Other causes, too, helped to protract the struggle. Between the wealthier plebeians, who were ambitious of high office and the poorer, whose minds were set rather on allotments of land recently taken from Veii, there was a division of interest of which the patricians were not slow to take advantage, and to this must be added the pressure of war. The death struggle with Veii and the sack of Rome by the Gauls absorbed for the time all the energies of the community. In 377, however, two of the tribunes, G. Licinius Stolo (see LICINIUS STOLO, GAms) and L. Sextius, came forward with proposals which united all sections of the plebs in their support. Their proposals were as follows: (I) that consuls and not consular tribunes be elected; (2) that one consul at least should be a plebeian; (3) that the priestly college, which had the charge of the Sibylline books, should consist of ten mem bers instead of two, and that of these half should be plebeians; (4) that no single citizen should hold in occupation more than 5ooac. of the common lands, or pasture upon them more than ioo head of cattle and Soo sheep; (5) that interest already paid on debts should be deducted from the principal, and the remainder paid off in three years. The last two proposals were obviously intended to meet the demands of the poorer plebeians, and to secure their support for the first half of the scheme. Ten years of bitter conflict followed, but at last, in 367 B.c., the Licinian rogations became law, and one of their authors, L. Sextius, was created the first plebeian consul. For the moment it was some consolation to the patricians that they not only succeeded in detaching from the consulship the administration of civil law, which was entrusted to a separate officer, praetor urbanus, to be elected by the comitia of the centuries, with an understanding apparently that he should be a patrician, but also obtained the institution of two additional aediles (aediles curules), who were in like manner to be members of their own order. With the opening of the consulship, however, the issue of the long contest was virtually decided, and the next 8o years witnessed a rapid succession of plebeian victories. Now that a plebeian consul might preside at the elections, the main difficulty in the way of the nomination and election of plebeian candidates was removed. The proposed patrician monopoly of the new curule aedileship was almost instantly abandoned. In 356 the first plebeian was made dictator; in 35o the censorship, and in 337 the praetorship was filled for the first time by plebeians; and lastly, in 300, by the lex Ogulnia, even the sacred colleges of the pontiffs and augurs, the old strongholds of patrician supremacy, were thrown open to the plebs. The patricians lost also the control they had exercised so long over the action of the people in assembly. The patrum auctoritas, the sanction given or refused by the patrician senators to laws and to elections, had hitherto been a powerful weapon in their hands. But in 339 a law of Q. Publilius Philo, a plebeian dictator, enacted that this sanction should be given beforehand to laws enacted in the comitia centuriata, and a lex Maenia of uncertain date extended the rule to elections in the same assembly. Henceforward the patrum auctoritas sank into a meaningless form, though as such it still survived in the time of Livy. From 287 onwards it is certain that measures passed by the plebs, voting by their tribes, had the full force of laws without any further conditions whatsoever. The legislative independence of the plebeian assembly was secured, and with this crowning victory ended the long struggle between the orders.
(b) Conquest of Italy.—Twelve years of ter the passing of the lex Hortensia, King Pyrrhus, beaten at Beneventum, with drew from Italy, and Rome was left mistress of the peninsula.
The steps by which this supremacy had been won have now to be traced.
The expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome, followed as it seems to have been by the emancipation from Etruscan supremacy of all the country between the Tiber and the Liris, entirely altered the aspect of affairs. North of the Tiber the powerful Etruscan city of Veii, of ter a vain attempt to restore the Tarquins, relapsed into an attitude of sullen hostility towards Rome, which, down to the outbreak of the final struggle in 407, found vent in constant and harassing border forays. The Sabines recommenced their
raids across the Anio ; from their hills to the south-east the Aequi pressed forward as far as the eastern spurs of the Alban range, and ravaged the low country between that range and the Sabine mountains; the Volsci overran the coast-lands as far as Antium, established themselves at Velitrae and even wasted the fields within a few miles of Rome. But the good fortune of Rome did not leave her to face these foes single-handed, and it is a significant fact that the history of the Roman advance begins, not with a bril liant victory, but with a timely alliance. According to Livy, it was in 493, only a few years after the defeat of the prince of Tusculum at Lake Regillus, that a treaty was concluded between Rome and the Latin communities of the Campagna. The alliance was in every respect natural. The Latins were the near neighbours and kinsmen of the Romans, and both Romans and Latins were just freed from Etruscan rule to find themselves as lowlanders and dwellers in towns face to face with a common foe in the ruder hill tribes on their borders. The exact terms of the treaty cannot, any more than the precise circumstances under which it was concluded, be stated with certainty (see LAnum), but two points seem clear. There was at first a genuine equality in the relations between the allies ; Romans and Latins, though com bining for defence and offence, did so without sacrificing their separate freedom of action, even in the matter of waging wars independently of each other. But, secondly, Rome enjoyed from the first one inestimable advantage. The Latins lay between her and the most active of her foes, the Aequi and Volsci, and served to protect her territories at the expense of their own. Behind this barrier Rome grew strong, and the close of the Aequian and Volscian wars left the Latin, her dependents rather than her allies. Beyond the limits of the Campagna Rome found a second ally, hardly less useful than the Latins, in the tribe of the Hernici, in the valley of the Trerus, who had equal reason with the Romans and Latins to dread the Volsci and Aequi, while their position midway between the two latter peoples made them valuable auxiliaries to the lowlanders of the Campagna.