ORGANISATION OF THE STATE
[Sidenote: [_ca._ 753-510 B.C.]]
The people or citizens of Rome were divided into the three tribes of the
Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres,[10] to whatever races we may suppose them
to belong, or at whatever time and under whatever circumstances they may
have become united. Each of these tribes was divided into ten smaller
bodies called curiæ; so that the whole people consisted of thirty curiæ:
these same divisions were in war represented by the thirty centuries
which made up the legion, just as the three tribes were represented by
the three centuries of horsemen; but that the soldiers of each century
were exactly a hundred, is apparently an unfounded conclusion.
We have said that each tribe was divided into ten curiæ; it would be more
correct to say that the union of ten curiæ formed the tribe. For the
state grew out of the junction of certain original elements; and these
were neither the tribes, nor even the curiæ, but the gentes[11] or houses
which made up the curiæ. The first element of the whole system was the
gens or house, a union of several families who were bound together by the
joint performance of certain religious rites. Actually, where a system
of houses has existed within historical memory, the several families who
composed a house were not necessarily related to one another; they were
not really cousins more or less distant, all descended from a common
ancestor. But there is no reason to doubt that in the original idea of a
house, the bond of union between its several families was truly sameness
of blood: such was likely to be the earliest acknowledged tie; although
afterwards, as names are apt to outlive their meanings, an artificial
bond may have succeeded to the natural one; and a house, instead of
consisting of families of real relations, was made up sometimes of
families of strangers, in the hope that law, and custom, and religion,
might together rival the force of nature.
Thus the state being made up of families, and every family consisting
from the earliest times of members and dependents, the original
inhabitants of Rome belonged all to one of two classes: they were either
members of a family, and, if so, members of a house, of a curia, of a
tribe, and so, lastly, of the state; or they were dependents on a family;
and, if so, their relation went no further than the immediate aggregate
of families, that is, the house: with the curia, with the tribe, and with
the state, they had no connection.
These members of families were the original citizens of Rome; these
dependents on families were the original clients.
The idea of clientship is that of a wholly private relation; the clients
were something to their respective patrons, but to the state they were
nothing. But wherever states composed in this manner, of a body of
houses with their clients, had been long established, there grew up
amidst, or close beside them, created in most instances by conquest, a
population of a very distinct kind. Strangers might come to live in the
land, or more commonly the inhabitants of a neighbouring district might
be conquered, and united with their conquerors as a subject people. Now
this population had no connection with the houses separately, but only
with a state composed of those houses: this was wholly a political, not a
domestic relation; it united personal and private liberty with political
subjection. This inferior population possessed property, regulated their
own municipal as well as domestic affairs, and as free men fought in the
armies of what was now their common country. But, strictly, they were
not its citizens; they could not intermarry with the houses; they could
not belong to the state, for they belonged to no house, and therefore to
no curia, and no tribe; consequently they had no share in the state’s
government, nor in the state’s property. With whatever belonged to the
state in its aggregate capacity, these, as being its neighbours merely,
and not its members, had no concern.
Such an inferior population, free personally, but subject politically,
not slaves, yet not citizens, was the original plebs, the commons of
Rome.[12]
The mass of the Roman commons were conquered Latins. These, besides
receiving grants of a portion of their former lands, to be held by them
as Roman citizens, had also the hill Aventinus assigned as a residence to
those of them who removed to Rome. The Aventine was without the walls,
although so near to them: thus the commons were, even in the nature of
their abode, like the Pfahlbürger of the Middle Ages--men not admitted to
live within the city, but enjoying its protection against foreign enemies.
It will be understood at once, that whatever is said of the people in
these early times, refers only to the full citizens, that is, to the
members of the houses. The assembly of the people was the assembly of the
curiæ; that is, the great council of the members of the houses; while
the senate, consisting of two hundred senators, chosen in equal numbers
from the two higher tribes of the Ramnes and Tities, was their smaller or
ordinary council.
Within the walls every citizen was allowed to appeal from the king, or
his judges, to the sentence of his peers; that is, to the great council
of the curiæ. The king had his demesne lands, and in war would receive
his portion of the conquered land, as well as of the spoil of movables.
THE STATUS OF THE MONARCHY
The dominion and greatness of the monarchy are attested by two sufficient
witnesses; the great works completed at this period, and still existing;
and the famous treaty with Carthage, concluded under the first consuls
of the commonwealth, and preserved to us by Polybius.[f] Under the last
kings the city of Rome reached the limits which it retained through the
whole period of the commonwealth, and the most flourishing times of the
empire. What are called the walls of Servius Tullius continued to be
the walls of Rome for nearly eight hundred years, down to the emperor
Aurelian. They enclosed all those well-known Seven Hills, whose fame has
so utterly eclipsed the Seven Hills already described of the smaller and
more ancient city.
The line of the mound or rampart may still be distinctly traced, and
the course and extent of the walls can be sufficiently ascertained;
but very few remains are left of the actual building. But the masonry
with which the bank of the Tiber was built up, a work ascribed to the
elder Tarquinius, and resembling the works of the Babylonian kings along
the banks of the Euphrates, is still visible. So also are the massy
substructions of the Capitoline temple, which were made in order to form
a level surface for the building to stand on, upon one of the two summits
of the Capitoline Hill. Above all, enough is still to be seen of the
great cloaca or drain, to assure us that the accounts left us of it are
not exaggerated. The foundations of this work were laid about forty feet
under ground, its branches were carried under a great part of the city,
and brought at last into one grand trunk which ran down into the Tiber
exactly to the west of the Palatine Hill. It thus drained the waters of
the low grounds on both sides of the Palatine; of the Velabrum, between
the Palatine and the Aventine; and of the site of the Forum between the
Palatine and the Capitoline. The stone employed in the cloaca is in
itself a mark of the great antiquity of the work; it is not the peperino
of Gabii and the Alban hills, which was the common building stone in the
time of the commonwealth; much less the travertino, or limestone of the
neighbourhood of Tibur, the material used in the great works of the early
emperors; but it is the stone found in Rome itself, a mass of volcanic
materials coarsely cemented together, which afterwards was supplanted by
the finer quality of the peperino. Such a work as the cloaca proves the
greatness of the power which effected it, as well as the character of its
government. It was wrought by task-work, like the great works of Egypt;
and stories were long current of the misery and degradation which it
brought upon the people during its progress. But this task-work for these
vast objects shows a strong and despotic government, which had at its
command the whole resources of the people; and such a government could
hardly have existed, unless it had been based upon some considerable
extent of dominion.
What the cloaca seems to imply, we find conveyed in express terms in the
treaty with Carthage. As this treaty was concluded in the very first
year of the commonwealth, the state of things to which it refers must
clearly be that of the latest period of the monarchy. It appears then
that the whole coast of Latium was at this time subject to the Roman
dominion: Ardea, Antium, Circeii, and Tarracina, are expressly mentioned
as the subject allies (ὑπήκοοι) of Rome. Of these, Circeii is said in the
common story to have been a Roman colony founded by the last Tarquinius;
but we read of it no less than of the others as independent, and making
peace or war with Rome, during the commonwealth down to a much later
period. Now it is scarcely conceivable that the Romans could thus have
been masters of the whole coast of Latium, without some corresponding
dominion in the interior; and we may well believe that Rome was at this
time the acknowledged head of the Latin cities, and exercised a power
over them more resembling the sovereignty of Athens over her allies
than the moderate supremacy of Lacedæmon. On the right bank of the
Tiber the Romans seem to have possessed nothing on the coast; but the
stories of Etruscan conquests which we find in the common accounts of
Servius Tullius, are so far justified by better testimony as to make it
probable that in the direction of Veii the Roman dominion had reached
beyond the Tiber, and that the territory thus gained from the Etruscans
formed a very considerable part of the whole territory of Rome. It is
well known that the number of local tribes established by the later kings
was thirty; whereas a few years after the beginning of the commonwealth
we find them reduced to twenty. Now, as even the common account of the
war with Porsenna describes the Romans as giving up to the Veientines
a portion of territory formerly conquered from them, it becomes a very
probable conjecture that the Etruscans, soon after the expulsion of the
kings, recovered all the country which the kings had taken from them;
and that this was so considerable in extent, that by its loss the actual
territory of the Roman people was reduced by one-third from what it had
been before.
It may thus be considered certain that Rome under its last kings was
the seat of a great monarchy, extending over the whole of Latium on the
one side, and possessing some considerable territory in Etruria on the
other. But how this dominion was gained it is vain to inquire. There
are accounts which represent all the three last kings of Rome, Servius
Tullius no less than the two Tarquins, as of Etruscan origin. Without
attempting to make out their history as individuals, it is probable that
the later kings were either by birth or by long intercourse closely
connected with Etruria, inasmuch as at some early period of the Roman
history the religion and usages of the Etruscans gave a deep and lasting
colouring to those of Rome; and yet it could not have been at the very
origin of the Roman people, as the Etruscan language has left no traces
of itself in the Latin; whereas if the Romans had been in part of
Etruscan origin, their language, no less than their institutions, would
have contained some Etruscan elements.
The Etruscan influence, however introduced, produced some effects that
were lasting, and others that were only temporary; it affected the
religion of Rome, down to the very final extinction of paganism; and
the state of the Roman magistrates, their lictors, their ivory chairs,
and their triumphal robes, are all said to have been derived from
Etruria. A temporary effect of Etruscan influence may perhaps be traced
in the overflow of the free constitution ascribed to Servius Tullius,
in the degradation of the Roman commons under the last king, and in the
endeavours of the patricians to keep them so degraded during all the
first periods of the commonwealth. It is well known that the government
in the cities of Etruria was an exclusive aristocracy, and that the
commons, if in so wretched a condition they may be called by that
honourable name, were like the mass of the people amongst the Slavonic
nations, the mere serfs or slaves of the nobility. This is a marked
distinction between the Etruscans, and the Sabine and Latin nations of
Italy; and, as in the constitution of Servius Tullius a Latin spirit is
discernible, so the tyranny which, whether in the shape of a monarchy or
an aristocracy, suspended that constitution for nearly two centuries,
tended certainly to make Rome resemble the cities of Etruria, and may
possibly be traced originally to that same revolution which expelled the
Sabine gods from the Capitol, and changed forever the simple religion of
the infancy of Rome.
RELIGION
It is a remarkable story that towards the end of the sixth century of
Rome, the religious books of Numa were accidentally brought to light
by the discovery of his tomb under the Janiculum. They were read by A.
Petillius, the prætor urbanus, and by him ordered to be burned in the
comitium, because their contents tended to overthrow the religious rites
then observed in Rome. We cannot but connect with this story what is
told of Tarquinius the elder, how he cleared away the holy places of the
Sabine gods from the Capitoline Hill, to make room for his new temple;
and the statement which Augustine quotes from Varro, and which is found
also in Plutarch, that during the first hundred and seventy years after
the foundation of the city, the Romans had no images of their gods.
All these accounts represent a change effected in the Roman religion; and
the term of one hundred and seventy years, given by Varro and Plutarch,
fixes this change to the reigns of the later kings. It is said also that
Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, the three deities to whom the Capitoline
temple was dedicated, were the very powers whose worship, according to
the Etruscan religion, was essential to every city; there could be no
city without three gates duly consecrated, and three temples to these
divinities. But here again we gain a glimpse of something real, but
cannot make it out distinctly.
Images of the gods belong rather to the religion of the Greeks than of
the Etruscans; and the Greek mythology, as well as Grecian art, had
been familiar in the southern Etruscan cities from a very early period,
whether derived from the Tyrrhenians, or borrowed directly from Hellas
or the Hellenic colonies. Grecian deities and Greek ceremonies may have
been introduced, in part, along with such as were purely Etruscan. But
the science of the haruspices, and especially the attention to signs in
the sky, to thunder and lightning, seems to have been conducted according
to the Etruscan ritual; perhaps also from the same source came that
belief in the punishment of the wicked after death, to which Polybius
ascribes so strong a moral influence over the minds of the Romans, even
in his own days. And Etruscan rites and ordinances must have been widely
prevalent in the Roman commonwealth, when, as some writers asserted, the
Roman nobility were taught habitually the Etruscan language, and when the
senate provided by a special decree for the perpetual cultivation of the
Etruscan discipline by young men of the highest nobility in Etruria; lest
a science so important to the commonwealth should be corrupted by falling
into the hands of low and mercenary persons.
CONSTITUTION
Nothing is more familiar to our ears than the name of the classes and
centuries of Servius Tullius; nothing is more difficult, even after the
immortal labour of Niebuhr,[c] than to answer all the questions which
naturally arise connected with this part of the Roman history. But first
of all, in considering the changes effected in the Roman constitution
during the later period of the monarchy, we find another threefold
division of them presenting itself. We have, first, the enlargement
of the older constitution, on the same principles, in the addition to
the number of senators and of the centuries of the knights, commonly
ascribed to Tarquinius Priscus. Second, we have the establishment of
a new constitution on different principles, in the famous classes and
centuries of Servius Tullius. And, third, we have the overthrow, to
speak generally, of this new constitution, and the return to the older
state of things, modified by the great increase of the king’s power, in
the revolution effected by Tarquinius Superbus, and in his subsequent
despotism.
The old constitution was enlarged upon the same principles, in the
increase of the number of senators, and of the centuries of the
knights. It has been already shown that the older constitution was an
oligarchy, as far as the clients and commons were concerned; it is no
less true, that it was democratical, as far as regarded the relations
of the citizens, or members of the houses, to each other. Both these
characters, with a slight modification, were preserved in the changes
made by Tarquinius Priscus. He doubled, it is said, the actual number of
senators, or rather of patrician houses; which involved a corresponding
increase in the numbers of the senate; but the houses thus ennobled, to
use a modern term, were distinguished from the old by the title of the
“lesser houses”; and their senators did not vote till after the senators
of the greater houses.
[Illustration: A VESTAL VIRGIN]
According to the same system, the king proposed to double the number
of the tribes, that is, to divide his newly created houses into three
tribes, to stand beside the three tribes of the old houses, the
Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres. Now as the military divisions of the old
commonwealths went along with the civil divisions, the tribes of the
commonwealth were the centuries of the army; and if three new tribes were
added, it involved also the addition of three new centuries of knights or
horsemen; and it is in this form that the proposed change is represented
in the common stories. But here it is said that the interest of the old
citizens, taking the shape of a religious objection, was strong enough
to force the king to modify his project. No new tribes were created, and
consequently no new centuries; but the new houses were enrolled in the
three old centuries, so as to form a second division in each, and thus to
continue inferior in dignity to the old houses in every relation of the
commonwealth. It may be fairly supposed, that these second centuries in
the army were also second tribes and second curiæ in the civil divisions
of the state; and that the members of the new houses voted after those of
the old ones no less in the great council, the comitia of the curiæ, than
in the smaller council of the senate.
The causes which led to this enlargement of the old constitution may be
readily conceived. Whether Tarquinius was a Latin or an Etruscan, all
the stories agree in representing him as a foreigner, who gained the
throne by his wealth and personal reputation. The mere growth of the
Roman state would, in the natural course of things, have multiplied new
families, which had risen to wealth, and were in their former country
of noble blood; but which were excluded from the curiæ, that is, from
the rights of citizenship at Rome; the time was come to open to them
the doors of the commonwealth; and a foreign king, ambitious of adding
to the strength of his kingdom, if it were but for the sake of his own
greatness, was not likely to refuse or put off the opportunity. Beyond
this we are involved in endless disputes and difficulties; who the
Luceres were, and why Tarquinius raised them to a level with the old
tribes, we never can determine.
That there were only four vestal virgins before, and that Tarquinius
made them six, would certainly seem to show, that a third part of the
state had hitherto been below the other two-thirds, at least in matters
of religion; for it was always acknowledged that the six vestal virgins
represented the three tribes of the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, two for
each tribe. But in the additions made to the senate and to the centuries,
the new citizens must have been more than a third of the old ones; and
indeed here the story supposes that in military matters, at any rate,
the Luceres were already on an equality with the Ramnes and Tities. It
is enough therefore to say, that there had arisen at Rome so great a
number of distinguished families, of whatever origin, or from whatever
causes, that an extension of the rights of citizenship became natural
and almost necessary: but as these were still only a small part of the
whole population, the change went no further than to admit them into the
aristocracy; leaving the character and privileges of the aristocracy
itself, with regard to the mass of the population, precisely the same as
they had been before.
But a far greater change was effected soon afterwards; no less than the
establishment of a new constitution, on totally different principles.
This constitution is no doubt historical, however uncertain may be the
accounts which relate to its reputed author. “The good king Servius and
his just laws,” were the objects of the same fond regret amongst the
Roman commons, when suffering under the tyranny of the aristocracy, as
the laws of the good king Edward the Confessor amongst the English after
the Norman conquest; and imagination magnified, perhaps, the merit of
the one no less than of the other: yet the constitution of Servius was a
great work, and well deserves to be examined and explained. Servius, like
Tarquinius, is represented as a foreigner, and is said also, like him, to
have ascended the throne to the exclusion of the sons of the late king.
According to the account which Livy[d] followed, he was acknowledged by
the senate, but not by the people; and this, which seemed contradictory
so long as the people, populus, and the commons, plebs, were confounded
together, is in itself consistent and probable, when it is understood
that the people, who would not acknowledge Servius, were the houses
assembled in their great council of the curiæ, and that these were likely
to be far less manageable by the king whom they disliked, than the
smaller council of their representatives assembled in the senate. Now
supposing that the king, whoever he may have been, was unwelcome to what
was then the people, that is, to the only body of men who enjoyed civil
rights, it was absolutely necessary for him, unless he would maintain
his power as a mere tyrant, through the help of a foreign paid guard, to
create a new and different people out of the large mass of inhabitants
of Rome who had no political existence, but who were free, and in many
instances wealthy and of noble origin; who therefore, although now
without rights, were in every respect well fitted to receive them.
The principle of an aristocracy is equality within its own body,
ascendency over all the rest of the community. Opposed to this is the
system, which, rejecting these extremes of equality and inequality,
subjects no part of the community to another, but gives a portion of
power to all; not an equal portion however, but one graduated according
to a certain standard, which standard has generally been property.
Accordingly, this system has both to do away with distinctions and to
create them; to do away, as it has generally happened, with distinctions
of birth, and to create distinctions of property. Thus at Rome, in the
first instance, the tribes or divisions of the people took a different
form.
The old three tribes of Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, had been divisions
of birth, real or supposed; each was made up of the houses of the curiæ,
and no man could belong to the tribe without first belonging to a curia,
and to a house; nor could any stranger become a member of a house except
by the rite of adoption, by which he was made as one of the same race,
and therefore a lawful worshipper of the same gods. Each of these tribes
had its portion of the Ager Romanus, the old territory of Rome. But now,
as many others had become Romans in the course of time, without belonging
to either of these three tribes, that is, had come to live under the
Roman kings, many in Rome itself, and had received grants of land from
the kings beyond the limits of the old Ager Romanus, a new division was
made including all these; and the whole city and territory of Rome,
except the Capitol, were divided into thirty tribes, four for the city,
and twenty-six for the country, containing all the Romans who were not
members of the houses, and classing them according to the local situation
of their property. These thirty tribes corresponded to the thirty curiæ
of the houses; for the houses were used to assemble, not in a threefold
division, according to their tribes, but divided into thirty, according
to their curiæ: and the commons were to meet and settle all their own
affairs in the assembly of their tribes, as the houses met and settled
theirs in the assembly of their curiæ.
Thus then there were two bodies existing alongside of each other,
analogous to the House of Lords and the House of Commons of England’s
ancient constitution, two estates distinct from and independent of
each other, but with no means as yet provided for converting them into
states-general or a parliament. Nor could they have acted together as
jointly legislating for the whole nation; for the curiæ still regarded
themselves as forming exclusively the Roman people, and would not allow
the commons, as such, to claim any part in the highest acts of national
sovereignty.[13] There was one relation, however, in which the people
and the commons felt that they belonged to one common country, in which
they were accustomed to act together, and in which therefore it was
practicable to unite them into one great body. This was when they marched
out to war; then, if not equally citizens of Rome, they felt that they
were alike Romans.
It has ever been the case, that the distinctions of peace vanish amidst
the dangers of war; arms and courage, and brotherhood in perils, confer
of necessity power and dignity. Thus we hear of armies on their return
home from war stopping before they entered the city walls to try, in
their military character, all offences or cases of misconduct which had
occurred since they had taken the field: whereas when once they had
entered the walls, civil relations were reassumed, and all trials were
conducted according to other forms, and before other judges. This will
explain the peculiar constitution of the comitia of centuries, which
was a device for uniting the people and the commons into a national and
sovereign assembly in their capacity of soldiers, without shocking those
prejudices which as yet placed a barrier between them as soon as they
returned to the relations of peace.
THE ORGANISATION OF THE ARMY
But in order to do this with effect, and to secure in this great assembly
a preponderance to the commons, a change in the military organisation
and tactics of the army became indispensable. In all aristocracies in an
early stage of society, the ruling order or class has fought on horseback
or in chariots and their subjects or dependents have fought on foot.
The cavalry service under these circumstances has been cultivated, that
of the infantry neglected; the mounted noble has been well armed and
carefully trained in warlike exercises, whilst his followers on foot have
been ill armed and ill disciplined, and quite incapable of acting with
equal effect. The first great step then towards raising the importance
of the infantry, or in other words, of the commons of a state, was to
train them to resist cavalry, to form them into thick masses instead of
a thin extended line, to arm them with the pike instead of the sword or
the javelin. Thus the phalanx order of battle was one of the earliest
improvements in the art of war; and at the time we are now speaking of,
this order was in general use in Greece, and must have been well known,
if only through the Greek colonies, in Italy also. Its introduction into
the Roman army would be sure to make the infantry from henceforward
more important than the cavalry; that is, it would enable the commons
to assert a greater right in Rome than could be claimed by the houses,
inasmuch as they could render better service. Again, the phalanx order of
battle furnished a ready means for giving importance to a great number of
the less wealthy commons, who could not supply themselves with complete
armour; while on the other hand it suggested a natural distinction
between them and their richer fellows, and thus established property as
the standard of political power, the only one which can in the outset
compete effectually with the more aristocratical standard of birth;
although in a later stage of society it becomes itself aristocratical,
unless it be duly tempered by the mixture of a third standard, education
and intelligence. In a deep phalanx, the foremost ranks needed to be
completely armed, but those in the rear could neither reach or be reached
by the enemy, and only served to add weight to the charge of the whole
body. These points being remembered, we may now proceed to the details of
the great comitia of Servius.
The traditional reformer, Servius Tullius, found the knights of Rome
divided into three centuries of horsemen, each of which, in consequence
of the accession to its numbers made by the last king, contained within
itself two centuries, a first and a second. The old citizens, anxious in
all things to keep up the old form of the state, had then prevented what
were really six centuries from being acknowledged as such in name; but
the present change extended to the name as well as the reality; and the
three double centuries of the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, became now the
six votes (_sex suffragia_) of the new united assembly. To these, which
contained all the members of the houses, there were now added twelve new
centuries of knights,[14] formed, as usual in the Greek states, from the
richest members of the community, continuing, like the centuries below
them, to belong to the thirty tribes of the commons.
_Classes of Foot-soldiers_
It remained to organise the foot-soldiers of the state. Accordingly, all
those of the commons whose property was sufficient to qualify them for
serving even in the hindmost ranks of the phalanx, were divided into
four classes. Of these the first class contained all whose property
amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand pounds’ weight of copper.
The soldiers of this class were required to provide themselves with the
complete arms used in the front ranks of the phalanx; the greaves, the
coat of mail, the helmet, and the round shield, all of brass; the sword,
and the peculiar weapon of the heavy-armed infantry, the long pike. And
as these were to bear the brunt of every battle, and were the flower of
the state’s soldiers, so their weight in the great military assembly was
to be in proportion; they formed eighty centuries; forty of younger men,
between the ages of fifteen and forty-five years complete; and forty of
elders, between forty-five and sixty: the first to serve in the field,
the second to defend the city. The second class contained those whose
property fell short of 100,000 pounds of copper, and exceeded or amounted
to 75,000 pounds. They formed twenty centuries, ten of younger men, and
ten of elders; and they were allowed to dispense with the coat of mail,
and to bear the large oblong wooden shield called scutum, instead of
the round brazen shield, clipeus, of the first ranks of the phalanx.
The third class contained a like number of centuries, equally divided
into those of the younger men and elders; its qualification was property
between 50,000 pounds of copper, and 75,000 pounds; and the soldiers of
this class were allowed to lay aside the greaves as well as the coat
of mail. The fourth class again contained twenty centuries; the lowest
point of its qualification was 25,000 pounds of copper, and its soldiers
were required to provide no defensive armour, but to go to battle merely
with the pike and a javelin. These four classes composed the phalanx;
but a fifth class divided into thirty centuries, and consisting of those
whose property was between 25,000 pounds of copper and 12,500, formed the
regular light-armed infantry of the army, and were required to provide
themselves with darts and slings.[15]
The poorest citizens, whose property fell short of 12,500 pounds, were
considered in a manner as supernumeraries in this division. Those who
had more than 1,500 pounds of copper, were still reckoned amongst the
taxpayers (_assidui_), and were formed into two centuries, called the
accensi and velati. They followed the army, but without bearing arms,
being only required to step into the places of those who fell; and in
the meantime acting as orderlies to the centurions and decurions. Below
these came one century of the proletarii, whose property was between
1,500 pounds and 375 pounds. These paid no taxes, and in ordinary times
had no military duty; but on great emergencies arms were furnished them
by the government, and they were called out as an extraordinary levy. One
century more included all whose property was less than 375 pounds, and
who were called capite censi; and from these last no military service was
at any time required, as we are told, till a late period of the republic.
Three centuries of a different character from all the rest remain to
be described, centuries defined not by the amount of their property,
but by the nature of their occupation; those of carpenters and smiths
(_fabrorum_); of hornblowers (_cornicines_); and of trumpeters
(_tubicines_), or, as Cicero calls them (_liticines_). The first of these
was attached to the centuries of the first class, the other two to the
fourth. The nature of their callings so connected them with the service
of the army, that this peculiar distinction was granted to them.[16]
The position held in the comitia by the patricians’ clients is involved
in great obscurity. We know that they had votes, and probably they must
have been enrolled in the classes according to the amount of their
property, without reference to its nature: at the same time Niebuhr[c]
thinks that they did not serve in the regular infantry along with the
plebeians. It would seem from the story of the three hundred Fabii, and
from the adventures related of Caius Marcius, that the clients followed
their lords to the field at their bidding, and formed a sort of feudal
force quite distinct from the national army of the commons, like the
retainers of the nobles in the Middle Ages, as distinguished from the
free burghers of the cities.
Such is the account transmitted to us of the constitution of the comitia
of centuries. As their whole organisation was military, so they were
accustomed to meet without the city, in the Field of Mars; they were
called together, not by lictors, like the comitia of the curiæ, but by
the blast of the horn: and their very name was “the Army of the City,”
_Exercitus Urbanus_.
It is quite plain that this constitution tended to give the chief
power in the state to the body of the commons, and especially to the
richer class among them, who fought in the first ranks of the phalanx.
For wherever there is a well-armed and well-disciplined infantry, it
constitutes the main force of an army; and it is a true observation of
Aristotle, that in the ancient commonwealths the chief power was apt to
be possessed by that class of the people whose military services were
most important: thus when the navy of Athens became its great support
and strength, the government became democratical; because the ships were
manned by the poorer classes.
POPULAR INSTITUTIONS
Other good and popular institutions were ascribed to the reign of
Servius. As he had made the commons an order in the state, so he gave
them judges out of their own body to try all civil causes; whereas
before they had no jurisdiction, but referred all their suits either to
the king or to the houses. These judges were, as Niebuhr[c] thinks, the
_centumviri_, the hundred men of a later period, elected three from each
tribe, so that in the time of Servius their number would probably have
been ninety.
To give a further organisation to the commons, he is said also to have
instituted the festivals called Paganalia and Compitalia. In the tribes
in the country, many strongholds on high ground, pagi, had been fixed
upon as general refuges for the inhabitants and their cattle in case
of invasion. Here they all met once a year to keep festival, and every
man, woman, and child paid on these occasions a certain sum, which being
collected by the priests gave the amount of the whole population. And
for the same purpose, every one living in the city paid a certain sum at
the temple of Juno Lucina for every birth in his family, another sum at
the temple of Venus Libitina for every death, and a third at the temple
of Youth for every son who came to the age of military service. The
Compitalia in the city answered to the Paganalia in the country, and were
yearly festivals in honour of the Lares or guardian spirits, celebrated
at all the compita, or places where several streets met.
Other laws and measures are ascribed to Servius, which seem to be the
fond invention of a later period, when the commons, suffering under a
cruel and unjust system, and wishing its overthrow, gladly believed that
the deliverance which they longed for had been once given them by their
good king, and that they were only reclaiming old rights, not demanding
new ones. Servius, it is said, drove out the patricians from their unjust
occupation of the public land, and ordered that the property only, and
not the person, of a debtor should be liable for the payment of his debt.
Further, to complete the notion of a patriot king, it was said that he
had drawn out a scheme of popular government, by which two magistrates,
chosen every year, were to exercise the supreme power, and that he
himself proposed to lay down his kingly rule to make way for them. It
can hardly be doubted that these two magistrates were intended to be
chosen the one from the houses and the other from the commons, to be the
representatives of their respective orders.
[Illustration: RUINS OF A TEMPLE OF SATURN, ROME]
But the following tyranny swept away the institutions of Servius, and
much more prevented the growth of that society for which alone his
institutions were fitted. No man can tell how much of the story of
the murder of the old king and of the impiety of the wicked Tullia
is historical; but it is certain that the houses, or rather a strong
faction among them, supported Tarquinius in his usurpation: nor can we
doubt the statement that the aristocratical brotherhoods or societies
served him more zealously than the legal assembly of the curiæ; because
these societies are ever to be met with in the history of the ancient
commonwealths, as pledged to one another for the interests of their
order, and ready to support those interests by any crime. Like Sulla
in after-times, he crushed the liberties of the commons, doing away
with the laws of Servius, and, as we are told, destroying the tables
on which they were written; abolishing the whole system of the census,
and consequently the arrangement of the classes, and with them the
organisation of the phalanx; and forbidding even the religious meetings
of the Paganalia and Compitalia, in order to undo all that had been done
to give the commons strength and union.
Further it is expressly said by Dionysius[e] that he formed his military
force out of a small portion of the people, and employed the great
bulk of them in servile works, in the building of the circus and the
Capitoline temple, and the completion of the great drain or cloaca;
so that in his wars, his army consisted of his allies, the Latins and
Hernicans, in a much greater proportion than of Romans. His enmity to
the commons was all in the spirit of Sulla; and the members of the
aristocratical societies, who were his ready tools in every act of
confiscation, or legal murder, or mere assassination, were faithfully
represented by the agents of Sulla’s proscription, by L. Catilina and his
patrician associates. But in what followed, Tarquinius showed himself,
like Critias or Appius Claudius, a mere vulgar tyrant, who preferred
himself to his order, when the two came into competition, and far
inferior to Sulla, the most sincere of aristocrats, who, having secured
the ascendency of his order, was content to resign his own personal
power, who was followed therefore by the noblest as well as by the vilest
of his countrymen, by Pompey and Catulus no less than by Catiline.
Thus Tarquinius became hated by all that was good and noble amongst the
houses, as well as by the commons; and both orders cordially joined to
effect his overthrow. But the evil of his tyranny survived him; it was
not so easy to restore what he had destroyed as to expel him and his
family; the commons no longer stood beside the patricians as an equal
order, free, wealthy, well armed, and well organised; they were now poor,
ill armed, and with no bonds of union; they therefore naturally sank
beneath the power of the nobility, and the revolution which drove out the
Tarquins established at Rome not a free commonwealth, but on the other
hand an exclusive and tyrannical aristocracy.
THE WEALTH OF THE ROMANS AND ITS SOURCES
Niebuhr[c] has almost exhausted the subject of the Roman copper money.
He has shown its originally low value, owing to the great abundance
of the metal; that as it afterwards became scarce, a reduction in the
weight of the coin followed naturally, not as a fraudulent depreciation
of it, but because a small portion of it was now as valuable as a large
mass had been before. The plenty of copper in early times is owing to
this, that where it is found, it exists often in immense quantities, and
even in large masses of pure metal on the surface of the soil. Thus the
Copper Indians of North America found it in such abundance on their hills
that they used it for all domestic purposes; but the supply thus easily
obtained soon became exhausted.
The small value of copper at Rome is shown not only by the size of the
coins, they having been at first a full pound in weight, but also by the
price of the war-horse, according to the regulation of Servius Tullius,
namely ten thousand pounds of copper.[17] This statement, connected as it
is with the other details of the census, seems original and authentic;
nor considering the great abundance of cattle, and other circumstances,
is it inconsistent with the account in Plutarch’s life of Publicola, that
an ox in the beginning of the commonwealth, was worth one hundred oboli,
and a sheep worth ten; nor with the provisions of the Aternian law, which
fixed the price of the one at one hundred asses and the other at ten.
The sources of wealth amongst the Romans, under their later kings,
were agriculture, and also, in a large proportion, foreign commerce.
Agriculture, indeed, strictly speaking, could scarcely be called a
source of wealth; for the portions of land assigned to each man, even
if from the beginning they were as much as seven jugera, were not large
enough to allow of the growth of much superfluous produce. The _ager
publicus_, or undivided public land, was indeed of considerable extent,
and this as being enjoyed exclusively by the patricians might have been
a source of great profit. But in the earliest times it seems probable
that the greatest part of this land was kept as pasture; and only the
small portions of two jugera, allotted by the houses to their clients,
to be held during pleasure, were appropriated to tillage.[18] The low
prices of sheep and oxen show that cattle must have been abundant; the
earliest revenue according to Pliny[g] was derived from pasture; that is,
the patricians paid so much to the state for their enjoyment of the ager
publicus, which was left unenclosed as pasture ground; and all accounts
speak of the great quantities of cattle reared in Italy from time
immemorial. Cattle then may have been a source of wealth; but commerce
must have been so in a still greater degree.
The early foundation of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, ascribed to
Ancus Marcius, could have had no object, unless the Romans had been
engaged in foreign trade; and the treaty with Carthage, already alluded
to, proves the same thing directly and undeniably. In this treaty the
Romans are allowed to trade with Sardinia, with Sicily, and with Africa
westward of the Fair Headland, that is, with Carthage itself, and all the
coast westward to the Pillars of Hercules; and it is much more according
to the common course of things that this treaty should have been made to
regulate a trade already in activity, than to call it for the first time
into existence. By this commerce great fortunes were sure to be made,
because there were as yet so many new markets open to the enterprising
trader, and none perhaps where the demand for his goods had been so
steadily and abundantly supplied as to destroy the profit of his traffic.
But although much wealth must thus have been brought into Rome, it is
another question how widely it was distributed. Was foreign trade open to
every Roman, or was it confined to the patricians and their clients, and
in a still larger proportion to the king? The king had large domains of
his own, partly arable, partly pasture, and partly planted with vines and
olives; hence he was in a condition to traffic with foreign countries,
and much of the Roman commerce was probably carried on by the government
for its own direct benefit, as was the case in Judea in the reign of
Solomon. The patricians also, we may be sure, exported, like the Russian
nobility, the skins and wool of the numerous herds and flocks which they
fed upon their public land, and were the owners of trading ships, as it
was not till three centuries afterwards that a law was passed with the
avowed object of restraining senators, a term then become equivalent with
patricians, from possessing ships of large burden.
All these classes then might, and probably did, become wealthy; but
it may be doubted whether the plebeian landholders had the same
opportunities open to them. Agriculture was to them the business of
their lives; if their estates were ill cultivated, they were liable to be
degraded from their order.
Beyond this we have scarcely the means of proceeding. Setting aside the
tyranny ascribed to Tarquinius, and remembering that it was his policy to
deprive the commons of their lately acquired citizenship, and to treat
them like subjects rather than members of the state, the picture given
of the wealth and greatness of Judea under Solomon may convey some idea
of the state of Rome under its later kings. Powerful amongst surrounding
nations, exposed to no hostile invasions, with a flourishing agriculture
and an active commerce, the country was great and prosperous; and the
king was enabled to execute public works of the highest magnificence,
and to invest himself with a splendour unknown in the earlier times
of the monarchy. The last Tarquinius was guilty of individual acts of
oppression, we may be sure, towards the patricians no less than the
plebeians; but it was these last whom he laboured on system to depress
and degrade, and whom he employed, as Solomon did the Canaanites, in all
the servile and laborious part of his undertakings. Still the citizens
or patricians themselves found that the splendour of his government had
its burdens for them also; as the great majority of the Israelites, amid
all the peace and prosperity of Solomon’s reign, and although exempted
from all servile labour, and serving only in honourable offices, yet
complained that they had endured a grievous yoke, and took the first
opportunity to relieve themselves from it by banishing the house of
Solomon from among them forever.[b]
ROMAN EDUCATION
The aim of education in the family and in public life was to repress
the freedom of the individual in the interest of the state, to make a
nation of brave warriors and of dutiful citizens. The highest results of
this stern training were reached in the Samnite wars,--a period known
thereafter as the golden age of virtue and of heroism. A citizen of this
time was, in the highest degree, obedient to authority, pious, frugal,
and generally honest. But though he was willing to sacrifice his life
for the good of the state, he was equally ready to enrich himself at
the expense of his neighbours; the wealthy did not hesitate to sell the
poor into slavery for debt, till they were forbidden to do so by law.
Their hard, stern souls knew neither generosity nor mercy. Severe toward
the members of their family, cruel in the treatment of slaves, and in
their business transactions shrewd and grasping, the Romans of the time,
however admirable for their heroic virtues, were narrow, harsh, and
unlovable. Greed was one of their strongest motives for conquest. Not
for glory,--much less for the good of their neighbours,--did they extend
their power over Italy; it was rather that more of the peasants might be
supplied with farms and that the nobles might be given larger tracts of
the public land and a greater number of places of honour and of profit to
use and to enjoy.
As long as they remained poor and under strict discipline, they were
moral. In the following period they were to gain greater freedom from the
control of their magistrates and, at the same time, power and wealth.
These new conditions were to put their virtue and even their government
to the severest test.[i]
MORALS AND POLITICS OF THE AGE
It is difficult to form a clear idea of the moral character of the Roman
people under its kings, because we cannot be sure that the pictures
handed down to us of that period were not copied from the manners of a
later time, and thus represent in fact the state of the Commonwealth
rather than that of the Monarchy. Thus the simple habits of Lucretia seem
copied from the matrons of the republic in the time of its early poverty,
and cannot safely be ascribed to the princesses of the magnificent house
of the Tarquinii. Again, we can scarcely tell how far we may carry back
the origin of those characteristic points in the later Roman manners, the
absolute authority possessed by the head of a family over his wife and
children. But it is probable that they are of great antiquity; for the
absolute power of a father over his sons extended only to those who were
born in that peculiar form of marriage called connubium, a connection
which anciently could only subsist between persons of the same order,
and which was solemnised by a peculiar ceremony called _confarreatio_;
a ceremony so sacred, that a marriage thus contracted could only be
dissolved by certain unwonted and horrible rites, purposely ordered as it
seems to discourage the practice of divorce.
[Illustration: ROMAN YOUTH
(From a statue)]
All these usages point to a very great antiquity, and indicate the early
severity of the Roman domestic manners, and the habits of obedience which
every citizen learned under his father’s roof. This severity, however,
did not imply an equal purity; connubium could only be contracted with
one wife, but the practice of concubinage was tolerated, although the
condition of a concubine is marked as disreputable by a law so old as
to be ascribed to Numa. And the indecency of some parts of the ancient
religious worship, and the licence allowed at particular festivals, at
marriages, and in the festal meetings of men amongst themselves, belong
so much to an agricultural people, as well as to human nature in general,
that these too may be safely presumed to be co-eval with the very origin
of the Roman nation.
But the most striking point in the character of the Romans, and that
which has so permanently influenced the condition of mankind, was their
love of institutions and of order, their reverence for law, their habit
of considering the individual as living only for that society of which he
was a member. This character, the very opposite to that of the barbarian
and the savage, belongs apparently to that race to which the Greeks and
Romans both belong, by whatever name, Pelasgian, Tyrrhenian, or Sicelian,
we choose to distinguish it. It has indeed marked the Teutonic race, but
in a less degree: the Celts have been strangers to it, nor do we find it
developed amongst the nations of Asia: but it strongly characterises the
Dorians in Greece, and the Romans; nor is it wanting among the Ionians,
although in these last it was modified by that individual freedom which
arose naturally from the surpassing vigour of their intellect, the
destined well-spring of wisdom to the whole world. But in Rome, as at
Lacedæmon, as there was much less activity of reason, so the tendency to
regulate and to organise was much more predominant.
Accordingly we find traces of this character in the very earliest
traditions of Roman story. Even in Romulus, his institutions go hand
in hand with his deeds in arms; and the wrath of the gods darkened the
last years of the warlike Tullus, because he had neglected the rites
and ordinances established by Numa. Numa and Servius, whose memory
was cherished most fondly, were known only as lawgivers; Ancus, like
Romulus, is the founder of institutions as well as the conqueror, and one
particular branch of law is ascribed to him as its author, the ceremonial
to be observed before going to war. The two Tarquinii are represented as
of foreign origin, and the character of their reigns is foreign also.
They are great warriors and great kings; they extend the dominion of
Rome; they enlarge the city and embellish it with great and magnificent
works; but they add nothing to its institutions; and it was the crime of
the last Tarquinius to undo those good regulations which his predecessor
had appointed.
THE FINE ARTS
It is allowed, on all hands, that the works of art executed in Rome
under the later kings, whether architecture or sculpture, were of
Etruscan origin; but what is meant by “Etruscan,” and how far Etruscan
art was itself derived from Greece, are questions which have been warmly
disputed. The statue of Jupiter in the Capitol, and the four-horsed
chariot on the summit of the temple, together with most of the statues of
the gods, were at this period wrought in clay; bronze was not generally
employed till a later age. There is no mention of any paintings in Rome
itself earlier than the time of the commonwealth; but Pliny[g] speaks
of some frescoes at Ardea and at Cære, which he considered to be older
than the very foundation of the city, and which in his own age preserved
the freshness of their colouring, and in his judgment were works of
remarkable merit. The Capitoline temple itself was built nearly in the
form of a square, each side being about two hundred feet in length; its
front faced southwards, towards the Forum and the Palatine, and had a
triple row of pillars before it, while a double row enclosed the sides of
the temple. These, it is probable, were not of marble, but made either of
the stone of Rome itself, like the cloaca, or possibly from the quarries
of Gabii or Alba.
Of the Roman mind under the kings, Cicero knew no more than we do. He
had seen no works of that period, whether of historians or of poets;
he had never heard the name of a single individual whose genius had
made it famous, and had preserved its memory together with his own. A
certain number of laws ascribed to the kings, and preserved, whether
on tables of wood or brass in the Capitol, or in the collection of the
jurist Papirius, were almost the sole monuments which could illustrate
the spirit of the early ages of the Roman people. But even these, to
judge from the few extracts with which we are acquainted, must have been
modernised in their language; for the Latin of a law ascribed to Servius
Tullius is perfectly intelligible, and not more ancient in its forms than
that of the fifth century of Rome; whereas the few genuine monuments
of the earliest times, the hymns of the Salii, and of the Brotherhood
of Husbandry, _Fratres Arvales_, required to be interpreted to the
Romans of Cicero’s time like a foreign language; and of the hymn of the
Fratres Arvales we can ourselves judge, for it has been accidentally
preserved to our days, and the meaning of nearly half of it is only to
be guessed at. This agrees with what Polybius says of the language of
the treaty between Rome and Carthage, concluded in the first year of
the commonwealth; it was so unlike the Latin of his own time, the end
of the sixth and beginning of the seventh century of Rome, that even
those who understood it best found some things in it which with their
best attention they could scarcely explain. Thus, although verses were
undoubtedly made and sung in the times of the kings, at funerals and
at feasts, in commemoration of the worthy deeds of the noblest of the
Romans and although some of the actual stories of the kings may perhaps
have come down from this source, yet it does not appear that they were
ever written; and thus they were altered from one generation to another,
nor can any one tell at what time they attained to their present shape.
Traces of a period much later than that of the kings may be discerned in
them; and we see no reason to differ from the opinion of Niebuhr,[c] who
thinks that as we now have them they are not earlier than the restoration
of the city after the invasion of the Gauls.
If this be so, there rests a veil not to be removed, not only on the
particular history of the early Romans, but on that which we should much
more desire to know--and which in the case of the Greeks stands out in
such full light--the nature and power of their genius, what they thought,
what they hated, and what they loved.[b]
FOOTNOTES
[10] [Cf. page 51, note 1.]
[11] [According to Meyer,[h] Botsford,[i] and others, however, the gens
was not primitive, but a growth of the late regal and early republican
periods; the city developing from the canton, a group of villages with a
common place of refuge on a hill-top.]
[12] [Though this view of the status of the social ranks is that of
the majority of modern authorities, certain prominent historians like
Meyer[h] are returning to the theory of the ancient writers--that the
clients and the plebeians were citizens from the beginning, with the
right of voting in the curiæ, and that the patricians were simply the
nobles.]
[13] [Cf. page 104, note.]
[14] [According to some writers this was not done till a century later.]
[15] [Doubtless in the original organisation the classes were based not
upon the money value of property but upon the amount of land possessed
by the citizens, the value being later represented by its money
equivalent. It is also asserted that the first three classes formed the
phalanx of heavy-armed infantry, whereas the last two classes composed
the light-armed force. It is asserted further that the centuriate
organisation applied only to the army in the field. Towards the end
of the regal period, then, the army in active service would consist
regularly of eighty-four centuries of infantry and six centuries of
cavalry. All scholars agree that the so-called Servian organisation was
purely military, and that the comitia centuriata gradually developed
from it. The army and the comitia were never strictly identical in
composition: cf. Soltau.[j]]
[16] [There being in public life no difference between clients and
plebeians, such stories as that of the Fabii and their clients may
indicate the survival of a primitive military organisation after the
phalanx was introduced.]
[17] [This valuation, however, originated after the coins had been
lightened.]
[18] [More probably the clients received two jugera as private,
hereditary property, while they tilled, as tenants or for hire, the
arable lands of their lord.]
[Illustration: ROMAN WRITING IMPLEMENTS
(In the British Museum)]
[Illustration]