WHO were the patricians? Livy1 thought that Romulus had chosen a hundred clan heads of his tribe to help him establish Rome and be his council or senate. These men were later called patres—“fathers”—and their descendants patricii—“derived from the fathers.” Modem theory, which lives by nibbling at tradition, likes to explain the patricians as alien conquerors, perhaps Sabines, who invaded Latium and thereafter ruled the Latin plebs, or populace, as a lower caste. We may believe that they were composed of clans that through economic or military superiority had acquired the best lands, and had transformed their agricultural leadership into political mastery. These victorious clans—the Manlii, Valerii, Aemilii, Cornelii, Fabii, Horatii, Claudii, Julii, etc.—continued for five centuries to give Rome generals, consuls, and laws. When the three original tribes united, their clan heads made a senate of some three hundred members. They were not such lords of comfort and luxury as their descendants; often they put their own hands to the ax or the plow, lived vigorously on simple fare, and wore clothing spun in their homes. The plebs admired them even when it fought them, and applied to almost anything appertaining to them the term classicus, “classical”—i.e., of the highest rank or class.2
Close to them in wealth, but far below them in political power, were the equites, or businessmen. Some were rich enough to win their way into the Senate, and formed there the second part of its constituent patres (et) conscripti—i.e., “patricians and coinscribed men.” These two classes were called the “orders,” and were termed bom, “the good”; for early civilizations thought of virtue in terms of rank, ability, and power; virtus to the Roman meant manliness, the qualities that make a man (vir). Populus, “people,” took in only these upper classes; and originally it was in this sense that those famous initials were used—S P Q R (Senatus Populusque Romanus)—which were to mark so proudly a hundred thousand monuments.3 Gradually, as democracy fought its way, the word populus came to include the plebs.
This was the main body of Roman citizens. Some were artisans or tradesmen, some were freedmen, many were peasants; perhaps, in the beginning, they were the conquered natives of the city’s hills. Some were attached as clientes, or dependents, to an upper-class patronus; in return for land and protection they helped him in peace, served under him in war, and voted in the assemblies as he told them.
Lowest of all were the slaves. Under the kings they had been costly and few, and therefore had been treated with consideration as valuable members of the family. In the sixth century B.C., when Rome began her career of conquest, war captives were sold in rising number to the aristocracy, the business classes, and even to plebeians; and the status of the slave sank. Legally he could be dealt with as any other piece of property; in theory, and according to the custom of the ancients, his life had been forfeited by defeat, and his enslavement was a merciful commutation of his death. Sometimes he managed his master’s property, business, or funds; sometimes he became a teacher, writer, actor, craftsman, laborer, tradesman, or artist, and paid his master part of his earnings. In this or other ways he might earn enough to buy his freedom and become a member of the plebs.
Contentment is as rare among men as it is natural among animals, and no form of government has ever satisfied its subjects. In this system the businessmen were piqued by their exclusion from the Senate, the richer plebeians by their exclusion from the equites; and the poorer plebeians resented their poverty, their political disabilities, and their liability to enslavement for debt. The law of the early Republic allowed a creditor to imprison a persistently defaulting debtor in a private dungeon, to sell him into slavery, even to kill him. Joint creditors might, said the law, cut up the corpse of the defaulting debtor and divide it among them—a provision apparently never enforced.4 The plebs demanded that these laws should be repealed and the burden of accrued debt reduced; that the lands won in war and owned by the state should be distributed among the poor instead of being given, or sold at nominal prices, to the rich; that plebeians should be eligible to the magistracies and the priesthoods, be permitted to intermarry with the “orders,” and have a representative of their class among the highest officials of the government. The Senate sought to frustrate the agitation by fomenting wars, but it was shocked to find its calls to the colors ignored. In 494 B.C. large masses of the plebs “seceded” to the Sacred Mount on the river Anio, three miles from the city, and declared that they would neither fight nor work for Rome until their demands had been met. The Senate used every diplomatic or religious device to lure the rebels back; then, fearing that invasion from without might soon be added to revolt within, it agreed to a cancellation or reduction of debts, and the establishment of two tribunes and three aediles as the elected defenders of the plebs. The plebs returned, but only after taking a solemn oath to kill any man who should ever lay violent hands upon their representatives in the government.5
This was the opening battle in a class war that ended only with the Republic that it destroyed. In 486 the consul Spurius Cassius proposed an allotment of captured lands among the poor; the patricians accused him of currying popular favor with a view to making himself king, and had him killed; this was probably not the first in a long line of agrarian proposals and Senatorial assassinations, culminating in the Gracchi and Caesar. In 439 Spurius Maelius, who during a famine had distributed wheat to the poor at a low price or free, was slain in his home by an emissary of the Senate, again on the charge of plotting to be king.6 In 384 Marcus Manlius, who had heroically defended Rome against the Gauls, was put to death on the same charge after he had spent his fortune relieving insolvent debtors.
The next step in the climb of the plebs was a demand for definite, written, and secular laws. Heretofore the patrician priests had been the recorders and interpreters of the statutes, had kept their records secret, and had used their monopoly, and the ritual requirements of the law, as weapons against social change. After a long resistance to the new demands, the Senate (454) sent a commission of three patricians to Greece to study and report on the legislation of Solon and other lawmakers. When they returned, the Assembly (451) chose ten men—decemviri—to formulate a new code, and gave them supreme governmental power in Rome for two years. This commission, under the presidency of a resolute reactionary, Appius Claudius, transformed the old customary law of Rome into the famous Twelve Tables, submitted them to the Assembly (which passed them with some changes), and displayed them in the Forum for all who would—and could—to read. This seemingly trivial event was epochal in Roman history and in the history of mankind; it was the first written form of that legal structure which was to be Rome’s most signal achievement and her greatest contribution to civilization.
When the second year of the commission’s tenure’ ended, it refused to restore the government to the consuls and tribunes, and continued to exercise supreme—and ever more irresponsible—authority. Appius Claudius, says a story suspiciously like Lucretia’s, was stirred with a passion for the beautiful plebeian Virginia, and, to secure her for his pleasure, had her declared a slave. Her father, Lucius Virginius, protested; and when Claudius refused to hear him he slew his daughter, rushed out to his legion, and asked its aid in overthrowing the new despot. The enraged plebs once more “seceded” to the Sacred Mount, “imitating,” says Livy, “the moderation of their fathers by abstaining from all injury.”7 Learning that the army was supporting the plebs, the patricians gathered in the senate house, deposed the Decemvirs, banished Claudius, restored the consulate, enlarged the tribunate, recognized the inviolability of the people’s tribunes, and confirmed to the plebs the right of appealing to the Assembly of the Centuries from the decision of any magistrate.8 Four years later (445) the tribune Caius Canuleius moved that the plebs should have the right of intermarriage with patricians, and that plebeians should be eligible to the consulate. The Senate, again faced by threats of war from vengeful neighbors, yielded the first point, and averted the second by agreeing that thereafter six of the tribunes chosen by the Centurial Assembly should have the authority of consuls. The plebs responded handsomely by choosing all these tribuni militum consulari potestate from the patrician class.
The long war with Veii (405-396), and the assault of the Gauls upon Rome, unified the nation for a time, and stilled internal strife. But victory and disaster alike left the plebeians destitute. While they fought for their country their lands were neglected or ravaged, and the interest on their debts mounted beyond possible repayment. The lenders took no excuse, but demanded principal and interest, or the imprisonment and enslavement of the borrowers. In 376 the tribunes Licinius and Sextius proposed that interest already paid should be deducted from the principal, the balance to be met in three years; that no man should be allowed to own more than five hundred iugera (about three hundred acres) of land, or to use on them more than a certain proportion.of slaves to free laborers; and that one of the two consuls should regularly be chosen from the plebs. For a decade the patricians resisted these proposals; meanwhile, says Dio Cassius, “they stirred up war after war, that the people might be too occupied to agitate about the land.”9 At last, threatened with a third secession, the Senate accepted the “Licinian laws,” and Camillus, leader of the conservatives, celebrated the reconciliation of the classes by building a stately Temple of Concord in the Forum.
It was a major step in the growth of Rome’s limited democracy. From that moment the plebs progressed rapidly towards a formal equality with the “orders” in politics and law. In 356 a plebeian was made dictator for a year; in 351 the censorship, in 337 the praetorship, and in 300 the priesthoods were opened to the plebs. Finally (287) the Senate agreed that the decisions of the Tribal Assembly should also have the force of law, even when contrary to the resolutions of the Senate. Since in this Assembly the patricians could easily be outvoted by the plebs, this lex Hortensia was the capstone and triumph of Roman democracy.
Nevertheless, the power of the Senate soon recovered after these defeats. The demand for land was quieted by sending Romans as colonists to conquered soil. The cost of winning and holding office—which was unpaid—automatically disqualified the poor. The richer plebeians, having secured political equality and opportunity, now co-operated with the patricians in checking radical legislation; the poorer plebeians, shorn of financial means, ceased for two centuries to play a significant role in the affairs of Rome. Businessmen fell in with patrician policy because it gave them contracts for public works, openings for colonial and provincial exploitation, and commissions to collect taxes for the state. The Assembly of the Centuries, whose method of voting gave the aristocracy full control, continued to choose the magistrates, and therefore the Senate. The tribunes, dependent upon the support of rich plebeians, used their office as a conservative force. Every consul, even if chosen by the plebs, became by contagion a zealous conservative when, at the close of his year of office, he was received into the Senate for life. The Senate took the initiative in legislation, and custom sanctioned its authority far beyond the letter of the law. As foreign affairs became more important, the Senate’s firm administration of them raised its prestige and power. When, in 264, Rome entered upon a century of war with Carthage for the mastery of the Mediterranean, it was the Senate that led the nation through every trial to victory; and an imperiled and desperate people yielded without protest to its leadership and domination.