CHAP. VI.

THE FIRST CONSULS.

65

pletely crippled, and opportunity given to the patricians to recover much of their surrendered authority.

When the consuls had been designated by the centuries and accepted by the curies, it was still from a further vote of the superior assembly that they received the Imperium or command of the legions. Even the curies themselves were jealous of the mighty power they thus created, and it was required of the consuls that one only should exercise his functions within the city at a time, and the other should take his station in the camp beyond it. But the patricians armed themselves with another and more formidable weapon against the encroachments of the plebeians. They demanded in times of public emergency, whether from foreign attack or from domestic intrigue, that they should have authority to supersede the consular magistracy by the creation of a dictator, in whose single hand the whole power of the state should be effectually lodged, and all privileges of persons and classes overruled, at least for a space of six months. For a period so limited the dictator, seconded by a master of the horse of his own appointment, became the despotic ruler of the state, and was bound by the terms of his compact to see that it took no harm. It was against the plebeians, quite as much as against the foreign enemy, that the vigor of this sovereign was invoked.

CHAPTER VI.

The first consuls.-The first dictator.-The first secession of the plebs.Reconciliation effected by Menenius Agrippa.-The first tribunes of the plebs.

THE dates of the presumed historical events of our history up to the Regifugium have been thus far very loosely indicated, inasmuch as they are set forth with the greatest discrepancy by the meagre authorities we have to guide us. But the date assigned to the Regifugium itself-the year of the city 245 and before Christ 509-may be conveniently accepted as a fixed epoch; from that period the Romans themselves introduced the usage of marking time by driving a nail every year into the temple of Minerva; thenceforth the list of their consuls seems to have been regularly kept, and from this list, though not wholly free from variation and confusion, the common consent of the chronologers has drawn up a sufficient guide for our annual reckoning. We follow from this time the chronology of Varro among the ancients, and of

Clinton and Fischer-1.deed, the generally received chronologyamong the moderns, and put aside the disputed points which it would be unsuitable to discuss in a compendium of Roman history.

On the expulsion of their king the Romans at once elected L Junius Brutus and L. Tarquinius Collatinus consuls. It was popularly asserted to the honor of these magistrates that they revived the Servian institutions most favorable to the plebeians; restored to them their own judges taken from their own order, with the right of appealing to the tribes, as the patricians had an appeal to the curies. They distributed among them many lots of the royal domain, and called up a hundred of them to the Senate, which had been decimated by the tyranny of the Tarquins. When Brutus was prematurely cut off in the very year of his consulship, his surviving colleague provided for the perpetuation of the form of government which by him mainly had been founded. Nevertheless, Valerius himself, the new consul, incurred suspicion of affecting sovereignty by erecting his mansion on an eminence of the city. As soon, however, as the murmurs of the citizens were reported to him he caused the rising buildings to be destroyed, and contented himself with a modest cabin on the slope of the hill. He carried moreover a special decree by which royal rule was forever interdicted in Rome. The very name of king and kingdom became from henceforth an abomination to the Romans. For this and other like tokens of his generous patriotism Valerius obtained the splendid title of Poplicola, never again held by a Roman, for never again did the liberties of Rome emerge from so perilous a crisis.

The war with the Etruscans under Porsena was renewed through three years, and B.C. 507 Rome either capitulated to the invader U.O. 247. or finally repulsed him, according to which of the conB.C. 507. flicting stories we prefer. At any rate our histories record no cessation of the foreign wars of the Romans. They continued to be constantly engaged in conflict with the Sabines and the Latins, and in the year 501 a dictator was for the first time created to strengthen the hands of the government. The title seems to have been taken from one in use among the Latins, to whom a corresponding office was familiar. Spurius Lartius was the first dictator of Rome. The two names bear perhaps the same meaning, and may indicate that the Romans were conscious of the superior power they were thus conferring upon their lord and master. In 496 a dictator was appointed a second time in the person of Aulus Postumius, who fought the great battle of Regillus against the last confederacy raised against Rome by the exiled family.

Thus far the pressure of danger from abroad, if not the mutual

CHAP. VI.

WRONGS OF THE PLEBEIANS.

67

balance of classes within the city, had kept peace and union between the two rival orders. But whatever indulgence might seem to have been shown to the plebeians, first by Servius and again by Brutus and Valerius, it soon became apparent that they enjoyed no real equality, and indeed that their dearest rights were still liable to unjust and cruel invasion. A people that lives by the land transacts its business mainly by sale and barter. Money is the product of trade and commerce, but in all flourishing and advancing communities ready money affords the most direct means of opulence. The petty landowners of the Roman territory were constantly in want of the easy means of exchange required for their improvements in husbandry, for the payment of their rents and of the public charges. The men of small estate-and such were for the most part the plebeians-were constrained to come to their richer neighbors, the patricians, who enjoyed not only broader lands, but almost all the offices of the state and the share of plunder thereto accruing, for the accommodation of loans of money. The Romans were from the first thrifty and close in their dealings, keen in traffic, usurious in lending. The code of commercial law which they exacted gave every advantage to the lender as against the borrower. It enabled him to seize upon the estate of his debtor to the last farthing; it further entitled him to lock up the bankrupt in prison, or sell him into slavery, with all his family; and lastly, if we may rely upon the plain letter of a famous enactment, it authorized a number of creditors, if the debtor's estate was not sufficient to satisfy their claims, to cut his body in pieces and take each his share. But the plebeians, as has been said, were for the most part the poorer class, and therefore the most liable to fall under the pains and penalties of indebtedness. The patricians seized their goods, and thrust them into prison, if they did not go to the extreme but unprofitable length of carving them in morsels. When one of these imprisoned debtors made from time to time his escape, and showed himself in the Forum in his rags and chains, it roused the fury of the commons to madness, and drove them at last to grave measures of retaliation.

It was one of the bravest of the centurions of the Roman army who had thus made his escape and proclaimed his wrongs to his indignant countrymen. At the same moment an incursion of the Volsci was announced. The consuls of the year 495, the haughty Appius Claudius, the first of a race notorious in many later generations for its pride and cruelty, and with him the popular Servilius, summoned the people to arms. The plebs refused to enlist, and defied the law. The consuls yielded for the moment, promised redress of grievances, suppressed the rising mutiny, led forth

the legions, and defeated the enemy; but the Senate refused to perform the promises made for it, and threatened to create Appius dictator, and give him power without appeal over the exasperated multitude. In the succeeding year this threat was executed; a dictatorship was proclaimed for the suppression of the sedition, but the choice of the Senate fell upon Valerius Volesus, a milder and wiser man. The plebeians had collected in a body and seceded to the Mons Sacer, an eminence three miles distant from the city; from thence they seem to have soon returned and occupied the more menacing position of the Aventine, within the walls. The crisis was worthy of the famous incident which fol lowed, when Menenius Agrippa, sent as an envoy to them with the most dignified chiefs of the Senate, related the apologue of the members and the belly, and persuaded them of the mutual inU.C. 260. terdependence of the rival classes. This time the SenB.C. 494. ate acted with good faith: the imprisoned debtors were set free, and the insolvent relieved from their obligations.

According to the color which tradition gives to this event, the quarrel lay not so much between the patricians and plebeians, as rival orders in the commonwealth, as between the richer and the poorer classes, for even of the plebeians not a few had by this time risen to wealth, and no doubt exercised the law of debtor and creditor to the full as harshly as the patricians. But at the next shifting of the scene we find the plebeians as a body turning the success of the secession to their general advantage. The plebeians were excluded by law from the consulship, but they now insisted upon securing for themselves the protection of a magistrate of their own order, whose power should at least balance that of the patrician executive. The assemblies of the citizens in the centuries were impeded by the power claimed by the patricians to subject them to religious ideas and ceremonies, controlled by a priesthood who were themselves almost universally of the higher order. The plebeians acquired a check upon this privilege by demanding that officers of their own choice should be invested with personal inviolability, and that while they could put a veto on the action of the Senate, any one who assailed them in the execution of their office should be declared accursed, and his property confiscated.

The institution of the tribunes-such was the name of these magistrates-was a crisis that affected the whole subsequent history of Rome. First, it kept the consuls in check; in time it acquired for the plebs a share in all the privileges of the populace; and at length effected a fusion of the rival orders of the early commonwealth. When, after the great conquests of Rome, the struggle of classes lay no longer between patricians and plebeians,

CHAP. VII.

INSTITUTION OF THE TRIBUNES.

69

but between the aristocracy or the nobles and the heterogeneous populace who constituted the mass of citizens, this institution supported again the cause of the multitude, and secured its final triumph in the establishment of the Empire. The emperors themselves assumed the name and office of tribunes, and as such claimed a legal prerogative for the protection of popular rights; and they in their turn converted their prerogative into an instrument for admitting the provinces to the privileges of the city, and transforming all the subject races of the Empire into Roman citizens. Truly the secession to the Mons Sacer was "not a revolt, but a revolution." It was fitting that an event on which such issues depended, however little they may have been at the time foreseen, should be celebrated with special solemnities. Vows were made and sacrifices offered, and the ministrations of the fecials invoked, as at the conclusion of peace between two hostile forces. The compact between the two orders was invested with peculiar sanctity under the title of the LEGES SACRATE. An altar was erected to Jove the Thunderer, under which name the "best and chiefest" of the gods was held in especial veneration. To Menenius, as the author of the happy reconciliation, the highest honors were paid during his lifetime, and a public funeral was decreed at his death. The plebeians chose for their first tribunes the men who had led them to victory-a Sicinius and a Brutus; and thus a second time had a Brutus saved the commonwealth.

CHAPTER VII.

First struggle of the plebeians for a share of the public lands.-Their part espoused by the consul Spurius Cassius.-The stories of the Fabii and the battle at the Cremera, of Coriolanus, and of Cincinnatus.-Constant wars between Rome and the neighboring tribes-the Æqui, the Volsci, and the Veientes-and the losses she suffered.

THE elder Brutus had gained the admiration of the whole Roman people by the stand he had made against a tyranny which affected the whole; but he had earned the title of a popular champion more particularly by the assignments of public land which he had obtained for the plebeians. In this, it is true, he had only followed the example of the kings themselves, for the kingly power had generally favored the lower class to strengthen itself against the upper. But after the popular stroke of Brutus our history represents the consuls, with the patricians at their