hurtful in time of war, for the consuls chosen by the people in their
great assemblies were not always skilful generals; or if they were so,
they were obliged to lay down their command at the year's end.
So the senate determined, in cases of great danger, to call upon one of
the consuls to appoint a single chief, who should be called "dictator,"
or master of the people. He had sovereign power (_Imperium_) both in the
city and out of the city, and the fasces were always carried before him
with the axes in them, as they had been before the king. He could only
be appointed for six months, but at the end of the time he had to give
no account. So that he was free to act according to his own judgment,
having no colleague to interfere with him at the present, and no
accusations to fear at a future time. The dictator was general-in-chief,
and he appointed a chief officer to command the knights under him, who
was called "master of the horse."
And now it appeared to be a fit time to appoint such a chief, to take
the command of the army against the Latins. So the first dictator was T.
Lartius, and he made Spurius Cassius his master of the horse. This was
in the year B.C. 499, eight years after the expulsion of Tarquin.
But the Latins did not declare war for two years after. Then the senate
again ordered the consul to name a master of the people, or dictator;
and he named Aul. Postumius, who appointed T. Æbutius (one of the
consuls of that year) to be his master of the horse. So they led out the
Roman army against the Latins, and they met at the Lake Regillus, in the
land of the Tusculans. King Tarquin and all his family were in the host
of the Latins; and that day it was to be determined whether Rome should
be again subject to the tyrant and whether or not she was to be chief of
the Latin cities.
King Tarquin himself, old as he was, rode in front of the Latins in full
armor; and when he descried the Roman dictator marshalling his men, he
rode at him; but Postumius wounded him in the side, and he was rescued
by the Latins. Then also Æbutius, the master of the horse, and Oct.
Mamilius, the dictator of the Latins, charged one another, and Æbutius
was pierced through the arm, and Mamilius wounded in the breast. But the
Latin chief, nothing daunted, returned to battle, followed by Titus, the
king's son, with his band of exiles. These charged the Romans furiously,
so that they gave way; but when M. Valerius, brother of the great
Poplicola, saw this, he spurred his horse against Titus, and rode at him
with spear in rest; and when Titus turned away and fled, Valerius rode
furiously after him into the midst of the Latin host, and a certain
Latin smote him in the side as he was riding past, so that he fell dead,
and his horse galloped on without a rider. So the band of exiles pressed
still more fiercely upon the Romans, and they began to flee.
Then Postumius the dictator lifted up his voice and vowed a temple to
Castor and Pollux, the great twin heroes of the Greeks, if they would
aid him; and behold there appeared on his right two horsemen, taller and
fairer than the sons of men, and their horses were as white as snow. And
they led the dictator and his guard against the exiles and the Latins,
and the Romans prevailed against them; and T. Herminius the Titian, the
friend of Horatius Cocles, ran Mamilius, the dictator of the Latins,
through the body, so that he died; but when he was stripping the arms
from his foe, another ran him through, and he was carried back to the
camp, and he also died. Then also Titus, the king's son, was slain, and
the Latins fled, and the Romans pursued them with great slaughter, and
took their camp and all that was in it. Now Postumius had promised great
rewards to those who first broke into the camp of the Latins, and the
first who broke in were the two horsemen on white horses; but after the
battle they were nowhere to be seen or found, nor was there any sign of
them left, save on the hard rock there was the mark of a horse's hoof,
which men said was made by the horse of one of those horsemen.
But at this very time two youths on white horses rode into the Forum at
Rome. They were covered with dust and sweat and blood, like men who had
fought long and hard, and their horses also were bathed in sweat and
foam: and they alighted near the Temple of Vesta, and washed themselves
in a spring that gushes out hard by, and told all the people in the
Forum how the battle by the Lake Regillus had been fought and won. Then
they mounted their horses and rode away, and were seen no more.
But Postumius, when he heard it, knew that these were Castor and Pollux,
the great twin brethren of the Greeks, and that it was they who fought
so well for Rome at the Lake Regillus. So he built them a temple,
according to his vow, over the place where they had alighted in the
Forum. And their effigies were displayed on Roman coins to the latest
ages of the city.
This was the fourth and last attempt to restore King Tarquin. After the
great defeat of Lake Regillus, the Latin cities made peace with Rome,
and agreed to refuse harborage to the old king. He had lost all his
sons, and, accompanied by a few faithful friends, who shared his exile,
he sought a last asylum at the Greek city of Cumæ in the Bay of Naples,
at the court of the tyrant Aristodemus. Here he died in the course of a
year, fourteen years after his expulsion.
We shall now record, not only the slow steps by which the Romans
recovered dominion over their neighbors, but also the long-continued
struggle by which the plebeians raised themselves to a level with the
patricians, who had again become the dominant caste at Rome. Mixed up
with legendary tales as the history still is, enough is nevertheless
preserved to excite the admiration of all who love to look upon a brave
people pursuing a worthy object with patient but earnest resolution,
never flinching, yet seldom injuring their good cause by reckless
violence. To an Englishman this history ought to be especially dear, for
more than any other in the annals of the world does it resemble the
long-enduring constancy and sturdy determination, the temperate will and
noble self-control, with which the Commons of his own country secured
their rights. It was by a struggle of this nature, pursued through a
century and a half, that the character of the Roman people was molded
into that form of strength and energy, which threw back Hannibal to the
coasts of Africa, and in half a century more made them masters of the
Mediterranean shore.
There can be no doubt that the wars that followed the expulsion of the
Tarquins, with the loss of territory that accompanied them, must have
reduced all orders of men at Rome to great distress. But those who most
suffered were the plebeians. The plebeians at that time consisted
entirely of landholders, great and small, and husbandmen, for in those
times the practice of trades and mechanical arts was considered unworthy
of a freeborn man. Some of the plebeian families were as wealthy as any
among the patricians; but the mass of them were petty yeoman, who lived
on the produce of their small farm, and were solely dependent for a
living on their own limbs, their own thrift and industry. Most of them
lived in the villages and small towns, which in those times were thickly
sprinkled over the slopes of the Campagna.
The patricians, on the other hand, resided chiefly within the city. If
slaves were few as yet, they had the labor of their clients available to
till their farms; and through their clients also they were enabled to
derive a profit from the practice of trading and crafts, which
personally neither they nor the plebeians would stoop to pursue. Besides
these sources of profit, they had at this time the exclusive use of the
public land, a subject on which we shall have to speak more at length
hereafter. At present, it will be sufficient to say, that the public
land now spoken of had been the crown land or regal domain, which on
the expulsion of the kings had been forfeited to the state. The
patricians being in possession of all actual power, engrossed possession
of it, and seem to have paid a very small quit-rent to the treasury for
this great advantage.
Besides this, the necessity of service in the army, or militia--as it
might more justly be called--acted very differently on the rich
landholder and the small yeoman. The latter, being called out with sword
and spear for the summer's campaign, as his turn came round, was obliged
to leave his farm uncared for, and his crop could only be reaped by the
kind aid of neighbors; whereas the rich proprietor, by his clients or
his hired laborers, could render the required military service without
robbing his land of his own labor. Moreover, the territory of Rome was
so narrow, and the enemy's borders so close at hand, that any night the
stout yeoman might find himself reduced to beggary, by seeing his crops
destroyed, his cattle driven away, and his homestead burnt in a sudden
foray. The patricians and rich plebeians were, it is true, exposed to
the same contingencies. But wealth will always provide some defence; and
it is reasonable to think that the larger proprietors provided places of
refuge, into which they could drive their cattle and secure much of
their property, such as the peel-towers common in our own border
counties. Thus the patricians and their clients might escape the storm
which destroyed the isolated yeoman.
To this must be added that the public land seems to have been mostly in
pasturage, and therefore the property of the patricians must have
chiefly consisted in cattle, which was more easily saved from
depredation than the crops of the plebeian. Lastly, the profit derived
from the trades and business of their clients, being secured by the
walls of the city, gave to the patricians the command of all the capital
that could exist in a state of society so simple and crude, and afforded
at once a means of repairing their own losses, and also of obtaining a
dominion over the poor yeoman.
For some time after the expulsion of the Tarquins it was necessary for
the patricians to treat the plebeians with liberality. The institutions
of "the Commons' King," King Servius, suspended by Tarquin, were,
partially at least, restored: it is said even that one of the first
consuls was a plebeian, and that he chose several of the leading
plebeians into the senate. But after the death of Porsenna, and when the
fear of the Tarquins ceased, all these flattering signs disappeared. The
consuls seem still to have been elected by the Centuriate Assembly, but
the Curiate Assembly retained in their own hands the right of conferring
the _Imperium_, which amounted to a positive veto on the election by the
larger body. All the names of the early consuls, except in the first
year of the Republic, are patrician. But if by chance a consul displayed
popular tendencies, it was in the power of the senate and patricians to
suspend his power by the appointment of a dictator. Thus, practically,
the patrician burgesses again became the _Populus_, or body politic of
Rome.
It must not here be forgotten that this dominant body was an exclusive
caste; that is, it consisted of a limited number of noble families, who
allowed none of their members to marry with persons born out of the pale
of their own order. The child of a patrician and a plebeian, or of a
patrician and a client, was not considered as born in lawful wedlock;
and however proud the blood which it derived from one parent, the child
sank to the condition of the parent of lower rank. This was expressed in
Roman language by saying, that there was no "Right of Connubium" between
patricians and any inferior classes of men. Nothing can be more
impolitic than such restrictions; nothing more hurtful even to those who
count it their privilege. In all exclusive or oligarchical,_pales_,
families become extinct, and the breed decays both in bodily strength
and mental vigor. Happily for Rome, the patricians were unable long to
maintain themselves as a separate caste.
Yet the plebeians might long have submitted to this state of social and
political inferiority, had not their personal distress and the severe
laws of Rome driven them to seek relief by claiming to be recognized as
members of the body politic.
The severe laws of which we speak were those of debtor and creditor. If
a Roman borrowed money, he was expected to enter into a contract with
his creditor to pay the debt by a certain day; and if on that day he was
unable to discharge his obligation, he was summoned before the patrician
judge, who was authorized by the law to assign the defaulter as a bonds
man to his creditor--that is, the debtor was obliged to pay by his own
labor the debt which he was unable to pay in money. Or if a man incurred
a debt without such formal contract, the rule was still more imperious,
for in that case the law itself fixed the day of payment; and if after a
lapse of thirty days from that date the debt was not discharged, the
creditor was empowered to arrest the person of his debtor, to load him
with chains, and feed him on bread and water for another thirty days;
and then, if the money still remained unpaid, he might put him to death,
or sell him as a slave to the highest bidder; or, if there were several
creditors, they might hew his body in pieces and divide it. And in this
last case the law provided with scrupulous providence against the
evasion by which the Merchant of Venice escaped the cruelty of the Jew;
for the Roman law said that "whether a man cut more or less [than his
due], he should incur no penalty." These atrocious provisions, however,
defeated their own object, for there was no more unprofitable way in
which the body of a debtor could be disposed of.
Such being the law of debtor and creditor, it remains to say that the
creditors were chiefly of the patrician caste, and the debtors almost
exclusively of the poorer sort among the plebeians. The patricians were
the creditors, because from their occupancy of the public land, and from
their engrossing the profits to be derived from trade and crafts, they
alone had spare capital to lend. The plebeian yeomen were the debtors,
because their independent position made them, at that time, helpless.
Vassals, clients, serfs, or by whatever name dependents are called, do
not suffer from the ravages of a predatory war like free landholders,
because the loss falls on their lords or patrons. But when the
independent yeoman's crops are destroyed, his cattle "lifted," and his
homestead in ashes, he must himself repair the loss. This was, as we
have said, the condition of many Roman plebeians. To rebuild their
houses and restock their farms they borrowed; the patricians were their
creditors; and the law, instead of protecting the small holders, like
the law of the Hebrews, delivered them over into serfdom or slavery.
Thus the free plebeian population might have been reduced to a state of
mere dependency, and the history of Rome might have presented a
repetition of monotonous severity, like that of Sparta or of Venice.[38]
But it was ordained otherwise. The distress and oppression of the
plebeians led them to demand and to obtain political protectors, by
whose means they were slowly but surely raised to equality of rights and
privileges with their rulers and oppressors. These protectors were the
famous Tribunes of the Plebs. We will now repeat the no less famous
legends by which their first creation was accounted for.
[Footnote 38: A well-known German historian calls the Spartans by the
name of "stunted Romans." There is much resemblance to be traced.]
It was, by the common reckoning, fifteen years after the expulsion of
the Tarquins (B.C. 494), that the plebeians were roused to take the
first step in the assertion of their rights. After the battle of Lake
Regillus, the plebeians had reason to expect some relaxation of the law
of debt, in consideration of the great services they had rendered in the
war. But none was granted. The patrician creditors began to avail
themselves of the severity of the law against their plebeian debtors.
The discontent that followed was great, and the consuls prepared to meet
the storm. These were Appius Claudius, the proud Sabine nobleman who had
lately become a Roman, and who now led the high patrician party with all
the unbending energy of a chieftain whose will had never been disputed
by his obedient clansmen; and P. Servilius, who represented the milder
and more liberal party of the Fathers.
It chanced that an aged man rushed into the Forum on a market-day,
loaded with chains, clothed with a few scanty rags, his hair and beard
long and squalid; his whole appearance ghastly, as of one oppressed by
long want of food and air. He was recognized as a brave soldier, the old
comrade of many who thronged the Forum. He told his story, how that in
the late wars the enemy had burned his house and plundered his little
farm; that to replace his losses he had borrowed money of a patrician,
that his cruel creditor (in default of payment) had thrown him into
prison,[39] and tormented him with chains and scourges. At this sad
tale, the passions of the people rose high.
[Footnote 39: Such prisons were called _ergastula_, and afterward became
the places for keeping slaves in.]
Appius was obliged to conceal himself, while Servilius undertook to
plead the cause of the plebeians with the senate.
Meantime news came to the city that the Roman territory was invaded by
the Volscian foe. The consuls proclaimed a levy; but the stout yeomen,
one and all, refused to give in their names and take the military oath.
Servilius now came forward and proclaimed by edict that no citizen
should be imprisoned for debt so long as the war lasted, and that at the
close of the war he would propose an alteration of the law. The
plebeians trusted him, and the enemy was driven back. But when the
popular consul returned with his victorious soldiers, he was denied a
triumph, and the senate, led by Appius, refused to make any concession
in favor of the debtors.
The anger of the plebeians rose higher and higher, when again news came
that the enemy was ravaging the lands of Rome. The senate, well knowing
that the power of the consuls would avail nothing, since Appius was
regarded as a tyrant, and Servilius would not choose again to become an
instrument for deceiving the people, appointed a dictator to lead the
citizens into the field. But to make the act as popular as might be,
they named M. Valerius, a descendant of the great Poplicola. The same
scene was repeated over again. Valerius protected the plebeians against
their creditors while they were at war, and promised them relief when
war was over. But when the danger was gone by, Appius again prevailed;
the senate refused to listen to Valerius, and the dictator laid down his
office, calling gods and men to witness that he was not responsible for
his breach of faith.
The plebeians whom Valerius had led forth were still under arms, still
bound by their military oath, and Appius, with the violent patricians,
refused to disband them. The army, therefore, having lost Valerius,
their proper general chose two of themselves, L. Junius Brutus and L.
Sicinius Bellutus by name, and under their command they marched
northward and occupied the hill which commands the junction of the Tiber
and the Anio. Here, at a distance of about two miles from Rome, they
determined to settle and form a new city, leaving Rome to the patricians
and their clients. But the latter were not willing to lose the best of
their soldiery, the cultivators of the greater part of the Roman
territory, and they sent repeated embassies to persuade the seceders to
return. They, however, turned a deaf ear to all promises, for they had
too often been deceived. Appius now urged the senate and patricians to
leave the plebeians to themselves. The nobles and their clients, he
said, could well maintain themselves in the city without such base aid.
But wiser sentiments prevailed. T. Lartius, and M. Valerius, both of whom
had been dictators, with Menenius Agrippa, an old patrician of popular
character, were empowered to treat with the people. Still their leaders
were unwilling to listen, till old Menenius addressed them in the famous
fable of the "Belly and the Members":
"In times of old," said he, "when every member of the body could think
for itself, and each had a separate will of its own, they all, with one
consent, resolved to revolt against the belly. They knew no reason, they
said, why they should toil from morning till night in its service, while
the belly lay at its ease in the midst of all, and indolently grew fat
upon their labors. Accordingly they agreed to support it no more. The
feet vowed they would carry it no longer; the hands that they would do
no more work; the teeth that they would not chew a morsel of meat, even
were it placed between them. Thus resolved, the members for a time
showed their spirit and kept their resolution; but soon they found that
instead of mortifying the belly they only undid themselves: they
languished for a while, and perceived too late that it was owing to the
belly that they had strength to work and courage to mutiny."
The moral of this fable was plain. The people readily applied it to the
patricians and themselves, and their leaders proposed terms of agreement
to the patrician messengers. They required that the debtors who could
not pay should have their debts cancelled, and that those who had been
given up into slavery should be restored to freedom. This for the past.
And as a security for the future, they demanded that two of themselves
should be appointed for the sole purpose of protecting the plebeians
against the patrician magistrates, if they acted cruelly or unjustly
toward the debtors. The two officers thus to be appointed were called
"Tribunes of the Plebs." Their persons were to be sacred and inviolable
during their year of office, whence their office is called _sacrosancta
Potestas_. They were never to leave the city during that time, and their
houses were to be open day and night, that all who needed their aid
might demand it without delay.
This concession, apparently great, was much modified by the fact that
the patricians insisted on the election of the tribunes being made at
the Comitia of the Centuries, in which they themselves and their wealthy
clients could usually command a majority. In later times, the number of
the tribunes was increased to five, and afterward to ten. They were
elected at the Comitia of the tribes. They had the privilege of
attending all sittings of the senate, though they were not considered
members of that famous body. Above all, they acquired the great and
perilous power of the veto, by which any one of their number might stop
any law, or annul any decree of the senate without cause or reason
assigned. This right of veto was called the "Right of Intercession."
On the spot where this treaty was made, an altar was built to Jupiter,
the causer and banisher of fear, for the plebeians had gone thither in
fear and returned from it in safety. The place was called Mons Sacer, or
the Sacred Hill, forever after, and the laws by which the sanctity of
the tribunitian office was secured were called the _Leges Sacratæ_.
The tribunes were not properly magistrates or officers, for they had no
express functions or official duties to discharge. They were simply
representatives and protectors of the plebs. At the same time, however,
with the institution of these protective officers, the plebeians were
allowed the right of having two ædiles chosen from their own body, whose
business it was to preserve order and decency in the streets, to provide
for the repair of all buildings and roads there, with other functions
partly belonging to police officers, and partly to commissioners of
public works.
THE BATTLE OF MARATHON
B.C. 490
SIR EDWARD SHEPHERD CREASY