About the year 754 B. C., at that point of Central Italy, nearly
fifteen miles from the Tuscan Sea, where the Anio joins the Tiber,
there stood on a height, called the Palatine Mount, a little village
named _Roma_, the centre of a small township, consisting probably of
5000 or 6000 inhabitants, all of them husbandmen and shepherds. This
Rome was one of the border townships of Latium, a territory of fertile
and undulating table-land extending from the Tiber to the Liris, and
from the sea-coast to the hills of the interior. The whole surface of
Latium was under diligent cultivation, and was covered with villages
similar to Rome, which together constituted what was called the Latin
nation.
Rome, we have said, was a frontier township of Latium. It was situated
precisely at that point where the territories of Latium adjoined those
of two other nations――of the Sabines, a hardy Oscan race of shepherds
inhabiting the angular district between the Anio and the Tiber; and of
the Etruscans, a remarkable people, of unknown but probably Oriental
origin, who had arrived in the north of Italy some centuries later
than the Pelasgians, and conquering all before them, whether
Pelasgians or Oscans, by the force of superior civilization, had
settled chiefly in the region between the Arnus and the Tiber,
corresponding to modern Tuscany. Between these three races――Oscans,
Pelasgians and Etruscans――either apart, or in various combinations,
all Italy, with the exception perhaps of some portions near the Alps,
was divided: the Oscan predominating in the interior; the Pelasgians
or rather Pelasgo-Oscans, along the coasts, as in Latium; and the
Etruscans in the parts above-mentioned. While the Italian peninsula
was thus occupied but by three great races or main stocks; the
political divisions or nations into which it was parceled out were so
numerous, however, that it would be scarcely possible to give a
complete list of them.
Situated so near to the Sabine and Etruscan frontiers, an intercourse,
sometimes friendly and sometimes hostile, must naturally have been
carried on between the Latins of Rome and the Sabines and Etruscans,
with whom they were in contact. A chain of events, which history
cannot now trace, but which is indicated in a poetic manner by a
number of early Roman legends, led to the incorporation of Rome with
two neighboring towns――one of them a small dependency of the
Etruscans, situated on the Cælian Hill, and probably named Lucerum;
another a Sabine village on the Quirinal Hill, called Quirium. The
Etruscans, or Etrusco-Latins as they seem rather to have been, of
Lucerum, were received on a subordinate footing; the Sabines of
Quirium on one of equality; but the joint city continued to bear its
old name of Roma. The population of this new Rome consisted,
therefore, of three tribes――the ancient Romans, who called themselves
_Ramnes_; the Sabines of Quirium, who called themselves _Tities_; and
the Etrusco-Latins of Lucerum, who were named _Luceres_.
ORIGINAL ROMAN CONSTITUTION――EARLY HISTORY UNDER THE KINGS――ORIGIN OF
THE PLEBEIANS.
With the enlargement of the population of Rome by the addition of
these new masses of citizens, a change of the constitution became of
course necessary. The following seems to have been the form ultimately
assumed:――Governed by a common sovereign, eligible by the whole
community from one of the superior tribes――the Ramnes and the
Tities――the three tribes intrusted the conduct of their affairs to a
senate composed of 200 members, 100 of whom represented the gentes of
the Ramnes, and 100 the gentes of the Tities. The Luceres as an
inferior tribe, were not represented in the senate; and their
political influence was limited to the right to vote with the other
two tribes in the general assemblies of the whole people.
In these general assemblies, or _Comitia_, as they were called, the
people voted; not individually, nor in families, nor in gentes, but in
divisions called _Curix_ or _Curies_; the _Curia_ being the tenth part
of a tribe, and including, according to the ancient system of round
numbers, ten gentes. Thus the entire Populus Romanus, or Roman people,
of this primitive time, consisted of thirty curies――ten curies of
Ramnes, ten of Tities, and ten of Luceres: the ten curies of each
tribe corresponding to 100 gentes, and the thirty curies together
making up 300 gentes. As the Luceres were an inferior tribe, their
gentes were called _Gentes Minores_, or Lesser Houses; while those of
the Ramnes and Tities were called _Gentes Majores_ or Greater Houses.
The assembly of the whole people was called the _Comitia Curiatia_, or
meeting of curies. After a measure had been matured by the king and
senate, it was submitted to the whole people in their curies, who
might accept or reject, but could not alter, what was thus proposed to
them. An appeal was also open to the curies against any sentence of
the king, or of the judges nominated by him in his capacity of supreme
justiciary. The king, moreover, was the high priest of the nation in
peace, as well as the commander-in-chief during war. The 300 gentes
furnished each a horseman, so as to constitute a body of cavalry; the
mass of the people forming the infantry. The right of assembling the
senate lay with the king, who usually convened it three times a month.
Such was ancient Rome, as it appears to the historic eye endeavoring
to penetrate the mists of the past, where at first all seems vague and
wavering. The inquirer to whom we owe the power to conceive the
condition of ancient Rome, so far as that depended on political
institutions, was the celebrated German historian Niebuhr. Not so,
however, did the Romans conceive their own early history. In all
ancient communities, it was a habit of the popular imagination, nay,
it was part of the popular religion, to trace the fortunes of the
community to some divine or semi-divine founder; whose exploits, as
well as those of his heroic successors, formed the subject of numerous
sacred legends and ballads. Now, it was part of the Roman faith that
their city had been founded at a point of time corresponding with B.
C. 754, by twin brothers of miraculous birth, called Romulus and
Remus, whose father was the war god Mars, and their mother a vestal
virgin of the line of the Alban kings, the progeny of the great Æneas.
Romulus, according to this legend, surviving his brother Remus, became
the king of the village of shepherds which he had founded on the
Palatine; and it was in his reign that those events took place which
terminated in the establishment of the triple community of the Ramnes,
Tities, and Luceres. Setting out with Romulus, the Romans traced the
history of their state through a series of legends relating to six
kings his successors, whose characters, and the lengths of their
reigns, are all duly determined. Of this traditionary succession of
seven kings, extending over a period of 245 years (B. C. 754-509),
history can recognize with certainty the existence of only the two or
three latest. It is possible, however, to elicit out of the legends a
glimmering of the actual history of the Roman state during these
imaginary reigns.
Possessed, as all our information respecting the Romans in later times
justifies us in supposing, of an unusual degree of that warlike
instinct which was so rampant among the early tenants of our globe,
the shepherd farmers of Rome were incessantly engaged in raids on
their Latin, Etruscan, and Sabine neighbors. Strong-bodied, valiant,
and persevering, as we also know them to have been, they were, on the
whole, successful in these raids; and the consequence was, a gradual
extension of their territory, particularly on the Latin side, by the
conquest of those who were weaker than themselves. After each
conquest, their custom was to deprive the conquered community of a
part of their lands, and also of their political independence,
annexing them as subjects to the Populus Romanus. The consequence was
a gradual accumulation round the original Populus, with its 300
Houses, of a subject-population, free-born, and possessing property,
but without political influence. This subject-population, the origin
of which is dated by the legends from the reign of Ancus Martius, the
fourth king from Romulus, received the name of the _Plebs_, a word
which we translate ‘common people,’ but which it would be more
correct, in reference to these very ancient times, to translate
‘conquered people.’ Besides the plebs, the Roman community received
another ingredient in the persons called _Clients_; strangers, that
is, most of them professing mechanical occupations, who, arriving in
Rome, and not belonging to a gens, were obliged, in order to secure
themselves against molestation, to attach themselves to some powerful
citizen willing to protect them, and called by them _Patronus_, or
Patron. About six centuries before Christ, therefore, the population
of the growing township of Roma may be considered as having consisted
of four classes: 1_st_, The populus, or patricians, a governing class,
consisting of a limited number of powerful families, holding
themselves aloof from the rest of the community, not intermarrying
with them, and gradually diminishing in consequence; 2_d_, The plebs,
or plebeians, a large and continually-increasing subject-population,
of the same mixed Etrusco-Sabine-Latin blood as the populus, but
domineered over by them by right of conquest; 3_d_, The clients, a
considerable class, chiefly occupied in handicraft professions in the
town, while the populus and the plebs confined themselves to the more
honorable occupation, as it was then esteemed, of agriculture; and
4_th_, The slaves or _servi_, whether belonging to patricians,
plebeians, or clients――a class who were valued along with the cattle.
The increasing numbers of the plebs, the result of fresh wars, and the
value of their services to the community, entitled them to possess,
and emboldened them to claim, some political consideration.
Accordingly, in the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth of the
legendary kings, and in whose reputed Etruscan lineage historians
fancy that they can discern a time when Etruscan influence, if not
Etruscan arms, reigned paramount in Rome, a modification of the
original constitution took place. A number of the richest plebeian
families were drafted into the populus, to supply the blanks caused by
the dying out of many of the ancient gentes of the Ramnes, Tities, and
Luceres; and at the same time the number of senators was increased to
300, by the admission of the Luceres to the same rights as the other
two tribes. Even this modification was insufficient; and in order to
do justice to the claims of the plebs, Servius Tullius, the successor
of Tarquinius, and who is gratefully celebrated in Roman history as
‘the King of the Commons,’ proposed and effected an entire renovation
of the political system of the state. His first reform consisted in
giving the plebs a regular internal organization for its own purposes,
by dividing it into thirty tribes or parishes――four for the town, and
twenty-six for the country――each provided with an officer or tribe
convener called the Tribune, as well as with a detailed machinery of
local government; and all permitted to assemble in a general meeting
called the _Comitia Tributa_, to discuss matters purely affecting the
plebs. But this was not all. To admit the plebs to a share in the
general legislative power of the community, he instituted a third
legislative body, called the _Comitia Centuriata_, in addition to the
two――the senate and the comitia curiata――already existing. The comitia
centuriata was an assembly of the whole free population of the Roman
territory――patricians, plebeians, and clients――arranged, according to
the amount of their taxable property, in five classes, which again
were subdivided into 195 bodies, called _Centuries_, each century
possessing a vote, but the centuries of the rich being much smaller
than those of the poor, so as to secure a preponderance to wealth. The
powers of the comitia centuriata were similar to those of the comitia
curiata under the former system. They had the right to elect supreme
magistrates, and to accept or reject a measure referred to them by the
king and senate. The comitia curiata, however, still continued to be
held; and a measure, even after it had passed the comitia centuriata,
had still to be approved by the curies ere it could become a law.
Notwithstanding this restriction, the constitution of Servius Tullius
was a great concession to the popular spirit, as it virtually admitted
every free individual within the Roman territory to a share in the
government.
An attempt on the part of Tarquinius Superbus, the successor of
Servius Tullius, to undo the reforms of his predecessor, and to
establish what the ancients called a tyranny, or a government of
individual will, led to the expulsion of him and his family, and to
the abolition of the kingly form of government at Rome, B. C. 509, or
in the year of the city 245. Instead of a king, two annual magistrates
called Consuls were appointed, in whom were vested all the kingly
functions, with the exception of the pontifical, for which special
functionaries were created. Otherwise, the Servian constitution
remained in full operation.
THE COMMONWEALTH TO THE GAULISH INVASION――STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE
PATRICIANS AND PLEBEIANS.
After the expulsion of the kings, the little republic had to struggle
through many difficulties arising from the attacks of the neighboring
nations, incited thereto by the Tarquinii. Ten of the twenty-six rural
parishes were torn away in the contest――a loss equivalent to a full
third part of the Roman territory. It would have required a prophetic
eye to foresee that, of all the states into which Italy was then
divided, this little struggling republic was to obtain the
preëminence. One would have been disposed to promise the supremacy of
the peninsula rather to the cultured and large-brained Etruscans,
already masters of the north of Italy; to the hardy and valiant
Samnites, who were fast overspreading the southern interior; or, most
probably of all, to the Greeks, who, after adding Sicily to the empire
of their gifted race, were rapidly establishing colonies on the
southern coasts of the peninsula. Nay, clustered round the Roman
territories there were various petty states, any one of which might
have appeared a match for Rome――the Latins, the Æquians, the Volcians,
the Hernicans, the Sabines, and the Etruscans of Veii on the right
bank of the Tiber. Who could have predicted that, bursting this
cincture of nations, the men of the Tiber would overspread the
peninsula, and, by the leavening influence of their character and
institutions, throw first it and then all Europe, into fermentation?
It required a period of 119 years (B. C. 509-390) to enable the Romans
to burst the chain of petty nations――Latins, Volscians, Vejentes,
etc.――which girdled in their strength. This was a period of almost
incessant warfare; the last glorious act of which was the siege and
capture of Veii by the hero Camillus, B. C. 395, or in the year of the
city 359. By this capture part of Etruria was added to the Roman
dominions, and the influence of the state considerably extended on all
sides. This conquest, as well as the career of victory against
Æquians, Volscians, etc., which had preceded it, was greatly
facilitated by a confederacy, offensive and defensive, which had
subsisted between the Romans and the adjacent nations of the Latins
and the Hernicans from the year of the city 268, the twenty-third year
after the expulsion of the kings, when it had been established by the
instrumentality of an able patrician named Spurius Cassius, who was
three times, in cases of difficulty, elected to the consulship. This
confederacy with two powerful nations had insured the stability of the
infant republic against all assaults.
The second consulship of Spurius Cassius (year of Rome 261, or B. C.
493) had also been remarkable as the epoch of a formidable civic
tumult――the first of that long series of struggles between the
patricians and the plebeians which constitutes the most interesting
portion of the annals of the early Commonwealth. Not long after the
expulsion of the kings, the patrician gentes had begun to show a
disposition to tamper with the Servian constitution, or at least to
prevent the plebs from obtaining more power than they already
possessed. The principal instrument by which they were able to cripple
the energies of the plebs was the operation of the law of debt. In
primitive Rome, as in other ancient states, an insolvent debtor was
liable to be seized by his creditor, and kept in chains, or made to
work as his slave. Now, such had been the distress of the first years
of the republic, that multitudes of the plebeians, deprived, by the
casualties of war, of their little properties, had been obliged, in
order to preserve the lives of their families, to become debtors to
the patricians, the exclusive proprietors of the state lands. Hundreds
had, in consequence, fallen into a condition of slavery; and many
more, fearing to offend their patrician creditors by opposing their
designs, had become mere ciphers in the comitia centuriata. In short,
the plebs, as a body, were disintegrated and disheartened. Some
instances of oppression, more flagrant than ordinary, led to an
outbreak, and a clamor for the abolition of all existing debts; and to
enforce their demands, the plebeians adopted a method of agitation
which seems singular enough to our modern conceptions; they, or at
least such of them as were in arms for military service, retired in a
mass from the city at a time when it was threatened with invasion, and
encamped on a hill near, declaring they would starve sooner than live
in such a place as Rome was. The government was thus reduced to a dead
lock; Spurius Cassius was chosen consul by the patricians; and by his
instrumentality an arrangement was come to, by which the demands of
the commons were conceded, existing debts abolished, a treaty of
mutual obligation for the future agreed to between the populus and the
plebs as between two independent communities, and a new office
instituted, under the title of the _Tribuneship of the Common People_,
for the express purpose of protecting the interests of the plebs. The
commons then returned to the city; two tribunes of the people were
appointed; and their number was subsequently increased first to five,
and afterwards to ten. No one could have foreseen how important this
office would become.
Not content with alleviating the temporary distresses of the
plebeians, Spurius Cassius wished permanently to ameliorate their
condition; and accordingly, in his third consulship, in the year of
the city 268, or B. C. 486, he boldly proposed and carried what was
called an _Agrarian Law_. It is absolutely necessary that the reader
of Roman history should understand this term. According to the early
Roman constitution, the lands acquired in war became the property of
the whole populus, or body of patricians, in common. Portions of the
conquered lands might be purchased from the state by rich persons; and
in such cases the purchaser, whether patrician or plebeian, became
absolute owner. Usually, however, the lands were not sold, but were
annexed to the unallotted property already belonging to the populus.
With regard to this state land, a very curious system prevailed. Any
patrician (but none else) was allowed to occupy and cultivate as much
of it as he chose, on condition of paying to the state a tithe of the
annual produce if it were arable land, and a fifth if it were laid out
in oliveyards or vineyards. The land thus occupied did not, by right
of possession, become the property of the individual: he was liable to
be turned out of it at the pleasure of the state――his landlord; and it
was entirely at his own risk that he laid out capital in improving it.
As, however, it rarely happened that an individual was ejected from
land which he had thus occupied, large tracts of the state land were
speedily occupied by enterprising patricians. Such being the plan of
distribution, it is evident that in the state lands, occupied and
unoccupied, the government possessed a constant fund upon which they
could draw in cases of emergency. By selling portions of it, they
could raise money; and by assigning portions of it to indigent
families, they could permanently provide for them. Several times, it
appears, this had been done in the case of indigent plebeian families;
and the agrarian law of Spurius Cassius was simply a proposal that――a
large accession to the state lands having just taken place――the
government should seize the opportunity to provide for the distressed
plebeians, by apportioning them small portions of these state lands.
To the plebeians this proposal was exceedingly agreeable; not so,
however, to the patricians, who possessed the right of occupying and
farming as much of the public territory as they chose, but who lost
that right from the moment that the land was apportioned by the state.
The patricians, accordingly, resisted the proposal with all their
might; and Spurius Cassius having carried it notwithstanding, they
caused him to be impeached and put to death as soon as his consulship
had expired.
After this event, the patricians renewed their efforts to suppress the
plebs, proceeding so far as to transfer the right of electing the
consuls from the centuries to the purely patrician body of the curies.
The plebeians, however, behaved resolutely, asserting their rights
through their tribunes, and by clamors in the comitia tributa, where
none but plebeians had a right to take a part. In the year of the city
271, or B. C. 483, they regained the power of choosing one of the
consuls; and in the year 283, or B. C. 471, they wrung from the
patricians the right of electing their tribunes in their own comitia
tributa, instead of the centuries, at the same time obtaining the
right to discuss in the comitia tributa affairs affecting the whole
Commonwealth. Other concessions followed; and at length, in the year
292, or B. C. 462, a tribune named Caius Terentilius Harsa was so bold
as to propose a complete revision of the constitution in all its
parts. It was not desirable, he said, that the old distinction between
populus and plebs, which had originated in war, should be longer kept
up; let, therefore, a revision of the whole body of the laws be
undertaken, with a view to put the plebeians on a legal equality with
the patricians, and let some more limited form of supreme magistracy
be substituted for the consulship. After a protracted opposition, this
proposal resulted, in the year 303, or B. C. 452, in the appointment
of the famous _First Decemvirate_; a board of ten patricians, who were
to revise the entire body of the laws, as well as the political
machinery of the state, superseding in the meantime all other
authority. The digest of Roman law prepared by these decemvirs became
the foundation of all subsequent jurisprudence among the Romans; the
amendments which they effected on the old laws were favorable to the
plebeians. The principal constitutional changes which they carried out
were the incorporation of patricians and clients with the plebeian
tribes; the investment of the centuries with the powers of an ultimate
court of appeal; and the substitution of the decemviral office, of
which they themselves were an example, for the consulship, five of the
decemvirs to be plebeians. This last change, however, was of short
duration; for the second decemvirate was brought to an end by its own
depravity. Compelled, by a new secession of the commons, to abdicate,
the decemvirs of 305 were succeeded by two popular consuls, under
whose auspices several important privileges were obtained for the
plebeians, the most important of which was a law conferring on a
_plebiscitum_, or resolution of the tribes, the right to become law on
receiving the sanction of the patricians, thus enabling the whole
people to originate measures as well as the senate. In 310, the
plebeians mustered courage to demand that one of the consuls should
thenceforward be chosen from their order. To divert them from this,
the patricians yielded to another demand――the repeal of the law
prohibiting intermarriage between the two orders. The plebeians,
however, still persisting in their demand regarding the consulship,
the patricians, in 311, offered a compromise, which consisted in
breaking down the supreme authority, hitherto concentrated in the
consulship, into three offices――the Censorship, the Quæstorship, and
the Military Tribunate――with consular powers. The _censors_ were to be
two in number, chosen for a period of five years, by the curies from
among the patricians, subject to the approval of the centuries. The
ostensible duty of the censors was the administration of the public
revenues; but as they were intrusted with the task of determining the
rank of every citizen, and of rating his taxable property, their power
was, in reality, enormous. To watch over the moral conduct of the
citizens, and to degrade such senators or knights as disgraced their
order, were parts of their understood duty. The _quæstors_, two in
number, were to keep the public accounts; they were likewise to be
patricians, but were to be chosen by the centuries. Regarding the
third office, the _military tribunate_, the plebeians were to have the
option of this office, consisting of an indefinite number of persons
of somewhat less dignity than the consuls, but to be chosen by the
centuries from either order indiscriminately, or of consuls to be
chosen, as before, from among the patricians only.
This compromise having been accepted, the period from 311 to 350 was
one of incessant agitation on the part of the plebeians, of incessant
opposition on the part of the patricians, of incessant shifting
between the consulship and the military tribunate, according as the
patricians or the plebeians were the stronger. On the whole, however,
the plebeians gained ground. In 321, the active authority of the
censors was limited to eighteen months out of the five years for which
they were appointed. In 328, the tribes obtained the right of
deliberating on questions of peace and war. In 334, the number of the
quæstors was increased to four, to be chosen indiscriminately from
either order. Lastly, in 350, or B. C. 404, the system of payment for
military service became common. During these forty years the
patricians had frequently had recourse to the expedient of appointing
a _Dictator_, or supreme magistrate, with unlimited authority for six
months. Such an appointment almost always proved a temporary check to
the political advancement of the plebeians. In cases of difficulty
also, arising from external danger, it was usual to appoint some able
man dictator; and it was at such a juncture, in the year 359, that,
determined to bring the siege of Veii to a close, the Romans appointed
Camillus to this high office.
The siege of Veii having terminated so successfully, the Romans were
prepared to resume their career of conquest without, and their
political agitations within, when both the one and the other received
a check from an unexpected quarter. Some cause, now unknown, had
thrown the Gauls, or Celtic populations inhabiting the western portion
of Central Europe, into commotion; and bursting from their native
haunts, a mass of these savages crossed the Alps in quest of plunder
and settlements, established a permanent abode in the country adjacent
to the Po, and pushed their destructive way through almost the whole
length of the peninsula. Rome suffered more severely than any other
city. For several months (364-5, or B. C. 390-89) it was in the
possession of the savages――its rightful inhabitants, routed in the
battle, having dispersed themselves for safety through the surrounding
country. At length, however, the Gauls were bribed to return to their
homes in the north, leaving Rome in ruins.