The Beginnings of Rome

Since the tribunes were elected annually by the plebeians it was only natural that the plebeian assembly—which met by local groups or tribes—might remain to discuss policies and instruct the tribunes by resolution. In 471, if Livy is correct, a law was passed (the lex Publilia) which recognized the plebeian tribal assemblies as lawful, and authorized the tribunes to propose and carry resolutions in such assemblies. These resolutions (plebi scites) had of course only such force as plebeian influence gave them, but the time was to come when the plebeians were the most powerful element of the state, and when the law-making body dared not long resist the demands of plebiscites.

The Twelve Tables.

The plebeians now had advocates in court, but the tribunes were hampered by the fact that court judgments were rendered according to unwritten custom pre served from father to son within a narrow group of learned patricians. It therefore became apparent that the customary law must be codified and posted. After many years of discussion a law was passed substituting for the while a board of ten patricians in place of the two consuls and authorizing this board of ten to frame and publish a code of laws to be binding upon all. The decemviri worked on this code in 451 and 45o, when it was in scribed and posted in the Forum. These "XII. tables" were in no sense a reform or a liberalizing of old custom. They recognized the prerogatives of the patrician caste and of the patriarchal family, the validity of enslavement for unpaid debt and the inter ference of religious custom in civil cases. That they reveal a remarkable liberality for their time in respect to testamentary rights and to contracts is probably not due to any alteration brought in by the decemviri, but rather to the progress that had been made in commercial customs in the Roman Forum in the days of prosperity and vigorous trade. The gist of this code has survived in quotations and is now the historian's safest index of the state of Rome's culture in the 5th century. (T. F.) Constitutional Changes.—The decemviri, who had incurred much opposition because of their autocratic administration of Rome, were deposed at the demand of the plebeians who seceded to the Janiculan Hill and made a formal demand that the former Government be restored. The assemblies accordingly met and elected consuls and tribunes again. But the plebeian assembly

went farther and demanded certain reforms in the constitution. These demands were embodied in the very important Valeric Horatian laws passed by the popular (centuriate) assembly in 449. These laws granted or reaffirmed the inviolability of the tribunes, the right of every citizen to carry his appeal to the assembly in cases of death sentences, and finally enacted that plebiscites passed by the plebeian assembly should be placed before the senate and if ratified by the patres should be recog nized as law. Only a few years after the Valerio-Horatian legis lation came the lex Canuleia, itself a plebiscitum (445 B.C.), by which mixed marriages between patricians and plebeians were declared lawful, and the social exclusiveness of the patriciate broken down. In the same year with this measure, and like it in the interests primarily of the wealthier plebeians, a vigorous at tack commenced on the patrician monopoly of the consulate, and round this stronghold of patrician ascendancy the conflict raged until the passing of the Licinian laws in 367. The original pro posal of the tribune Gaius Canuleius, in 445, that the people should be allowed to elect a plebeian consul was evaded by a compromise. The senate resolved that for the next year, in the stead of consuls, six military tribunes with consular powers should be elected, and that the new office should be open to patricians and plebeians alike. The consulship was thus for the time saved from pollution, as the patricians phrased it, but the growing strength of the plebs is shown by the fact that in 5o years out of the 78 between 444 and 366 they succeeded in obtaining the elec tion of consular tribunes rather than of consuls. Despite, how ever, these discouragements, the patricians fought on. Each year they strove to secure the creation of consuls rather than consular tribunes, and failing this strained every nerve to secure for their own order at least a majority among the latter. Even the insti tution of the censorship (435), though rendered desirable by the increasing importance and complexity of the census, was, it is probable, due in part to their desire to discount beforehand the threatened loss of the consulship by diminishing its powers.