth year new censors should be chosen, but should remain in office only eighteen months. A further concession was made to the plebs in the year 421 b.c., by which the number of the quaestors was increased from two to four, and the plebeians were declared eligible for this post. It is true this concession was made by the patricians with the secret expectation that, in spite of the legal admission of plebeians to this office, they would be able, as in the case of the consular tribunes, to carry the election of patricians. They were, however, mistaken in this calculation. The plebeian comitia of tribes, which had to elect the quaestors, could not be managed so easily as those of the centuries, and eleven years afterwards, in the year 410 b.c., three plebeians were elected among the four qusestors. This was a just retribution for the cunning of the patricians, who would not consent to the plebeians having a certain fixed number among the quaestors, in the hope of being able to fill up all the places with patricians.

But at the election of the consular tribunes also an unexpected result took place. In the years 400 and 399 b.c., and again in the year 396 b.c., a majority of plebeians was elected. We cannot ascertain the causes and the details of these changes, as we are too scantily informed of the events of this period. We see plainly, however, that the plebeians were not hopelessly torpid, but understood how to make good use of a favourable opportunity, when offered, for the assertion of their rights. This perseverance could not fail sooner or later to be crowned with success. In the plebs was the germ of growth. The patrician class could neither be renovated nor extended. One generation later, in the year 866 b.c., the Licinian laws secured to the plebeians a share in the consulate, and the patricians lost their old preponderance in the state for ever.

 

CHAPTER XIV.

ROMAN INTERVENTION IN ARDEA, 446 B.C.

 

We cannot suppose that the foreign policy of the Roman senate was carried on with a greater respect for justice than was exhibited in the dealings of the patricians with the popular party. As far as foreign nations were concerned, the ancients considered everything right which promised to bring advantage, even more unscrupulously than we do at the present day. The considerations of equity and self-restraint which it was necessary to observe to a certain extent with regard to fellow-citizens, were disregarded in the case of foreigners. Towards them cunning and deceit, cruelty and ferocity, became virtues, and passed for wisdom and courage. Antiquity can show but few instances of magnanimity in the intercourse of nations, and the Romans especially were strangers to it. They are therefore entitled least of all to moralise on the faithlessness and perfidy of other nations; for, with regard to foreigners, who for them were originally synonymous with enemies, they never considered themselves bound by any obligation or restrained by any principles of right, except in so far as their own advantage seemed to demand it. We have occasion to notice this practice at the first contact of Rome with a neighbouring state, which is described in our authorities with so much detail and apparent fidelity that we can judge with tolerable certainty of the motives and the object of the Romans. It is the disgrace­ful spoliation of the allied town of Ardea, which Livy himself, who so gladly praises or excuses anything Roman, felt to be an infamous act.  

The town of Corioli had been destroyed in the course of the Volscian wars; and its territory, which was lying waste, was the subject of a long dispute and frequent wars between two adjacent Latin towns, Ardea and Aricia. At length (446 b.c.), after both towns had suffered severely from the protracted contest, they decided to choose Rome as their umpire. The Roman senate laid the matter before an assembly of the people, and the people decided that the disputed land belonged by right neither to Ardea nor to Aricia, but to Borne; for as Borne had conquered Corioli forty-seven years before, it had become the property of the Roman state (ager publicus). In vain, it is said, did the consuls and the senate endeavour to prevent this selfish and dishonourable decision of the people. The magnanimity and sense of right in the nobility found no response in the great mass, which was only moved by greediness and selfishness. The consuls therefore had no choice but to announce, very much against their will, to the allies of Borne the sentence of the Roman people, which, though not in reality altogether unjust, still was contrary to the feeling of equity of the senate. A formal treaty with Ardea ratified the decision of the Roman people in the year 444 B.C. Shortly after this (443 b.c.) a bloody civil war broke out in the town of Ardea. In Ardea also there were patricians and plebeians, and the same disputes and struggles took place there as in Borne. The plebs seceded and united themselves with a Volscian army to besiege the town. The patricians turned to Borne for assistance, and the Boman consul marched to the relief of Ardea. The Volscians were defeated, the town delivered, the rebellious plebeians punished, and the supremacy of the patricians re-established. But, as the town had been very much depopulated in the civil war, it was decided to send Roman colonists to Ardea, and to give them grants of land on the territory which Rome, as umpire, had awarded to itself. In order, however, that the disgrace of the iniquitous sentence might be obliterated, no land was assigned to the Roman colonists until all the people of Ardea had received allotments. Thus the assistance rendered, and the way in which the land was divided, not only reconciled Ardea with Borne, but laid it under especial obligations. The Roman plebeians, who had confidently expected that they would have a share in the division of the land, and who now found themselves excluded, to the advantage of the people of Ardea, were so exasperated that the patrician triumvirs, who had been sent as com missioners to settle the colonists at Ardea, did not venture to return to Borne, but preferred to remain in Ardea.

Thus runs this edifying narrative. We cannot fail to see that there is something true in it. It is certainly not a pure invention. The stain on the honour of Rome caused by its decision between Ardea and Aricia was of too deep a dye to be washed out. The Roman annalists have taken much trouble to garble the report and to justify or to excuse the conduct of the Romans. They have not, however, altogether succeeded, and we can separate with tolerable accuracy the true from the false.

It is, in the first place, no doubt untrue that the decision of the  Romans was given by the assembly of the people, that is, by the plebs. All questions of foreign policy came before the senate, and when by its decision no burden was imposed upon the people—for example, if no war was necessary—there was no need of consulting the people. The Roman patricians could indeed alone be interested in this matter and expect advantage from it. For as the disputed lands became the public land (ager publicum) of Rome, it is clear that the plebs gained nothing. The public lands still belonged exclusively to the privileged class. Only patricians could take possession of them. The principal complaint of the plebeians in relation to the agrarian laws was just this, that they were excluded from the enjoyment of the state lands. It is therefore quite absurd to attribute the ignominious decision to the mean selfishness of the plebeians, as our historians do, and to represent the patricians as opposed to it. It appears plainly in the course of the story that the Roman patricians were allied with the patricians of Ardea, and the district of Corioli was only the price which the aristocracy of Ardea paid to the Romans for their assistance against their own rebellious plebs. Finally, the conduct of the commissioners for the settlement of the colony of Ardea is significant. They dreaded the resentment of the plebs, and did not venture to return to Rome. Surely this proves that the Roman plebeians had not profited by the iniquitous acquisition, and that the patricians, who had the advantage of the transaction, were also the sole authors of it.

 

CHAPTER XV.

THE WARS DOWN TO THE LAST WAR WITH VEII, 449-405 B.C.

 

During the internal struggles which led to the decemvitate and the consular tribuneship, the wars with the neighbouring nations, especially the Aequians and the Volscians, had not ceased. Year after year these enemies repeated their incursions for rapine and murder; and not only the allies of the Romans, the Hernicans and the Latins, but even the Roman dominions themselves, were visited by the dreadful scourge of these everlasting petty wars. Three times, as mentioned above, in the years 465, 463, 446 b.c., the enemy penetrated into the immediate vicinity of Rome, and in the year 460 b.c., in the midst of the disputes about the Terentilian law, the Roman Capitol had temporarily fallen into their hands. The second and third book of Livy, and the corresponding books of Dionysius, convey to the careless reader a very erroneous impression. They make it appear that Rome, in spite of occasional reverses, was on the whole success­ful, and pursued an almost uninterrupted course of victories and conquests. This, as we have seen, is a great misrepresentation, caused by the national vanity of the historians. In truth Rome could hardly stand her ground, while her allies, the Latins and Hernicans, lost a considerable portion of their territory, and suffered more directly than even Rome, as lying nearer to the common enemies of the league.

Such continual calamities, we may suppose, were ag­gravated by internal dissensions. We are told of Roman soldiers, who, out of hatred to the patrician consuls, allowed themselves to be beaten by the enemy, or at least would not conquer, in order that the commander might lose his triumph; we read frequently of the factious opposition of the tribunes, who prevented, by their intercession, the levying of troops. There may be a great deal of exag­geration in these accounts, but they are not altogether fictitious, for it is evident that the wars were very disastrous. And, in truth, no growth of national power was possible for Rome so long as the plebeians, who supplied the main strength of the armies, were in bitter enmity against the ruling class.

A connected history of the wars of the Volscians and the Aequians during this time is out of the question. The character of our sources is essentially the same as in the preceding period, though such wild fictions as the stories of Cincinnatus and Coriolanus are not repeated. Here and there we are even agreeably surprised by narratives which have so much the air of genuine history about them that the dark clouds appear to break and to show distinct lines and points, which enable us to form an opinion of the probable outlines even of those parts which are still hidden. In the half century after the foundation of the republic, as we have seen, the war was decidedly unfavourable to the Romans and their allies. The Aequians, issuing forth from their old strongholds in the mountains on the Anio, had taken possession of the plain which, between those mountains and the isolated group of the Mons Albanus, formed the only easy communication between Rome and the Trerus valley, or the land of the Hernicans. They had taken several places, such as Labici and Boise, and retained possession of them. More than that, they had even penetrated to the Alban mountains, and had established themselves on the eastern spur, known as Mount Algidus. From this hill, as from a citadel, they could make their devastating incursions into all parts of Latium. The neighbouring town of Tusculum they kept in a continual state of siege, and made inroads at pleasure between Tusculum and the Anio into the Roman districts as far as the Tiber. In the south of Latium the Volscians had at the same time made extensive and lasting conquests. The most important of these was the fortified maritime town of Antium. The new Volscian inhabitants of this town separated themselves politically from their countrymen, and formed an independent community; they renounced all ideas of further conquests, and for a long while took no part in the war against Rome, in order apparently to devote themselves more exclusively to piracy, which pro­mised not less profit than the predatory wars on land.

Next to Antium, Ecetra, originally a Latin town, had become a principal stronghold of the Volscians in Latium. The situation of this town is not known; it lay, perhaps, in the mountain range which forms the eastern boundary of Latium, and divides it from the country of the Hernicans in the valley of the Trerus. Other towns, among them, perhaps, Satricum and Velitra, had fallen into the power of the Volscians. Such a Volscian conquest may be presumed in the case of those towns which, at a later period, when the fortunes of war had turned, are reported to have been taken by the Romans. Besides the towns of Latium already named which fell into the possession of the enemy, we must also mention those which were destroyed and never built again. One of these was Corioli, the territory of which was the matter of dispute between Ardea and Aricia. Many other places may have had a similar fate. Who can say how many flourishing villages, strong castles, and walled towns shared a similar fate in those devastating wars? The Roman antiquarians have preserved long lists of townships in Latium, the names of which touch our ears like the faint sounds of a distant echo; in the plains of the depopulated Campagna are seen at present, in many places, heaps of weather­worn stones, and unmistakable sites of towns on the level summits of steep rocks, to which no name and no memories cling. At the time of the Volscian wars, the desolation began which changed that once fruitful and populous land into the malaria-stricken wilderness of the present day.

By the successful invasions of the Aequians and the Volscians, the league between the Romans, Latins, and Hernicans was practically dissolved. The towns of Latium which had escaped destruction or conquest were so much reduced that they could no longer claim to be allies, entitled to treat with Rome as equals. They were compelled to look to Rome for their safety, and so they were no longer allied but protected states, and the superiority of Rome became more and more acknowledged as a de facto dominion.

Two causes seem to have contributed to turn the tide of the Aequian and Volscian wars in favour of Rome after the period of the decemvirs. In the first place, the civil troubles which preceded that period were followed by com­parative repose. The laws of the Twelve Tables seem not to have been without a beneficial effect in quieting the internal disorders. The Canuleian law on the right of intermarriage and the admission of the plebeians, at least in law and theory, to the highest office of the state, seem to have softened the virulence of the civil contest. Rome was therefore able to meet her enemies on more advantageous ground. In the second place, the Aequians and Volscians displayed much less vigour and energy during this period. This was owing, probably, as we have already said, to the growth of the Samnites, who were at that time extending their dominion in the rear of these two nations, and thus involuntarily relieving Rome. The Romans thus felt strong enough to assume the offensive, and to regain the ground they had lost.

They turned their attention first to their nearest enemies, the Aequians, who were decidedly the most troublesome, and had in the year 446 B.C. laid waste the Roman territory, even to the gates of the city. The wars appear often to have been interrupted by long periods of armistice, and the enemies of Borne were now reduced to the defensive. The first statement from which we can venture  to form an opinion as to the course of the wars, refers to the conquest of the small town of Bolae (414 B.C.), which, like Labici, lay on the line of communication between Rome and the country of the Hernicans, where, at a later period, the important ‘Latin road’ (via Latina) was constructed. 414 b.c. The Romans had now established an easy communication with their allies in the valley of the Trerus, and it is said that they made the first use of this for the purpose of re­storing to the Hernicans their principal town, Ferentinum, which had fallen into the hands of the Aequians.

In the popular tradition, the memory of these wars was principally connected with the name of the dictator, A. Postumius Tubertus, who stands out in horrible grandeur as one of the superhuman and inhuman heroes of the olden time. It is related of him that he condemned his son to death, because he had engaged in battle with an enemy against the express command of his father. The admiration for such virtues was, even in a Roman, mixed with horror and detestation. Another member of the Postumian house, the consular tribune M. Postumius Regillensis, was equally distinguished for his stern and unyielding temper and his cruel abuse of power. In consequence he had inspired his soldiers with no love or devotion, but only with fear; and when, after the conquest of Boise, he kept back the booty, and was making preparations to punish the mutinous disposition of the soldiers with inhuman severity, they were goaded to the terrible deed of stoning to death the commander to whom they were bound by the sacred military oath, the sacramentum, to yield implicit obedience? Such events were deeply impressed on the memory of the people. There is no reason for believing them to be without foundation, though there is some vagueness and uncertainty as to the precise, time and place to which they belong; and though they do not always seem to tally exactly with the great political events, we can still discover in them a substantial element of historical truth. By such gradual transitions we pass insensibly from the deceptive region of fable to the firm ground of history.

After the decemvirate, the Volscians, like the Aequians, appear to have lost strength. The war with them turns on the conquest of a few fortified places, like Verrugo and Artena, of which we know nothing but the names. Per­haps it was at this time that the Volscians lost some of their most important conquests in Latium, such as Velitrae and Satricum, as we find these soon after in the possession of the Romans. At all events, the fortune of war was on the side of the latter, who undertook what was for this period a very bold expedition through the midst of the land of the Volscians, past Antium, even to Anxur, afterwards called Terracina. The taking of this town also is reported more than once, as is usual in the case of such creditable exploits—viz., for the years 406 and 400 b.c.

While the attacks of the Volscians and Aequians not only grew less frequent, but the nations themselves lost ground in Latium and were reduced to such a state of weakness as to appear no longer formidable, the Romans acquired sufficient self-reliance, leisure, and strength to undertake a war with their nearest northern neighbours, the Etruscans. This war, which soon proved to be one for aggression and conquest, strained the whole strength of the republic, but eventually ended in the first important extension of the Roman territory.

In the immediate neighbourhood of Rome, only five Roman miles distant, on the left or Latin bank of the Tiber, lay the town of Fidenae. It had been undoubtedly Latin in the beginning, but at the time when the Etruscans reigned over Latium, it had received an Etruscan colony; and having thus a mixed population, it was isolated and separated from the neighbouring peoples, and occupied an independent position between Latium and Etruria. But an independent city just outside the gates of Rome could not avoid frequent collisions with such a powerful and aggressive neighbour. The feuds between the two towns must have been numerous enough. But what we read of these feuds in the stories of the regal time and of the earlier republic bears the manifest stamp of invention. Fidenae was always drawn upon to supply materials for filling the empty annals with warlike exploits, and such was the poverty of fancy of the Roman annalists that they nearly always relate the same uniform and interminably tedious stories, without ever rising to bold and original fiction. From the year 498 B.C., when Fidenae, after having revolted five times, was conquered and colonised for the sixth time, no further mention is made of the town till the year 438 B.C., and this silence is a good sign of the gradually increasing credibility of the Roman annals.

In the year 438 BC. Fidenae made an alliance with Veii, which was at that time governed by a king called Lars Tolumnius. The Romans sent four ambassadors to Fidenae to demand satisfaction. The people of Fidenae followed up their desertion with the murder of the ambassadors—a crime which cut off all chance of reconciliation. War was now unavoidable, and seemed the more threatening as the Veientes, under their king, Lars Tolumnius, and even the Faliscans, the people of the small town of Falerii in Etruria, were ready to assist Fidenae. The Romans therefore did as they were wont to do in hazardous times—they appointed a dictator.

The man selected was Mamercus Aemilius, who seems to have been a man of energy and ability, and is frequently mentioned about this time with reference to the civil history of Rome. A great battle was fought, which was decided in favour of the Romans chiefly in consequence of the courage of the horsemen, and in which the king of Veii fell by the hand of the valiant commander of the Roman horse, A. Cornelius Cossus.

Yet it was not until the following year, after another victory, that Fidenae fell into the hands of the Romans. It was again made a colony in 428 B.C. Nothing is said of the town being punished. The war with Veii was concluded by an armistice after the fall of Fidenae. The same events were repeated almost without any material variation, according to the Roman annals, in the year 426 B.C., some ten years later. Again Fidenae broke the peace, and marked its savage hostility and resolution this time by murdering the Roman colonists who had been sent to Fidenae two years before. Veii is again in league with Fidenae, and, what is of the greatest significance, Mamercus Aemilius is again nominated to be dictator. This time the valiant leader of the horse of 487 b.c., A. Cornelius Cossus, is master of the horse under the dictator, and again he decides the battle. This time also Fidenae is conquered, but it no longer appears to have strength to renew the war almost immediately. It is razed to the ground, and never appears again in history; it was from that time so utterly desolate that its name was used to designate a depopulated and deserted place.

From a comparison of the stories of the two wars with Fidenae it is perfectly clear that one is only a variation of the other. If it is asked which of the two wars has the greatest claim to be considered historical, we must, with Niebuhr, decide in favour of the second. It is quite inconceivable that Fidenae, after the first conquest, should not have been severely punished for the murder of the Roman ambassadors. Moreover, Diodorus knows only of the second war, and places in it the story of the murder of the ambassadors. This war has obtained a great celebrity, and is, for this reason, of considerable importance for the critical examination of the sources of the Roman historians, because two monuments, still extant in later times, bore witness to it. These were the statues of the murdered ambassadors on the Roman Forum, and the armour of which the commander of the Roman horse, A. Cornelius Cossus, stripped the body of Tolumnius, the king of Veii, and which he dedicated in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitol as spolia opima, i.e. spoils taken by a Roman commander from a commander of the enemies. That four statues of murdered ambassadors really stood at a later period on the Forum cannot be doubted, for Cicero mentions them as existing not long before his time. But whether they were set up immediately after the event which they were intended to commemorate, or at a later period, after the burning of Rome by the Gauls, must remain uncertain. At any rate they dated from a time when the memory of the murder was still fresh, and they may pass as historical evidence, although of course they can only bear witness to the general fact, and leave us in the dark with regard to detail, and especially the date of the event.

The armour of King Lars Tolumnius has given rise to an interesting critical enquiry. Livy, who, on the whole, did not care much for the examination of historical monuments, felt himself compelled here, probably out of polite attention to the Emperor Augustus, to tack on to his story a remark in which he represents Augustus as stating that during the restoration of the temple of Jupiter Feretrius he himself examined the armour of Cossus, and found that in the inscription he was called consul. From this fact Augustus came to the conclusion that Cossus could not have taken the spoils in the year 437 BC., because he then filled no public office, and because such spoils could only be dedicated by a man who, whilst commanding an army under his own auspices, had slain a hostile general in battle. Livy does not venture to decide whether, in consequence of this discovery, the dedication of the spoils ought to be placed in the year 428 BC., in which indeed Cossus was consul, but, according to the annals, waged no war, or in the year 426 b.C. when he was consular tribune, and, as commander of the horse of the dictator Mamercus Aemilius, again fought victoriously against the Fidenates and Veientes. For us, who regard the stories of the two wars as versions of the same story, no controversy can arise about the time of taking the spoils or the dedication of them. We reject the story of the year 437 B.C. as quite untenable on the ground given above; we hold that Cossus, as consular tribune, dedicated the spoils, and that either he himself or one of his descendants put the inscription on the armour, adding to his other titles that of consul, which he enjoyed two years later. Thus the accidental notice of an authentic monument does not lead to a negative result upsetting the whole of the popular tradition and the annalistic account, but it supplies a criterion which we can make use of to separate what is erroneous from the common narrative, and to arrive at a degree of certainty which, considering the still prevailing obscurity in the history of Borne at the time in question, cannot be too highly prized.

A consequence of the conquest and destruction of Fidenae was the confiscation of its territory as public land (ager publicus) of the Roman people. This, after the acquisition of the land in dispute between Ardea and Aricia (442 B.C.), is the first extension of the territory in the immediate neighbourhood of the town. We shall see hereafter how this acquisition led to the renewal of the agitations for agrarian laws which now began to be for the first time of a serious and reformatory character, and increased in intensity after the extension of the Roman possessions by the fall of Veii, so that at last (366 B.C.) they led to the Licinian laws, by which the possessions of the patricians in the state lands were limited.

 

CHAPTER XVI.

THE CONQUEST OF VEII, 396 B.C.

 

The war with Fidenae was the prelude to a more serious contest, for which Rome now prepared herself, and which may be characterised as the first war of conquest which the republic undertook. The flourishing and populous Etruscan town of Veii, which lay in the most southern portion of Etruria proper, if we can trust the annals, had been already frequently at war with Rome and the fall of the heroic Fabii on the river Cremera, and the taking of the Janiculus by the Veientes, had been preserved in the memory of the people, as the most striking and important events in those wars.

Nevertheless it appears that, on the whole, a peaceful intercourse prevailed between the Etruscans and the Romans. The former do not appear to have aimed at extending their power southward, after having lost the possession of Campania and Latium, and when the strength of the nation was evidently decreasing. While Rome and Latium barely maintained the contest with the Aequians and the Volscians, the Veientes remained quiet; and after the fall of Fidenae they felt even less inclined than before to break the peace, as the invasion of Northern Italy by the Gauls at this time exposed the Etruscans to a new and unexpected danger, and no doubt deprived the southern towns of Etruria of the assistance of their countrymen and allies in the north. Yet Veii, although confined to her own resources, had no great reason to dread a war with Rome.

According to the reports of ancient writers, confirmed by modern topographical researches, the extent of Veii was about equal to that of Rome. It stood on a rocky eminence bounded on three sides by precipitous ravines, and it con­tained a large population. The public and private buildings were of a solidity and grandeur unknown in Rome at that time. The industry and the peaceful arts of the Veientes had enriched and beautified the town. Being the mistress of several smaller towns, and of a large terri­tory, and moreover allied with the neighbouring cities of Capena, Falerii, Tarquinii, and Caere, Veii was at the head of all Southern Etruria, and seemed able to preserve her independence without foreign help.

We know next to nothing of the political and social institutions of Veii. According to the Roman annalists, the monarchical constitution continued in Veii, while in the other Etruscan towns it had given way to that of an aristocratic republic. Whether this continuance of the monarchy was injurious to the prosperity of Veii must be left undecided. Nor do we know what was the relation of the ruling class to the mass of the common people, and whether the latter, as is generally supposed, were oppressed and altogether deprived of political rights. If this was the case, it was certainly an element of weakness. Much has beeen said about the great influence of the priests over the Etruscan people, and of their almost Oriental fanaticism. That this would have contributed to rouse and intensify the energies of the nation in a war for political existence is proved by the vigour with which it inspired the Jews under the Maccabees, and during the last siege of Jerusalem.

The conquest and destruction of Veii, shortly before the invasion of the Gauls, is an event as well attested as the fall of Carthage. But round this centre of historical truth a luxuriant crop of legends has grown up, in which Greek fancy is unmistakable. The elements of legend and tradition are so mingled, that the attempt to separate them is baffled to a very considerable extent. We must therefore give up the hope of arriving at perfect historical truth, and confine ourselves to conjectures on those points which are enveloped in the legendary veil.

According to the annalistic accounts, the war with Veii began as early as 406 b.c. We cannot discover a sufficient cause of war; for the alleged participation of the Veientes in the revolt of Fidenae and in the murder of the Roman ambassadors was succeeded by a reconciliation and by several years of peace. The Romans, it seems, thought that the favourable moment had come for extending their territory towards the north, and they had no difficulty in assigning a special grievance. They saw, however, that, for a war with an enemy so formidable as Veii their old military organisation was not sufficient. It was only calculated for making short summer campaigns, during a few months or weeks, against the Aequian and Volscian invaders. In order to subdue a large fortified town like Veii, it was necessary to have an army ready in the field all the year round. The old citizen-soldiers were fed and armed at their own expense, and exchanged their agricultural labour only for a short time for military service. It was necessary to replace them by a standing army of soldiers, who might remain in the field summer and winter, and who would be relieved from all domestic cares. For this purpose the introduction of military pay was necessary. This reform was of the greatest importance, not only for the organisation of the army, and for the manner of carrying on war, but also for internal political life. If, as we may suppose, the Romans conceived this idea sooner than their neighbours (for they possessed a wonderful instinct for improvement in military matters), the consequent superiority of their army gave them a well-merited preponderance over troops that were now com­paratively undisciplined. Perhaps the Etruscans had already adopted the principle of giving pay to their troops, for they were far in advance of the Romans in wealth and refinement. But it is not likely that they had as much intuitive wisdom as the Romans for hitting upon the best method of applying the principle. For the Roman armies were not formed of mercenaries, such as were very frequent in antiquity, but they consisted of citizens, to whom their pay was only a lightening of their military service, not an inducement for devoting themselves to a soldier’s life as to a profession.

With the introduction of pay for the troops was connected another innovation in the military organisation of Rome, the importance of which appears to have been even greater in its bearing on internal political reforms than on that of the army. The Roman cavalry, up to this time, was not formed, like the infantry, on the principle of the census or property qualification. The able- bodied young men, fit for cavalry service, were organised, without regard to the amount of their property, in six patrician and twelve plebeian horse centuries, and received horses and their keep from the state. Their arms were light, such as men of small means could procure. They were therefore less fitted for close combat in battle than for the purpose of quickly overrunning a hostile territory, for reconnoitring and for pursuing the enemy. The numerous descriptions of battles won by the heroism of the horsemen are, like all the pictures of the battles of those times, imaginary, and cannot be relied upon.

Now, after the introduction of military pay, when the service of the infantry had become less burdensome for the poorer class, the richer citizens were no longer so much in request as heavy armed foot soldiers, and were, therefore, more available for the cavalry. They accepted this change the more readily as the pay of the cavalry was three times as much as that of the infantry. There were a sufficient number who, we are told, offered themselves voluntarily, providing their own horses, and the state thankfully accepted their offer. In this manner the old Servian constitution was extended in the natural process of development. From the first of the five Servian classes a new division had branched off, consisting of the wealthiest citizens, who, without formally constituting a separate class, and without changing the organisation of the eighteen centuries of knights, took service as a species of volunteers, and laid the foundation for what became afterwards the order of the knights (ordo equester). From this time forward the cavalry service was considered a distinction, and attracted more and more the wealthier class of citizens. These now stood forth in a marked manner from the mass of citizens, and constituted a nursery for the senate, for posts of honour in the republic, and for the new nobility.

Nevertheless, even after this seasonable reform, which changed the character of the cavalry from light to heavy armed horse, the chief strength of the Roman army continued to be in their infantry. In the armies of the later republic, the allies furnished a contingent of cavalry considerably stronger than the Roman. This never could have happened if the Romans had felt themselves superior in this branch of the service. It was their infantry that conquered the world. When, however, they came in contact with such horsemen as the Gauls and Numidians of Hannibal, the weakness of their own cavalry was bitterly felt, and contributed not a little to the terrible defeats by which the republic was almost overthrown.

How the introduction of military pay influenced the tax on land we shall discuss in connexion with the agrarian laws.

In the first nine years of the war with Veii, the fortune of war was, according to the reports of the annalists, very fluctuating, and victory was by no means always on the side of the Romans. We hear even that they suffered serious losses and reverses. Veii was too large a town to be surrounded on all sides by a continuous line of works. Several fortified camps were therefore erected in the neighbourhood of the town for the purpose of enabling the besiegers to intercept supplies and aid from without. These fortified camps were stormed by the enemy in the third year of the siege, and the Roman armies were beaten in the field by the Veientes and their allies. But the Romans made fresh exertions, and when the plebeian consular tribunes Genucius and Titinius were beaten in the tenth year of the war by the allies of the Veientes, the Faliscans and Capenatians, and in consequence of this defeat a great panic arose in Borne, the senate resolved to try the effect of a dictatorship—their sheet anchor in times of danger. M. Furius Camillus was the man into whose hand the Romans intrusted their fate. He justified the confidence of his fellow-citizens, and within a short space of time brought the long and dangerous war to a happy and glorious end. So far the story of the last war of the Veientes is simple, dry, and ordinary. But now, with the appearance of Camillus, another spirit is infused into the story. We leave the domain of the natural and the possible, and enter the fabulous region of the miraculous.

In the eighth year of the war it is related there was oserved a remarkable natural phenomenon connected with the Lake of Alba. The waters of the lake rose suddenly, without any assignable cause, to so great a height that the banks were flooded, and the water at last found its way over the volcanic ridge which enclosed the bed of the lake, and flowed down the hill into the plain. When such wonderful events took place, the Romans were accustomed to consult the Sibylline books or the Etruscan soothsayers, in order to avert any threatened calamity by a solemn expiatory sacrifice. Now, as they were at war with the Etruscans, they did not confide in their soothsayers, but sent an embassy direct to Greece to seek advice at the shrine of the Delphian Apollo. In the meantime the war with Veii continued uninterrupted, and the Romans, who were encamped before Veii, often entered into conversation with the besieged. Then it happened that, during a dispute between the Romans and the Veientes, an old man cried out in a loud voice from the city wall, that Veii would not fall until the waters of the Alban Lake were abated.A Roman soldier, who thought he discovered something divine in this speech, persuaded the old man to come down from the wall, and, under the pretence of having something to tell him, took him some little space aside, then seized him suddenly round the body and carried him into the Roman camp. Sent from thence to Rome, and questioned by the senate, the prophet, under compulsion, revealed the divine will, as contained in the Etruscan books of fate. The Romans, therefore, immediately began making a canal through the mountain side which bounded the lake, and thus conducted the water into the plain, and when they had thus fulfilled the will of the gods, they doubted not that Veii would now fall into their hands.

Meantime Camillus kept the town blockaded with his army, which had been joined by Latin and Hernican auxiliaries. But the strong walls could, not be stormed Veii in the ordinary way. Therefore Camillus had a tunnel cut from the Roman camp, under the wall, to the citadel of Veii. When this tunnel was completed, Camillus knew that Veii was in his hands, and he sent to Rome to ask the senate how he should divide the spoils. The Senate determined that the whole people should have a share in the spoils of the enemy’s town, which was reduced by the exertions of the whole people; and young and old, rich and poor, proceeded from Rome into the camp before Veii, awaiting the moment when they could break

At last the day for storming the town arrived, and Camillus let the Roman army advance to the walls, and pretend to attack them. But while the Veientes were engaged in defending the walls, a select body of men advanced through the tunnel. At their head was Camillus himself, and when he arrived at the place where the tunnel ended and where there was only a thin wall to break through, inside the temple of Juno in the citadel of Veii, he heard the high priest of the Veientes, who was performing a sacrifice before the king, say that whoever presented this offering to the tutelar goddess of Veii would be victorious in battle. At this moment the Romans burst forth out of the ground, Camillus seized the victim, and offered it on the altar of the goddess, and his troops dispersed themselves from the citadel over the whole town, and opened the gates to their comrades.

Thus Veii fell into the hands of the Romans. Camillus surveyed the extent of the town from the citadel, and measured the greatness of the victory. Then he veiled his head, and implored the gods that, if too great happiness and success had attended him, they should impose upon him a moderate retribution. And when he had thus prayed, and, according to the solemn custom, had turned himself round, he tripped with his foot and fell down, for a good sign, as he supposed; for he thought, by this slight misfortune, to turn away the jealousy of the gods.

A more splendid triumphal procession than that which Camillus celebrated on his return from Veii had never been seen in Rome. In a chariot drawn by four white horses, and wearing the insignia of the Capitoline Jupiter, Camillus rode through the sacred street towards the Capitol; and his soldiers, flushed with joy and triumphing over the spoils, followed him, singing songs of praise in honour of their victorious leader.

But soon discontent and dissension arose. Camillus had made a vow to dedicate the tenth part of the spoils to the Delphian Apollo, and demanded now from each person the tenth part of all the booty he had taken. It was decided by the pontifices that nobody could keep in his own possession what was dedicated to the god, without incurring the divine vengeance. The tenth part of the conquered land must also be consecrated to the god. It was estimated, therefore, and copper was taken from the state treasury to buy gold for the amount. But as there was not so much gold to be obtained, the matrons gave up their ornaments, and as a requital of their good deed they were suffered to ride in chariots inside the town at the feasts of the gods. A bowl was made out of the gold thus obtained, and a ship was sent to Delphi to convey the offering to Apollo. When the ship was come near to Sicily, it was attacked by pirates and taken to the island of Lipara, where the pirates lived. But when their captain, Timasitheos, saw that the Romans had a sacrificial offering for the Delphian god on board, he let them go unhurt in their ship, and in this way won for himself the friendship of the Roman people, which was of great benefit to his descendants in the first Punic war, when the Romans took the island of Lipara. But the consecrated offering was placed in the temple of Delphi, and was among its choicest treasures until the Phokian Onomarchos carried it off in the year 401 b.c., forty years later. Only the basis, which was of brass, remained, and was to be seen even in Appian’s time. Thus Apollo received the tenth part of the spoils of the town which, by his help, had fallen into the hands of the Romans. But the people had ceased to love Camillus, and, from the very height of his glory, he was brought down to great misery. The tribunes accused him of having unjustly divided the spoils of Veii, nay, of having embezzled a part of them. The people were also much exasperated, because at his triumph he drove four white horses and bore with him things which belonged to the gods alone. For this reason, when Camillus saw that the sentence of the people would go against him, he left Borne, and retired to Ardea.

Thus runs the legend of the conquest of Veii. It looks like an attempt to introduce the narrative of a war resembling that of Troy into the early history of Rome. Hence the account of the ten years’ duration of the siege, and especially of the wonderful manner of taking the town by a mine which opened in the midst of the town, and from which issued armed foes, as from the Trojan horse. On the other hand, we can discover the character of genuine Italian imagination in the fable of the sudden appearance of the Romans in the sanctuary of Juno, of the declaration of the Etruscan priest that the victory was destined to him who should perform the present sacrifice, and of the readiness and cunning of Camillus, who anticipates the king of Veii and obtains the victory for Borne by complying with the decree of fate. We have met with a similar story before, relating that a Sabine had a cow of wonderful size, which he was going to sacrifice in the temple of Diana on the Aventine, in order to secure to his people the supreme power, according to the advice of the soothsayers; but that a Roman persuaded the Sabine first to perform his ablutions in the Tiber, and meanwhile sacrificed the cow for the benefit of the Romans.

It is evident that the story of the Etruscan soothsayer and that of the Delphian oracle are of different origin, and were not originally part of the same narrative. The one clearly excludes the other. One is of native Italian growth, the other is Greek in its origin. There can be no doubt that it is also more recent, for the worship of Apollo was, at the time in question, not yet introduced in Rome. What is said of the pious pirate Timasitheos proves nothing. When Rome became powerful, many towns tried to discover some old connexion, either of relationship or friendship, and the Romans were not displeased to discover that their ancestors had enjoyed familiar intercourse with the Greek nation. Hence the story of the Delphian offering is probably nothing more than an idle tale, which the Delphians ms.de up at the time when Rome became to the Greeks the object of fear or veneration.

The outlet of the Alban Lake, of which the legend speaks, exists even at the present day. But whether it was made at the time of the last war with Veii, and how the legend arose, it is perhaps impossible to determine. We can hardly suppose that Rome and Latium, just in the middle of a war which strained all their powers, would undertake an important public work, the object of which was, after all, only an agricultural improvement in the vicinity of the lake. It is far more probable that the outlet belongs to that period when the Etruscans had dominion in Latium, and when they constructed in Rome itself similar important works for draining the lower parts of the city. In the immediate neighbourhood of the Alban Lake was Tusculum, which was once Etruscan, and it is most likely that the outlet was made in the time before the expulsion of the Etruscans from this town, i.e. in the time of the Roman kings. Possibly during the siege of Veii an obstruction of the sewers made repairs or cleaning necessary, and thus the tradition may have arisen which ascribes the construction of the outlet to the time of the last Veientine war.

Some of the stories of Camillus are evidently drawn from the imagination of a foreigner, probably a Greek, who was imperfectly acquainted with Roman customs and institutions, and therefore relates things and attributes motives which no Roman would have hit upon. Thus we are told that Camillus gave offence because on the occasion of his triumph he decorated himself with the insignia of Jupiter, and drove to the Capitol in a chariot drawn by four white horses. But we know that it was customary at Rome for the victorious general, on the day of his triumph, to personate, as it were, the Capitoline Jupiter, as if to show that Jupiter himself triumphed over the enemies of Rome.

Not less open to objection is the story that, before the storming of Veii, the whole population of Rome were invited to share in the sack of the town. Who can think it compatible either with the strict Roman discipline, or with any kind of military order, to invite indiscriminately the populace of a town into the camp for the purpose of taking part in the plunder of a captured city?

Thus we find that, while the conquest of Veii is an incontrovertible historical fact, all the details connected with it in the annalistic reports are untrustworthy; nor can we discover satisfactorily what consequences the Roman conquest had on the neighbouring Etruscan towns. The annalists report wars with Capena and Falerii, even tell of military expeditions over the Ciminian mountains, the boundary of South Etruria, to Volsinii and Salpinum. How much of these accounts may be true it is not possible to decide; it seems, however, natural that, after the fall of Veii, the towns which had been subject to it, or closely allied with it, must likewise have fallen into the power of the Romans. This must have been the case with Capena, and also with Sutrium and Nepete, which from this time appear as subject to Rome. Falerii, on the other hand, maintained her independence, and Rome appears not to have shown herself at all hostile to Tarquinii and Caere, perhaps because they had remained neutral in the last war with Veii, or had even favoured Rome.

The conquest of Veii was so important an extension of the extremely narrow old Roman territory, that the former acquisitions of the territory of Corioli and Fidenae, as well as the colonisation of Labici, become comparatively insignificant. Shortly after, in the year 387 b.c., four new tribes were added to the twenty-one original Roman tribes, and these new tribes perhaps surpassed the old ones in fertility as well as extent. The Roman state had now so decidedly grown in power, that its relations to the allied towns in Latium were essentially altered. If we are justified in supposing that Veii, before its fall, was about equal to Rome, the power of the latter was nearly doubled, and probably not one of the existing towns of Etruria was now a match for her. The wide space enclosed by the wall of the city could now be filled by a denser population, and the hills, which had thus far been largely used for agricultural purposes, could grow into a town. The wealth acquired by the capture of the works of art of the Etruscan town could not fail to give a strong impulse to industry, enterprise, and commerce. For the first time Rome obtained a great accession of slaves in the numerous captives, who formed a skilled and industrious population; whilst the conquered country offered to the poor plebeian peasant, as well as to the wealthy patrician, abundant land for assignments and occupation. Borne, in her rapid develop­ment, was now in the act of emerging from the position of a federal capital of the Latins to become the mistress of a large country, when she was suddenly and unexpectedly overtaken by a disaster which threatened not only her growth, but her life, and which, like a hail-storm, swept away the first blossoms of the young republic. Six years after the destruction of Veii, the Gauls rioted amidst the smoking ruins of Rome.

 

CHAPTER XVII.

THE AGRARIAN MOVEMENTS TILL THE DESTRUCTION OF ROME BY THE GAULS.

 

The agrarian law of Sp. Cassius of the year 486 b.c. was, as we have seen, never carried into effect, and probably was not passed with due observance of all the constitutional forms. The thirty years from that period to the time of the decemvirs were, according to the accounts of our historians, filled with agrarian disputes, which were repeated almost every year. The tribunes were always urging afresh the dividing of land among the plebs, and the patricians always succeeded in frustrating these plans? But all these agitations, which occupy so much room in the annals of the older time, are incomprehensible to us, be­cause we know no more than the annalists did themselves what land it was proposed to divide. The narrators seem to have been more or less of opinion that the dispute was about newly conquered land. But the foreign history of that time, dark as it is, shows us that there was no such land; that the Romans, and their allies, the Latins and the Hernicans, could not always hold their own against the Volscians and the Aequians; and that, instead of conquering, they often lost land. If, therefore, those stories are really in any measure to be believed, and the tribunes urged the regulation of landed tenures, their proposals must have had reference to the old territory of the town. This is the more likely as the first agrarian law which was carried in consequence of these disputes, and of which we have any certain evidence, was confined to giving the plebeians a small portion of the town district for their use. This was the law of the tribune Icilius, adopted shortly before the decemvirate 456 b.c., which, on account of its importance, ranked as one of the sworn fundamental laws (leges sacratae). We can scarcely, however, suppose that the plebeians insisted on having the whole of the Roman public lands, which till now were in the possession of the patricians, divided among the people at large. Such a demand seems incompatible with the legal status of the plebs. Moreover, if the plebeians aimed so high at that early period, we can hardly understand why they should value so much the moderate concession of the Icilian law, and why they never afterwards made an attempt to disturb the old possessions of the patricians.

It is in the nature of the case that disputes about the division of land could only arise when there were lands to be divided, i.e. after new acquisitions of territory. The first acquisition of this kind was that of the Ardeatic district in the year 442 b.c. Ardea became a Latin colony, either at this time or some time after. The particular mode of appropriating the land for the exclusive benefit of the Roman patricians must remain doubtful But so much is certain, that the plebeians were excluded, for the three patrician commissioners sent out to Ardea for the settlement of the colony did not venture to return to Rome for fear of the plebs. We can well suppose that the signal would thus be given for agrarian agita­tions.

The next opportunity of improving the condition of the Roman plebs by grants of land was offered by the con­quest of Fidenae 426 b.c. This town was in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome. Its land lay most conveniently for the Roman peasantry, almost under the Roman walls. Fidenae was destroyed and its territory united to that of Rome. Again in the years immediately succeeding (424, 421, 420 b.c.) we hear of agrarian agitations. What the result was, we are not told. But probably this time too the plebeians failed to get what they wanted; the patricians insisted that the public land (the ager publicus) belonged to them as the original populus, and they would admit only their clients as tenants of the land which they had occupied on the ground of their exclusive right.

A further conquest was that of Labici, 418 b.c., in the neighbourhood of Tusculum. This acquisition of land also was followed by agrarian disputes, for in the succeeding years (416-414 b.c.) the tribunes made proposals of agrarian laws. This time the plebeians carried their point. A colony was sent to Labici, the first of the numerous Roman colonies which can be historically traced to its very foundation, and which remained in the uninterrupted possession of Rome. The colonists had two acres of land each assigned to them, to which was of course added the right of pasture on the common land. Such a scanty allowance seems to have satisfied the plebeians at that time. Yet the patricians must have thought the measure of their generosity exhausted, for soon after they resisted the proposal for the colonisation of Bolae. Party spirit ran so high that the consul Postumius, who acted as the champion of the patricians, was murdered by his own troops. Whether this crime caused a reaction, or whether other events favoured the policy of the patricians, we know not. But Boise was not colonised, and the Roman territory was for a time confined to the extent which it occupied at that period, while soon afterwards (406 till 396 b.c.) the whole strength of the nation was in requisition for the war with Veii.

The agrarian disputes just referred to were not confined to the question among whom the newly acquired lands should be divided. They extended to the question of the burthens which the new occupants should bear. It seems that at this time the principle was discussed, whether those who received from the state public lands for occupation laid themselves under certain obligations to the state; above all things, whether they should be obliged to pay a tax to the state. Already in the year 424 b.c. we see this proposed by liberal candidates for the office of the consular tribuneship, with this addition, that the income thus obtained should be appropriated to paying the soldiers. Not long afterwards, it is related that the patricians consented to the proposal of giving pay to the troops. To the change in the military organisation in Rome, which was thus effected, the Romans owed the great increase of power which is perceptible from this time forward, and the first important result of which was the conquest of Veii. It seems hardly doubtful that the money for paying the troops was derived principally, if not exclusively, from the taxes which the patrician possessors of the state lands had to pay; for only on this supposition was this new measure of real benefit to the plebs, as it is always represented to have been. It was therefore closely connected with the question about the appropriation and use of the public lands, and may have contributed not a little to support the claims of the patricians to their exclusive use. It was no bad argument if the patricians could say that they bore the cost of defending the state, and were therefore entitled to the possession of the state lands.

All previous conquests were insignificant in comparison with the great increase of the Roman power after the fall of Veii, 396 b.c. By it the Roman territory was all at once doubled, and the use to be made of the new districts became inevitably a subject for discussion. The patricians undoubtedly put forward the claim, which they had never relinquished, to the sole possession of the conquered state lands, while the plebeians urged a division of land as private property. The Roman writers have misrepresented these disputes in the interest of the aristocratic party. According to their account, the plebeians intended to divide the Roman state, leaving one-half of the citizens in Rome, and sending the other half to colonize Veii. This pernicious scheme, which threatened Rome with a fatal division, the patricians opposed with all their might, and finally succeeded in frustrating. This account, which is in substance repeated after the burning of Rome by the Gauls, is nothing but an attempt to accuse the plebeians of folly and treason, and so to misrepresent their demands as to insure their condemnation by very patriotic Roman. It is not difficult to discover what the plebeians really wanted. They wished no separation from Rome, nor did they propose a plan which would have substituted for the overthrown Veientine state a more formidable rival of Roman ascendancy. All that they insisted on was to acquire land for themselves in the conquered territory. This demand was so just that it could not be resisted in the end, and it was at last agreed that an allotment of seven jugera a head should be made.

A further misrepresentation of the facts is the story that Camillus dedicated to the Delphian Apollo the tenth not only of the movable spoils but also of the conquered land connected of Veii, and that the obligation of returning a tenth of the tithing of spoils and raising, at the public cost, the value of a tenth of the land, caused the serious contentions in Rome which ended in the exile of Camillus. It has already been mentioned that the story of the Delphian oracle and the dedication of the golden bowl is most likely a late inven­tion. The origin of the tale may easily be accounted for. It was nothing but the general obligation imposed on the occupiers of the territory of Veii to pay a tenth of the produce. Such a tax was not unreasonable, so far as it was imposed on the occupiers of what was properly public land. It is therefore not likely that it was objected to by the patricians, who were still the only occupiers of public land. If the plebeians objected and raised an outcry against the tax, it can only be explained by the supposition that they claimed to have land allotted to them as freehold and not subject to annual payments.

They received in fact allotments of seven jugera a head. Such a large allowance, in such a fertile district and so near to Rome, would no doubt have satisfied all their expectations, if it had not been burthened with a tithe or rent charge. As discontent no doubt existed, according to all accounts, on the part of the plebeians, and assumed the form of protests against the payment of a tenth for the Veientine holdings—as, moreover, the story of the payment of this tenth to the shrine of Apollo at Delphi is untrue—it seems natural to infer that the much-vexed agrarian question lay at the bottom of these difficulties, and that the partial annalists, who wrote in the interest of the governing class, misrepresented both the discontent of the plebs and the motives and policy of the patricians.

It is very uncertain in what manner the old inhabitants and cultivators of the Veientine country were treated. The tradition appears to assume that they were incorporated as Roman citizens into the four tribes newly formed from the conquered land. But such mild treatment of bitter enemies would not have been in accordance with Roman customs, and it was not practicable in this particular case, because the land of the conquered was to be taken possession of by the Romans. Perhaps we are not far wrong if we suppose that, with the conquest of Veii, the employment of slaves for domestic service and for agriculture became more general. In the old time the number of slaves in Rome was very small, as is natural in a state of society characterised by simplicity and poverty. The clientela of the subject population served to a certain extent the purpose of slavery in later times. Slavery, like the milder servitude of the clients, was the result of the subjection of enemies. The difference was this, that if the conquered people were left in possession of their hereditary lands, they became clients; if they were removed from their lands, they fell into the condition of slaves. The foundation of the Roman state was followed by the establishment of clientship; the extension of the Roman dominion led to an increase of slavery. Before the taking of Veii, the Homans had had but little opportunity of taking prisoners of war in large numbers, for they had made no conquests by which the great bulk of the hostile population fell into their power. But this was now the case with the numerous defenders of the large and populous town of Veii, which no doubt consisted in great part of country people from the surrounding districts. It is possible that some townships of the country of Veii obtained milder conditions, as having surrendered themselves to the Romans in the course of the war. If, in consequence of this, a part of the conquered land was not forfeited, yet there can be little doubt that the larger and more fertile part of the country was divided among the Romans, and that these new owners were the citizens authorized to vote in the newly established tribes.

With the conquest of Veii, therefore, we see Borne entering on a period of power and prosperity, which appeared to be a guarantee for a steadily continued development. Rome began to grow wealthy. The possessions of the influential families already covered hundreds of acres of land. Agriculture, it is true, remained the foundation of the national wealth; trade and commerce were only secondary sources of it. But in this direction also a beginning was probably made, for by the conquest of Veii no doubt thousands of skilful artisans fell into Roman captivity. Even the circumstance that Borne allured the rapacious hordes of the Gauls may be taken as evidence that at that time it began to rank among the wealthy towns of  Italy. Everything tends to show that, before the invasion of the Gauls, Rome was on the point of taking a great start and entering on a period of rapid development, when it was suddenly stopped, and for a considerable time sank into a state of weakness which endangered its position at the head of Latium.

 

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE INVASION OF THE GAULS, 390 B.C.

 

While in Italy the native Sabellian races, as well as those of foreign origin, the Etruscans and the Greeks, had arrived at various degrees of civilisation and national prosperity, and were practising agriculture, trade, com­merce, and the arts, the north of Europe, separated from sunny Italy by the great Alpine wall, was traversed by restless swarms of barbarians, who, with unsteady aim, were drifted, like the clouds of dust in the desert, in different directions, unwilling to settle down permanently and to live by the proceeds of their labour. Coming from the east, the great nation of the Celts or Gauls had taken possession of the western countries of Central Europe even to the sea, and from this their chief seat, which after them was called Gaul, Gallic hordes had crossed the Pyrenees and the Channel, to spread themselves in Spain and Britain. They had also found their way across the Alps at an early period. During a number of years swarms of them had penetrated to the level lands of Northern Italy, and had either subjected or expelled the former inhabitants of those parts. The Etruscan towns in the rich valley of the Po fell one after another into the hands of the Gauls. Civilisation and art succumbed to barbarism. The most fruitful plain of Italy again became almost a wilderness.

Northern Italy, between the Alps and the Apen­nines, was justly called from this time forward Cisalpine Gaul. In the extreme east only the Veneti preserved their independence, and in the west, the Ligurians, between the Alps, the Apennines, and the sea. The Umbrians, who lived between the Apennines and the Adriatic, and of old possessed the plain northwards far towards the Po, were driven southwards, and their collision with the Sabines caused the numerous migrations which brought the Samnites and the cognate tribes into the coast districts and to the south of the peninsula.

The most advanced tribe of the Gauls were the Senones on the Adriatic Sea, to the east of Central Etruria. While Borne reduced South Etruria to a state of subjection, these Gauls crossed the Apennines, and appeared suddenly before the gates of Clusium, the powerful Etruscan town from which, according to the ancient legend, King Porsenna had marched to attack Borne. When nations are migrating and seeking either booty or new settlements, no special inducement or provocation is needed to call forth their hostility. Whoever is in their way, whomso­ever they can subdue and despoil, he is their enemy. They know no other policy and no other motives. It is therefore nothing but a foolish tale which relates that an inhabitant of Clusium, in order to avenge himself on a powerful enemy, the seducer of his wife, prevailed on the Gauls to cross the Alps, by exhibiting before them specimens of the finest fruits of the rich southern country, and inviting them to take possession of districts which produced such delicacies, but were inhabited by cowards.

When the Clusians were threatened by the Gauls, so ran the Roman account, they sent an embassy to Rome asking for assistance. The senate despatched an embassy, consisting of three of the noblest men in Borne, sons of M. Fabius Ambustus, to warn the Gauls that they should desist from hostilities against the friends and allies of the Roman people. The haughty barbarians received with scorn and contempt a threat from a people whose very name was unknown to them. They demanded from the Etruscans land, where they might dwell, and relied upon the right of the stronger. A battle was fought between them and the Clusians; and the three Romans, eager to fight, and unmindful of the sacred right of nations which protected them as ambassadors against violence and also forbade their engaging in acts of hostility, took part in the battle, and fought in the foremost ranks of the Clusians, where one of them slew a Gallic chief and took his armour. The whole rage of the northern enemy was thus diverted from Clusium against Rome. They demanded from the senate the delivery of the three ambassadors; and when the Roman people rejected this demand, and even chose as consular tribunes for the next year the same men who had broken the law of nations, they marched with all their force down the valley of the Tiber towards Rome. At the small river Allia, only eleven Roman miles from the town, on the left bank of the Tiber, the two armies met, in the middle of summer. The Romans were put to flight almost without offering any resistance. A panic seized them at the sight of their gigantic enemies, who rushed to the attack with a terrific war-cry and with irresistible impetuosity. In one moment the legions were broken and scattered in headlong flight. The Romans were slaughtered like sheep, and in their despair they plunged into the waters of the Tiber; but even there many were reached by the darts of the enemy, and many sank under the weight of their arms. Only a small part of the fugitives reached the opposite bank, and rallied in the ruins of Veii. A few, and among them the consular tribune Sulpicius, reached Borne by the direct road. The Roman army was annihilated at one blow. Even the enemy were astonished at their unexpected success. They dispersed themselves to despoil the slain, and, according to their custom, they stuck the severed heads upon spears, and erected a monument of victory on the battlefield.

The defeat of the Allia was never forgotten by the Romans. The 18th of July, the anniversary of the battle, was for all time looked upon as an unlucky day. The panic, which alone had caused the misfortune, struck so deep into their minds that, for centuries afterwards, the name and the sight of Gauls inspired them with terror. The Romans never trembled before Italian enemies. Even Hannibal and his Punic army they encountered with manly courage. The greatest reverses, sustained in the wars with these enemies, produced but a temporary, passing effect. But the Gauls and the Germans were terrible to them. It was only with his iron discipline that Marius kept the legions together when they had to encounter the northern barbarians. Even as revolted slaves they inspired this terror, after they had worn Roman chains. Caesar had difficulty in accustoming his soldiers to the sight of the daring warriors of Ariovistus, and terror convulsed even imperial Borne when Varus, with his legions, met his fate far away in the forests of Germany.

The whole of the Roman people followed the example of the army. The machinery of government was out of gear all at once. The magistrates had ceased to govern. Fear, terror, and despair reigned throughout the town. Every one thought only of himself, of personal safety, of speedy flight. The army was believed to be annihilated, and everything was given up for lost. No one thought of defence. The walls were not manned; even the gates were left open. In confused crowds the train of fugitives hurried across the bridge over the Tiber towards the Janiculus. What could not be carried away or was forgotten in the confusion of the hour, was left behind to the mercy of the enemy. There was scarcely time to bury some sacred things, and for the vestal virgins to carry away the sacred fire in safety to the friendly town of Caere. The monuments of antiquity, the bronze tables of the laws, the images of gods and heroes, the old annals and whatever written documents were then in existence—all were abandoned and doomed to perish in the impending destruction.

But Rome was not destined to be quite overwhelmed by the barbarians. The Capitoline hill, with the fortifications and the temple of Jupiter, was taken possession of by armed men, and by the remnant of senators and magistrates. This isolated rock rose above the widespreading flood and transmitted the continuity of the Eternal City unbroken to the coming generations. From the centre Rome was destined soon to rise with renewed vigour, and to see the sons of the haughty barbarians led captive before the triumphal cars of her victorious sons.

Not till the third day after the battle did the Gauls appear before the town. When they found the walls unoccupied and the gates open, they feared an ambush, and for a long time did not venture nearer. At last they satisfied themselves that the place was undefended, and entering found the whole town forsaken and the streets empty. Only here and there, in the halls of their houses, they saw venerable old men, earnest, dignified, and motionless as statues, sitting on ivory chairs. They were a number of the oldest senators—men who in previous years had commanded the armies of the republic, and now, too proud for flight, preferred to await death amid the ruins of their native town. Their wish was fulfilled. They fell under the blows of the barbarians. When the enemy had sacked the empty town, the work of destruction began. From the Capitoline rock the men of Rome were doomed helplessly to look on and see their dwellings and the temples of their gods consumed by the flames. The end of the Roman state seemed to have come. The people were dispersed, the army annihilated, all order dissolved, the town in ashes. Who could hope for a rise after such a fall. Could such a night be ever succeeded by another day?

Yet the remnant of the Roman nation never despaired of their fatherland. A desperate assault of the Gauls against the Capitol was repulsed. For a regular siege of a fortified place the disorderly hordes of Gauls were neither disposed nor qualified. They confined themselves therefore to blockading the Romans, in the hope of forcing them through hunger to surrender. One part of their troops they sent into the neighbouring districts to collect provisions; the rest encamped among the ruins of the town.

In the meantime the fugitive Romans in Veii had recovered themselves from the inexplicable terror which had seized them at the sight of the Gauls, and by degrees they so far acquired courage that, under the guidance of a plebeian captain, M. Caedicius, they drove back a party of Etruscans, which had invaded the Roman territory on the right bank of the Tiber. By degrees, as they gained confidence, they aspired to deliver Rome from the barbarians. But it was felt that this undertaking could be ventured on only under the guidance of Camillus, who was living still in banishment in Ardea. In his new home Camillus had proved his Roman courage. At the head of the men of Ardea, he had surprised a party of plundering Gauls and annihilated them. But however much his heart might long to deliver his country, he could undertake nothing as an exile and without official authority. Therefore a bold youth, Pontius Cominius, undertook to go from Veii to the senate on the Capitol to communicate the wish of the army. He swam down the Tiber, climbed up the steep sides of the Capitoline rock, and after the senate had decided on recalling Camillus and choosing him as dictator, he returned by the same way. But this bold deed almost caused the destruction of all. The Gauls discovered the foot-prints where Cominius had climbed the rock, and, following this track, they tried to surprise the Capitol in the following night. The Roman guards slept. The first foes had already reached the height, when the garrison was aroused by the cackling of the geese in the temple of Juno, and the ex-consul M. Manlius hurried to the threatened place, and struck down the foremost of the Gauls, who in his fall dragged others with him. Thus, by the wakefulness of the geese and the prompt courage of Manlius, the Capitol was saved.

Nevertheless the blockade continued without interruption. In vain the besieged looked anxiously from the height of the Capitol into the distance. The expected help was nowhere to be descried. The provisions were wasting away, and hunger began to cripple the limbs and to warp the courage of the garrison. There was only one chance of deliverance left. The Gauls did not seem averse to withdrawing, in consideration of a ransom. Negotiations were opened, and it was agreed that Borne should be redeemed by a ransom of a thousand pounds of gold. The treasures of the temples and the gold of the trinkets which the noble ladies willingly gave up, scarcely sufficed to raise such a large sum. The gold was weighed on the Forum before the barbarians, and when the consular tribune Sulpicius complained that the Gauls made use of unjust weights, Brennus, their king, threw his sword into the scale and said, ‘Woe to the conquered!’ All of a sudden, however, Camillus appeared on the Forum, at the head of a body of troops, and stepping between the disputants, declared the contract which was signed without his sanction to be null and void, and when the Gauls protested he drove them by force out of the town. They drew up their forces at a short distance from the gates. On the road to Gabii a battle was fought. The Romans conquered and not a Gaul escaped. Brennus himself fell into the hands of Camillus, and as he asked for mercy Camillus returned his haughty words, ‘Woe to the conquered!’ and slew him. Thus was Rome delivered from the Gauls, after they had remained in the town for seven months. The disgrace of the Roman overthrow was blotted out; the insolent enemy was punished, and by the heroism of one man the humiliating agreement was set aside whereby the Romans, in their despair, had ransomed themselves from their enemies with gold, unmindful that a Roman should purchase his freedom not with gold but with steel.

The foregoing story, which, on the whole, is abridged from the mastery narrative of Livy, belongs to that class of narratives in which we can most easily detect the additions, ornaments, and poetical inventions of a later time, partly because they betray themselves by their fantastical features, partly because we find in Diodorus and Polybius much more simple and authentic accounts of the invasion of the Gauls, and with their assistance are enabled to recognise distinctly the event in its grand outlines. At the outset the story of the embassy of the three Fabii to the Gauls before Clusium is very improbable. It is not easy to understand why the people of Clusium should send to Rome for assistance, still less how the Romans could at that time employ a phrase which afterwards became popular among them, viz., that the Gauls should leave the friends and allies of the Roman people unmolested. The vanity of the Fabian house and their family traditions are no doubt the source of the story that the Gauls remarked the three Romans in the Etruscan army, and, on account of the violation of the law of nations, relinquished their attack on Etruria to advance straight upon Rome. From what we know of the Gauls of this time, they marched through Italy for the purpose of plundering, without scrupulously searching for just grounds to declare war on this or that nation. Thus they attacked Clusium, and for no other purpose they turned against Rome.

The men who composed the eulogium of Camillus con­tributed most of the embellishments and falsifications of the story. The fictions are so clumsy and awkward that they betray themselves immediately. At the same time we discover in them an author but little acquainted with Roman affairs and constitutional practice. The object of the narrator was to represent Camillus as the true deliverer of Rome. Hence the story of his recall from Ardea, and his nomination as dictator. In this story the fact is overlooked that, according to the previous account, Camillus was not sent into exile, but only condemned to pay a fine; that he voluntarily left Rome, and therefore had not lost the Roman citizenship, and that accordingly his recall required no vote of the people. The narrator, moreover, appears not to have known the forms observed on the nomination of a dictator. He causes him to be elected by a vote of the people, whereas the nomination ought to have been made by one of the consular tribunes. It cannot be conceived why this rule should have been departed from, seeing that, according to the received account, the consular tribune Q. Sulpicius Longus was on the Capitol, and could, at the request of the senate, easily nominate a dictator. The story therefore, creates a difficulty which, in reality, did not exist. On the other hand, it conceals or ignores an obstacle to the legal transfer of dictatorial power to Camillus. The law required that the dictator, after being duly nominated by a consul or consular tribune, should personally propose to the comitia curiata the law (the lex curiata de imperio) which conferred on him the military command. Camillus could only do this if he was himself on the Capitol, for the curies could not assemble outside Rome. These are our reasons for doubting the dictatorship of Camillus. Moreover we possess an account which is free from the silly theatrical scenes in which Camillus suddenly appears, like a deus ex machina, in the Forum, and defeats and slays the Gauls. According to Diodorus, Camillus is not made dictator until the Gauls have evacuated Borne. We have therefore no alternative but to prefer this simple narrative, and to reject every word which connects Camillus with the deliverance of Borne from the Gauls.

In like manner we must condemn the story which ascribes to Camillus the honour of having taken from the Gauls the spoils and the ransom of a thousand pounds of gold. It is plain, from the report of Polybius, that neither Camillus nor any one else was so fortunate as to accomplish such a feat. Polybius reports that the Gauls retired ‘unmolested with their booty.’ He does not even mention the ransom at all, so that perhaps even this story was invented for the same purpose of glorifying Camillus. It is indeed neither impossible nor improbable that the Gauls, after the destruction of the town, were induced to retire by a sum of money, but at any rate the Romans never recovered any portion of such ransom or of booty. According to the most popular story, adopted by Livy, the payment was interrupted by Camillus on the Forum; the Gauls therefore never got the money at all. According to another report, it was taken from the Gauls, by Camillus, when they returned from an invasion of Apulia in the following year. According to a third version, it was brought back to Rome out of the province of Gaul by the propraetor M. Li­vius Drusus about a century later. The narrators thought it quite possible that a heap of gold should remain untouched in the hands of barbarians for a whole year or even for a century. To us such abstinence appears quite as marvellous as the suckling of Romulus and Remus by a she-wolf, and we decline to accept it as an historical fact. In comparison with it another version seems almost to deserve credit, though that also is rather startling. It is stated that the sum of two thousand pounds of gold, after having been recovered from the Gauls, was deposited in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, and remained there untouched for more than two centuries, until in 55 b.c., in the second consulship of Pompeius, it was taken away by M. Crassus. If the Romans were able to lay aside such a handsome sum of money at the period of the great national distress which followed the burning of the city, and if they scrupled to touch it in the war with Hannibal, when they borrowed and took whatever money they could lay their hands on, we must confess that we have a very inadequate conception of the strength of their religious faith and conscientiousness. But we may fairly have grave doubts as to the accuracy of the statement. In the first place the sum paid as a ransom to the Gauls is all but unanimously stated to have amounted only to one thousand pounds of gold. If, therefore, it is true that, in 55 b.c., two thousand pounds were found, they must be otherwise accounted for. In the second place all the statements which refer to the raising, paying, and recovering the ransom are so contra­dictory and unauthenticated that we cannot believe that any trustworthy information existed on the subject.

The story of the saving of the Capitol by M. Manlius and the cackling of thee  geese is in itself not incredible, and it may have been part of a very old tradition. It seems probable that while many of the great outlines of the his­tory have been effaced, some of the minute details—such as the alarm given by the geese, the removal of the vestal virgins in the waggon of Albinius, and the sacrifice of Fabius—may have been faithfully preserved by tradition, or by the pontifical scribes. At the same time even this part of the story is not free from objections. In the first place the tradition was by no means uniform that the Gauls had climbed up the rock, following the track of Cominius, for one version made them get into the Capitol by a mine. In the second place, it is possible that the story of the geese was an aetiological legend, i.e., a legend invented to account for the origin of a custom or religious ceremony. It is reported that, in memory of the watchfulness of the geese and the negligence of the dogs, a procession took place every year in Rome, in which a dog fastened to a cross, and a goose decorated with gold and purple, were carried through the streets. Now it is hardly probable that an event like that reported of the geese should have given rise to such a religious ceremonial. Dogs were sacrificed on several occasions; the geese were sacred to Juno before the period in question, as the legend itself presumes. It is therefore more probable that the legend arose out of the religious custom, than the custom out of the alleged event.

Our inquiry shows that the greatest part of the common story does not belong to history but to fiction. On the other hand the narrative is defective. It does not say, for instance, what part the Latins took in the war with the Gauls. A very few faint traces indeed there are, which point to the fact that the Latins were not idle spectators during the Gallic invasion of Latium. In fact, as they were in the same danger as the Roman themselves, we cannot believe that they would on this occasion maintain a cowardly and foolish neutrality. It was not difficult for them, in their fortified towns, to defy the blind courage of the Gauls, as the Romans did on the Capitol, and to harass small detachments and troops of plunderers. Thus they may have played an important part in the deliverance of Rome; but the Roman annalists, intent only on their own glorification, have been ungenerously silent about the deserts of their allies.

After what has been said, it appears that the substance of historical facts to be drawn from the long descriptions of the Gallic conquest is very meagre. There is nothing certain but the general rough sketch of the picture. All the details are doubtful or deceptive. There remains only the bare fact, that the Gauls made an unexpected invasion, that the Roman army was overthrown, that the town was sacked and burnt, the Capitol besieged in vain, and that after some time the enemy retired with the spoils which had been taken.

That this invasion of the Gauls was a great misfortune for Rome cannot be denied. Yet it appears that the panic, which was the chief cause of the disaster, also tended to increase the impression which it made on the public mind. The Gauls were not in a position to make a permanent conquest. After they had retired, the former state of things returned, as the old configuration of the soil remains after an inundation. The body politic had been paralysed, not killed ; the organism was not destroyed, its action only had been arrested for a short time. Cer­tainly it was necessary to rebuild the town, which had been burnt to the ground; but the state recovered its former vigour without difficulty. It may even be that the invasion of the Gauls was more destructive to neighbouring nations than to Rome itself, and that Rome indirectly gained more from it than it lost. At any rate we find Rome, immediately after the retreat of the Gauls, in such a commanding position with regard to the Latins, the Aequians, and the Volscians, that its power seems in no way diminished.

 

CHAPTER XIX.

SOURCES OF EARLY ROMAN HISTORY.

 

The destruction of Rome by the Gauls is so marked a point in the history of the Romans, that the plan of those writers who (like Claudius Quadrigarius among the ancients) begin their narrative at this point, has much in its favour. The history of the regal period, and of the first 120 years of the republic, is not derived from contemporary witnesses, but was composed after the Gallic conflagration. Whatever historical monuments existed were almost entirely destroyed in the burning of the town, and the distress of the time which immediately succeeded left no leisure for restoring historical documents. We must not deceive ourselves by thinking that the time before the Gallic invasion belongs, strictly speaking, to the domain of history, inasmuch as history is intended to exhibit successive events in their connexion of cause and effect, and to trace a certain law of development, to make us understand and appreciate the character of individuals and of political bodies. It seems, therefore, advisable to pause here for a moment, and to review the sources of information possessed by the oldest annalists. We are the more called upon to do so as we require a justification for tarrying so long in the labyrinth of legends and of traditions more perplexing than instruc­tive.

Before the second Punic war, the Romans possessed no connected general account of their own history. An annalistic literature first grew up with the Greek work of Fabius Pictor, and continued to be cultivated until the end of the republic. It is from these annalists, whose works have all perished, that our authorities, such as Livy and Dionysius, have derived their information. But even Fabius Pictor and his imitators had predecessors, and it is important for us to know these predecessors, and to judge of the materials from which they gathered the knowledge of things which happened before their time.

The Roman nation was formed by the union of tribes and houses, which had been originally almost or entirely independent, whose recollections extended much further back than those of the united community, and whose peculiarities were lost only by degrees in the general character of the Roman people. Every family had its own domestic duties and religious rites, sanc­tuaries, and festivals, the preservation of which was considered a most sacred duty. Each peculiar custom gave rise to certain historical traditions, which were the common property of all the members of the family, and were preserved the more scrupulously as the happiness and prosperity of the family were supposed to depend upon the due observance of their religious duties. Thus there were formed distinct groups of families, closely connected together, and distinguished from the rest of the community by the common name of the house (nomen gentile). No ancient people possessed such a strongly developed and exclusive organisation of families and houses as subdivisions of the community at large as the Eoman, and nowhere was family pride carried to such an extent.

The history of Rome grew up in a manner analogous to the Roman people. As families, houses, and tribes were combined to make up the body of the citizens, so the private traditions, chronicles, and monuments of the distinguished families of the Roman nobility were the ma­terials out of which Fabius Pictor and his successors formed the history of the Roman commonwealth. Even though we had no authentic evidence of the existence of such family chronicles, we still could infer, from what we know of the patrician pride, that in every family traditions of the noble deeds of their forefathers must have been most carefully preserved. Even in the oldest period of the republic, and within the body of the patricians, there was a select nobility, founded on the distinction which certain ancestors had won in the service of the state. It was accordingly of great importance to preserve the evidence of the exploits of the great men belonging to each noble family, and to record the offices which they had filled, in such a manner as would serve, before the whole nation, as a public proof of nobility. Hence the care bestowed on the images of ancestors, which were preserved in the hall of each house; and hence the solemn pomp of the funerals, in which a noble Roman was accompanied to the grave not only by his living friends and relatives, but by the whole series of his ancestors, clothed in the robes of their offices. Hence, also, the solemn funeral orations and laudations, which to a certain extent took the place of a national epic poem or a popular history, and which preserved the memory of the most important transactions. Out of these funeral orations and family traditions arose the domestic chronicles, which, as we are told on good authority, existed in Rome. A careful examination of the oldest history of the republic shows that a considerable portion of it is taken from such traditions of the Valerian, Fabian, Quinctian, Furian, and other houses. At what time these traditions were written down in the form of domestic chronicles cannot with certainty be determined. Perhaps the beginning was made before the Gallic invasion; but such documents, if they existed at that time, were mostly lost in the burning of the town, and could not be restored afterwards without the chance of admitting a great amount of error.

As such domestic records dealt only with isolated portions of the events of the past, many things were necessarily overlooked, whilst repetitions, inaccuracies, and contradictions were numerous. It would have been impossible for Fabius Pictor to compose, from these materials alone, a connected, consecutive history. He must have had documents before him which served to string together, in something like chronological order, the motley materials, drawn from the traditions of the different families. These documents were supplied by the official lists of magistrates. In a republic with annually changing magistrates, it was absolutely necessary to have authentic records of the names of these officers, especially as these names served, in the absence of a recognised chronological era, to mark the successive years. Such official lists of magistrates were kept in the temple of Moneta, on the Capitol, and they are referred to as early as 444 b.c. Probably they extended as far back as the beginning of the republic. But they perished, for the most part, in the Gallic conflagration, and were restored imperfectly; nor even after this period were they carefully kept, as otherwise the numerous discrepancies and defects in them before and after this period would be unexplained.

The two principal sources for the earliest connected annals of Borne were accordingly the family traditions and the lists of the magistrates. All the remaining writings and monuments which, in their origin, belong to the time before the invasion of the Gauls, are of inferior importance.

The so-called annals of the pontifices were confined to subjects of religious interest, such as wonderful phenomena, the origin and meaning of religious customs and festivals, the building and consecration of temples and altars, epidemic diseases, public calamities, and so forth. The various ritualistic books treated of forms of prayer and sacrifices, of the laws concerning sacred things, of offices connected with public worship, of the duties of priests and their assistants. The official formularies of the secular magistrate contained in like manner only the necessary rules and instructions for the conduct of the different offices.

But little credit is to be attached to the alleged monuments of the oldest periods. It is difficult to fix the age of such works, unless they bear inscriptions with names or dates. A statue without a name inscribed on it is sure to pass for different persons at different times, or even at the same time? The monuments of the primeval period of Roman history are all more or less suspicious, as comparatively late fabrications. At any rate no safe inference can be drawn from them as to the reality of events, or even of persons, whose memory they appear designed to preserve.

One source yet remains for the knowledge of the old Roman history, a source out of which the annalists have drawn some valuable facts. This was supplied by the annals of the neighbouring towns, such as Ardea, Tibur, Tusculum, and Praeneste. As these towns never suffered such utter destruction as Rome in the Gallic conflagration, they were more likely to preserve old records and monuments.

It produces a very curious impression when Cicero tries to persuade himself that the history of Rome had, even in the regal period, a firm foundation, because at the time of Romulus Greece was already full of poets and musicians. Long before the building of Rome, Cicero remarks, Homer had flourished and Lycurgus had established the polity of Sparta. The age of Romulus was therefore, according to Cicero, a time when science was matured. The age of fables had passed away; it was already clear day. Granted that this was true of Greece, does it follow that in Italy the day of civilisation had begun to dawn? With the same reasoning a Russian patriot might claim for his country cultivation and advanced science in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, because in that age the classical studies were revived and the art of printing was discovered. Only a self-sufficient Roman like Cicero, who believed, or wished to make others believe, that his countrymen had in all things equalled or excelled the Greeks, could overlook the gigantic gulf which separated the Greek from the Italian world. The Greeks were several centuries ahead of the Romans. The whole of that glorious struggle from which Greece came forth victorious over Asiatic barbarism had been fought before Rome burst the narrow boundaries with which it was surrounded at the beginning of the republic. During the time of that brilliant age of the arts in Athens under Pericles and Phidias, Rome was a fortified village, with shingle-roofed houses, and without a single native artist of name. When Athens and Sparta were involved in that destructive war which blighted the blossoms of Greece, Rome was defending herself with difficulty against the Volscians and Aequians. While the family chroniclers of the Romans were relating the foolish tales about the destruction of Veii and the expulsion of the Gauls, and while the pontifical annals recorded, in the driest possible manner, nothing but miracles, pestilences, and famines, Thucydides raised the art of historic writing to the highest point which it reached in antiquity. In the year 404 B.C. Athens fell into the power of Lysander; in the same year the last war was commenced with Veii. When Rome was in the hands of the Gauls, 390 b.c., Greece was convulsed with that Corinthian war which directed the weapons of the Greeks away from the decaying Persian empire against their own hearts; and while in Rome the few miserable annals and historical monuments were consumed by the flames, there appeared in Greece the historical writings of Xenophon. It is necessary to keep in mind the contemporary events of Rome and Greece in order rightly to understand the political and intellectual influence exercised.