Niebuhr's lectures on Roman history, Vol. 1 (of 3)

by Barthold Georg Niebuhr

THE ETRUSCAN WAR. OTHER EVENTS DOWN TO THE THIRD SAMNITE WAR.

In the meanwhile, the Etruscan war had broken out in the year 444. A distinguishing characteristic of the Etruscans is the good faith with which they observed truces; and to this quality it must be attributed that the people of Tarquinii did not take any advantage of the circumstances of the Samnite war. Yet the victory of the Samnites near Lautulæ seems to have given them the first impulse. The union of the Etruscan towns was hard to accomplish; for at that time, not to speak of Cære, which had concluded peace for a hundred years, there were nine states which had to take that common step, although their interests were quite different.[145] The people of Tarquinii, for instance, had nothing to fear from the Gauls; but other states were threatened by them. When they were still considering, the tables had already turned, victory having in the meanwhile come back again to the Romans,—one reason more for the Etruscans to begin the war. Thus in 442, the Romans already looked upon an Etruscan war as unavoidable, and therefore appointed a dictator: yet the preparations of the Etruscans took up so much time that the whole of the following year passed away very quietly. It was only in the second year, that they commenced hostilities; but they found the Romans prepared. Their army was, however, considerable; and they acted on the offensive, a power which they may have acquired in their fierce wars with the Gauls. The Romans sent Q. Æmilius to Etruria, as the Etruscans were besieging the Roman border fortress Sutrium. The mountains of Viterbo had since the Gallic war been the frontier towards Etruria: they are now a bare ridge of hills; they were then covered with a thick forest. This is the Silva Ciminia of which Livy gives such a romantic description. It was nothing but the natural barrier between two nations which were unfriendly, and did not wish to have much intercourse: such a border may purposely be allowed to be overgrown with wood, and to become a wilderness. Such is the boundary between Austrian Croatia and Bosnia, where, since the memory of man, the wood has been left to itself, except that there are some wretched roads in it here and there. This forest was by no means on the scale of a Silva Hercynia, to which Livy likens it; but according to his own account, just broad enough for the Romans to take about a couple of hours to march through it. Sutrium and Nepete were the real border strongholds of the Romans; but always against Vulsinii, not against Tarquinii and Falerii: there the country was quite open, and had intercourse with Rome. The Roman consul now made his appearance to relieve Sutrium. Livy gives a very lively description of the battle; we see from him, that the Romans long kept back their strong reserve. This they often did to the very latest moment, allowing the troops engaged to shed their blood to the last drop: by this means, they gained many a victory. Thus it happened also this time: after having fought the whole day with the Etruscans, they conquered in the evening by bringing up the reserve. Livy says that in this battle the Etruscans had more men killed, while the Romans had the greater number of wounded; the reason of which is this, that the Romans fought with the pilum and the sword, but the Etruscans, who were armed after the Greek fashion, used the lance: these had also a large body of light troops. Even if we should listen to this account of Livy, we cannot believe in the result, that the Etruscans had been completely beaten; as in the following year, they were still encamped before Sutrium, and Fabius came forth to its relief. As their army was very great, Fabius thought it hazardous, as well as unnecessary, to attack them; for in truth, bold as the Romans were, on the whole, they were rather circumspect: they did not like to open a campaign with a battle.

Livy’s description of these wars is an immense exaggeration, which is the more to be wondered at, as his other histories of the Fabian house are so very exact. Fabius Pictor wrote not more than a hundred years after these events; and he is such an excellent writer, that we cannot lay the blame to him. There can be no doubt that Fabius was followed by Diodorus, whose account is here quite plain and credible, and not in any way to be reconciled with that of Livy: from whom the latter has taken his, heaven knows. According to Livy, the Etruscans in three battles must have lost a hundred thousand men; and not to speak of numbers at all, his description of the siege of Sutrium is quite incredible. Perhaps the only foundation there is for the first battle of Fabius in Livy, is, that by a very clever march he threw Roman troops and provisions into Sutrium. But when the Etruscans did not even then raise the siege, Fabius conceived the plan, which seemed foolhardy in the Romans, of invading Etruria itself across the Ciminian forest. The announcement of it spread terror in Rome. It seemed inevitable that the army would get between two Etruscan hosts; the Etruscans of Sutrium might cut off its direct retreat, and their return was only possible by going a great way round through Umbria, which was likewise a difficult country to pass. The senate deemed the undertaking so hazardous, that they sent five delegates, and two tribunes of the people, to dissuade him from it;—the tribunes accompanied the delegates, evidently to arrest him, if he should refuse to obey;—but Fabius had started in all haste, and, when the commissioners reached him, he already stood a conqueror in the midst of Etruria, just like Prince Eugene, by whom the order not to fight was read after the battle. Fabius in fact had pushed his army in advance, but had himself remained behind with the cavalry; then, leaving his camp standing, he undertook a great reconnoitring, and by this deceived the Etruscans during the day; towards sunset, he now followed his army and unexpectedly crossed the mountain. According to Diodorus, if we adopt the right reading,[146] Fabius, on the contrary, had invaded Etruria by going all the way round through Umbria, and had thus taken the Etruscans in the rear: in that case, the march across the Ciminian forest would be pure invention.

In this rich country, the Romans had their lust of plunder sated to the full, no enemy having been there for a hundred years, not even the Gauls. The Etruscans now raised the siege of Sutrium, and marched to Perusia, where Fabius won a decisive battle against them. Perusia, Cortona, and Arretium immediately negociated, making peace for a term of years: thus the western towns, Tarquinii, Vulsinii, Volaterræ, were left to themselves, and they tried to get a treaty on tolerable conditions.[147] The Romans did not perhaps wish to enter into a formal peace: on both sides, they were well pleased to drag on from year to year with the help of armistices. Vulsinii alone held out for thirty years, always drawing in single towns along with it; but the war was constantly interrupted by truces. At Vulsinii, the clients had gained a voice in the government: but the proud Vulsinians afterwards wished, by a counter revolution, to bring back the new Plebes to their old state of dependence; and as they did not succeed, they chose rather to let their city be destroyed by the Romans, than to share its honours with their former vassals. It was by raising their subjects, that they had been enabled to resist so long, whilst the other places, which were much better off, had already yielded in the first campaign: these had an enemy in their own subjects.[148]

The Romans had begun to form connexions also with Umbria; they had concluded a treaty with Camers, and had taken Nequinum, a very strong place on the Nera, near the northern frontier of the old Sabine country: the latter they changed into a Latin colony under the name of Narnia. They extended their colonial system thus far already, and by this means cut off the communication between Etruria and Samnium: at the same time, they had built strongholds like these at the mouth of the Liris, in Minturnæ and Suessa. In Narni, there seems to have been a garrison of Samnite auxiliaries; for it is said in the Fasti, that Q. Fabius, in his fifth, and P. Decius, in his fourth consulship, triumphed over the Umbrians and Samnites. With Samnium, there was peace by this time; but marauding was common among the Samnites.

A visible consequence of the peace with the Samnites, is shown in the relation between the Tarentines and Lucanians. During the war, there is no trace of any unfriendliness between these two peoples; but from the moment that the peace was concluded, there is hostility between them, and the Tarentines have to seek for assistance. This is to be accounted for by the fact, that until then the Samnites had ruled over the Lucanians, and had also made use of them against the Romans. The Tarentines called in Cleonymus, because, as the Greek accounts inform us, they were at war with the Lucanians and Romans: these two nations therefore must have been leagued together. Cleonymus was a prince of Sparta, son of the old king Cleomenes; yet as the succession to the throne there was not fixed, and he might be excluded, he readily listened to the invitation of the Tarentines: he was no common-place man; from that time, however, he became an adventurer, and entered the service of several nations. He brought over with him five thousand men, engaged a still stronger body, and forced the Lucanians to make peace. Hereupon, he got possession of Metapontum, in his own name, or in that of Tarentum; but he oppressed it with contributions, which could not possibly be paid, and he showed himself there to be a true tyrant. To the Tarentines he behaved so ill, that they broke off their connexion with him. They got rid of him; for he was taken into pay by one of the parties against Agathocles of Syracuse. The undertaking miscarried; and as Cleonymus on his return found the territory of the Tarentines closed against him, he seized upon Corcyra, and made it his chief arsenal for further expeditions. From thence he went against the Sallentines, and was defeated by a Roman general; then he marched into Venetia, and through the lagunes, against Padua; but he got on the mudbanks, and was obliged to retreat with some loss. After having roved about for more than twenty years, he returned to Sparta, and accommodated himself to the state of things there: but he was bitterly offended. He then beguiled Pyrrhus into his ill-fated expedition against Sparta, and must have died soon afterwards at an advanced age.

From these notices, circumstances may be gathered which the Roman annals pass over in silence. Not long before this, the Romans had carried on war in Apulia against the Sallentines, who were staunch friends of Tarentum. We now find the Romans allied with the Sallentines against Cleonymus; and hence it is likely that the Tarentines, throughout the Samnite war, were hostile to Rome, and that they made peace with her at the same time as the Lucanians. That a treaty afterwards existed between Rome and Tarentum, is certain; as the violation of a compact, twenty years later, is given as a cause of the war between the two states. One of its conditions was this, that no Roman ship of war was to show itself north of the Lacinian promontory. This treaty is indeed called an ancient one in Livy; but to an historical writer who weighs his words so little, a treaty of twenty years standing may already seem an old one. There cannot have been any concluded earlier, as the Tarentines until then appear to have been always hostile to the Romans.

Besides the eminent men of that age already spoken of, we have to mention Appius Claudius, who on account of the misfortune which befell him, of losing his eyesight, has become celebrated under the name of the Blind. He is quite a strange character, and his acts seem to be most inconsistent, unless we call to mind the times in which he lived. Born and bred in the pride of the patrician party, he goes to such lengths as to refuse as interrex to take any votes for the election of a plebeian consul, a fact which we know from Cicero; and yet he is the first to bring the sons of freedmen into the senate, passing over distinguished men: contrary to usage and custom, he tries, when censor to arrogate to himself extensive powers which had long since been curtailed by the constitutional laws; and in his old age, he again appears as the saviour of the state, who in the day of trouble, by his eloquence upholds the drooping courage of the fainthearted senate. This character is therefore quite a puzzle. If with Dionysius and the modern writers, we were to believe that the struggle at Rome, like that at Athens, was between the rich and the ὄχλος we should think it indeed strange that Appius admitted the children of freedmen into all the tribes, and even placed them in the senate. We must therefore look deeper into the matter, and have before our mind the temper of the parties and classes which existed at the time. During the fifty years which followed the passing of the Licinian law, nobility had already become the attribute of a considerable number of plebeian families, many of which had even then the jus imaginum. Among the patricians, the number of the ennobled families was now very limited; and it is a question, whether the plebeian clans of noble rank were not quite as many as the patrician ones, most of the latter having either become extinct or impoverished: we commonly find over and over again the Claudii, Cornelii, Sulpicii, Furii. The plebeians stood in the same relation to the patricians, as the nobili of the Terra Firma to the city nobles of Venice; had these notables become a corporation, as Maffei proposed, they would have formed a Plebes: but the nobles of Venice hated nothing so much as that very nobility of Padua, Verona, &c., whilst on the contrary they were friendly and kind towards the native low Venetian. This was the relation of the Roman patrician to his client, in contradistinction to the free plebeian order: a proud patrician, like Appius Claudius, looked upon Licinius, Genucius, and others, as most hateful rivals. Such an aristocracy, looking with a most jealous eye on clans whose equal rank it cannot gainsay, seeks for allies from among the very opposites to aristocracy. Such alliances have been most often seen in the South of Europe: the Santafedists at Naples were Lazzaroni; the royalist volunteers in Spain were from the very lowest of the people. Appius appears, on the one hand, as a man of great name in history; on the other, he is spoken of by Livy as a homo vafer, a trickster: this perhaps was not quite an unfounded opinion of him. Appius Claudius, and others of his fellow-patricians, seem to have still entertained the idea of depriving the plebeian nobles of their influence, by calling in a party which of itself could make no claim to honour. Principles like these were fatal in every respect, and hindered the onward march of the constitution. Notwithstanding all this, Appius Claudius was a most distinguished man; and reasons may even be brought forward for his innovations, which would in some measure justify them. He received the children of freedmen into the senate, and distributed the freedmen themselves among the tribes. From this latter point, we must go on again.

It was the distinguishing character of the plebeian order, that its members were landowners, and had their livelihood free and independent, the very reverse of the condition of the clients. The plebeian, like the patrician, was to be well-born, εὐγενής, ingenuus; and therefore, as well as his rival, he added to his name those of his father and grandfather. The libertinus could not thus show proof of his ancestors: if he was a freedman himself, he could not name any father at all; if his father was a freedman, he could but mention him alone; but if his grandfather already had been free, then the wall of partition fell to the ground,—he was perfectly ingenuus, and could be admitted into the tribes. Now in the course of so long a war, the numbers of those who were bound to serve, had very much fallen off, and the conscription was felt to be a heavy burthen. It is a remark of Aristotle, that the character of the Athenian Demos had been much changed in the Peloponnesian war; for its numbers had lessened, and the gaps had been filled up by freedmen and others. If then the Roman people kept to its system of only adding whole tribes, whilst the vacancies in the old ones were scarcely ever filled up, and the enlistments were to be made in the same proportions as before, the citizens who belonged to those old tribes were very hardly dealt with: hence it was but a natural thought, to increase the number of those who were bound to serve. But among the Romans, rights and duties were inseparably united; and thus we may understand why it was that the censor wished to complete the tribes. He who had to bear the burthen of the war, was also to enjoy the advantage of belonging to the commonalty. The undoubted power of the censors to enrol names in the lists of the tribes, the knights, and the senate, and to strike them off likewise, warrants the supposition that the deficiency of two ancestors was not, after all, an insurmountable obstacle to entering the tribes; and that it could not have been altogether a thing unheard of, that freedmen were received in them. Yet if it had been done hitherto, it was in truth but seldom, and in the case of individuals; and the innovation of Appius consisted in this, that he placed the freedmen in a mass among the tribes. In one point of view, this measure was a happy expedient; but there was besides to be considered the change of relations between the different elements of the state, which are to be looked upon in history as always tending to shift their ground. Under the then existing circumstances, the trades might have become of greater importance than they were formerly. If, instead of the slaves, many ærarians carried on the trades and enriched themselves, the relations between the different classes were changed, and the state was then obliged to have regard to their reasonable demands: excessive advantages were not indeed to be granted them, and at the same time, established institutions and vested interests were to be protected against the too luxuriant growth of what was fresh and new. With these principles, free states have always been able to maintain their ground. Thus at that period a class of people is formed, which we now meet with for the first time, namely, the notaries, or scribæ, who had a wider range than the tabelliones under the emperors. They became a guild, which in Cicero’s times was exclusive, and into which one had to pay for admission: its members were people of the most motley description. According to the Roman constitution, no other kind of knowledge was requisite for holding an administrative office, but the artes liberales, which comprised everything that a man of good education was supposed to have learned; on the other hand, the whole mass of that business of which the greater part of the work of officials is made up, was done by the scribæ. Thus there was an immense deal of writing at the prætor’s office; yet the minutes were neither kept by the prætor himself, nor by any other homo ingenuus, but by the scribæ. This profession was very lucrative; all transactions were drawn up in writing by them according to certain forms. These men were employed not by the authorities only, but in every possible kind of business; for the Romans wrote to a fearful amount. They kept all the accounts of the ædiles, the laborious registers of the censors and others, while the functionaries themselves only superintended the whole; they also did the same services for the bankers (negotiatores, equites), as every Roman was obliged to keep his own accounts, his books of receipts and expenses, and this in deference to public opinion, that he might not be considered as a homo levis. For this purpose they frequently kept a scriba.

This class now comes forward for the first time, and as a body of the greatest weight, owing to Cn. Flavius. If Appius wished to drag down the leading plebeians from the position which they had won, it was no longer feasible to have recourse to arms in conjunction with clients and isopolites; but he had to gain his point by cunning, which was done by uniting a great mass with the patrician order, and so he introduced libertini into the tribes: he had then a majority in the resolutions of the Plebes. In a like manner, the municipes might further his plans; and he was himself able, by removing, as censor, the independent plebeians from the senate, and by bringing into it men of low birth, to carry measures which were formerly not to be thought of. Something similar occurs in the undertaking of Sylla, who likewise, more than two hundred years afterwards, came back to his legislation, and promoted men of the lowest rank, who were mere proletarians, into the senate. There is to be found in Livy, from the censorship of Appius downwards, a difference between the Plebs sincera and the forensis factio; evidently the former is the old Plebs, and the latter the incorporated freedmen and isopolites.

Those who had been newly received into the senate, must therefore have been only the creatures of Appius Claudius and his party. He certainly did not think of a tyrannis, being too sensible a man to do so: his son is said to have had such an idea; but he must have been mad. His plan could therefore have only been for the interest of the aristocracy: on what is called the “right side” in the French chamber of deputies, there is indeed no want of people who have been raised up by the revolution from the very lowest ranks. That Appius entered libertini upon the rolls of the senate, excited such heartburning, that the consuls summoned the senate according to its former composition: he seems in fact to have also made omissions, very likely among the plebeian senators. His list was therefore never made use of.

The period for which the censorship was held, had for a long time been reduced from five years to one and a half. Appius claimed all the five years, and carried his point, until at last he wanted to be consul and censor both at once. This was against the Genucian law; and the tribunes had decided upon having him arrested, if he should try and do this by force: he then resigned the censorship. It is, however, possible that he wished to retain it, not so much from motives of ambition, as for the sake of those great works which he had begun to execute. He made the Appian road, the regina viarum. For, the Latin one, which led through Tusculum, and through the country of the Hernicans, being then so much infested, and not yet quite restored to the possession of the Romans, the Appian road was to serve as a shorter and safer one: it led by Terracina, Fundi, and Mola, to Capua. At first, he laid it down as far as Velitræ, then to Setia round the Pontine marshes. That portion which crosses the marshes themselves, he did not make;—even that which was afterwards constructed, was not of much use for the Roman troops;—but he cut a canal through them, in order to drain part of them: for to drain the whole, was not, and will perhaps never be possible. This canal was meant for the conveyance of warlike stores from Cisterna to Terracina; which was necessary, as the Romans had no fleet, and the Tarentines could easily cut off their communication by sea with Campania. The mainroad for the troops passed over the mountains, and by Setia, via Setina, which, therefore, in the list of roads is mentioned separately: it is the same road, which throughout the middle ages, until the times of Pius VI., was again the common one, when the Pontine marshes were deserted. The Romans chose it, because the distance between Cisterna and Terracina through the marshes is too great for one day’s march. There lay indeed between the two places Forum Appii on the canal; but indeed it must have been inhabited during the winter only: on the Via Setina, on the other hand, the armies might encamp on the hills during the summer nights. Had they wished to bivouack in the Pontine marshes during the night, they would have been destroyed by the malignant fevers; consequently the Via Setina was a necessity. The Via Appia, even if Appius should have carried it on the whole length to Capua, has not been executed by him with that magnificence which we now admire in those parts of it which have not been intentionally destroyed; those closely fitting polygons of basalt, which thousands of years were not able to disturb, are of somewhat later date. The road was now made because it was wanted; and it was not until the year 457, that they began at all to pave it with peperino, and some years later with basalt (silex),—at first a small portion, from the Porta Capena to the temple of Mars, of which we have positive information in Livy. Before that time, there were highroads already, which along the mainway had footpaths paved with peperino; that is to say, with flag-stones (saxo quadrato) of that material. For the basaltic pavement, the fines especially were appropriated.

Appius was also the first who brought an aqueduct to Rome, the aqua Appia. The Roman aqueducts of later times were of immense extent; the one built by Appius was but a small beginning, being only for immediate wants. They had to fetch water in Rome from wells, but chiefly from cisterns (putei), as that which is got from the Tiber is so bad. Those quarters of the city which lay low on marshy ground, as the Velabrum, the Forum Olitorium, had of course no wells, and people were therefore obliged to do as well as they could with cisterns: to supply those parts, was the object of the aqua Appia. It was brought to Rome from a distance of eight (Italian) miles, and supplied only the lower town, not the hills, as Livy expressly states. It was finished in the middle of the Samnite war, after the year 440, when fortune began to turn in favour of the Romans; and it was all under ground, as Frontinus tells us, that it might not be destroyed in some of the many Latin insurrections. For it was feared that arches built above ground might be demolished, as was done by the Goths in Belisarius’ times. It led by the Cœlius under the Porta Capena to the Aventine, as far as the spot where Piranesi very exactly hit upon it, near the Clivus Publicius, at the corner of the hill. The outlet is now covered with rubbish, the water having been choked by stalactites, as in several other aqueducts. This undertaking was a benefit unknown throughout the whole of Greece.

These two works are said to have induced Appius Claudius not to lay down his censorship, until they should be completed, and much has been written here about the struggle between him and the tribunes. If it was merely his intention to carry out this design, the way in which the tribunes behaved would have been paltry enough: but perhaps these works were too grand for the circumstances of the times; and it is a question, how far he may have burthened the existing generation for the benefit of those who came after. According to a statement which Diodorus has taken from Fabius, who, though a patrician himself, was indeed an enemy to oligarchy, Appius actually undertook them without any authority from the senate. This would certainly have been an audacious enterprise; and, to judge from his disposition, it was not impossible. He seems also to have made sales of the ager publicus for this purpose; and thus, while the Plebes suffered, the members of his own order were losers as well.

His real agent seems to have been the Cn. Flavius, who has been already mentioned. This man was the son of a freedman; he could therefore use the name of his father only, which was Annius. This is an Etruscan name; so that Annius was very likely an Etruscan slave, who had perhaps been a man of consequence in his own country, and had only lost his freedom (ingenuitas) by having been taken prisoner. Cn. Flavius became the benefactor of the people, in a manner of which we cannot easily form an idea. According to the most ancient Roman custom, there were thirty-eight court-days in the year of ten months, the kings, and then the consuls, sitting in judgment every eighth day, consequently on the nundines. This was afterwards done away with; the nundines were no more to be the same as the court-days, as on these the country plebeians were in such numbers in the town, that a tumult might easily be raised. The thirty-eight days were therefore distributed over the whole year of twelve months; and there being too few of them, single days were added, on which likewise lege agebatur. But now there was a double difficulty; and the patricians took advantage of the circumstance to keep the plebeians in a state of dependance. The thirty-eight days had been distributed irregularly throughout the year; so that if any one wanted, for instance, to sue by a vindicatio, he did not know when the prætor would sit in judgment, but had to make inquiries in the forum, or of the pontiffs, on what day a legis actio might be brought in. Now it might be answered, that one could surely have remembered the eight and thirty days: but then there were others besides, half fasti and half nefasti, on which lege agebatur; and others again, on which comitia were appointed to be held, but yet lege non agebatur. And therefore, as we are told, Appius ordered his scriba Cn. Flavius constantly to find out from the lawyers, on what days legi agi posset; Flavius by this means made a calendar on a tablet of plaster (album), and publicly set it up: it was then frequently copied, and the plebeians were full of gratitude towards him. Indeed, to secure their independence still further, he also published the formulæ actionum:—according to Cicero, this was done after his time only, as the forms themselves were first invented at a later period; according to others, it was he who did it, which is much more likely. We must not imagine this to have been a regular system of laws, although it is generally termed jus Flavianum, but a set of forms of proceeding for every case,—a sort of “Complete Lawyer.” This was felt to be a heavy blow to the influence of the higher classes on the common people. Until then, no one could transact any business without a legal adviser; for certain acts could only be performed on certain days, and so forth. This manual of law is a great step in the progress of political freedom.

As a requital for these benefits, Cn. Flavius had the votes of the plebeians in the election for the ædiles. When it was objected to him that he could not be an ædile, quia scriptum faceret, he took an oath that he would give up his notary business; from which we may gather, that, at that time, it was still incompatible with the condition of an ingenuus. Together with him, one Q. Anicius of Præneste, who a few years before had still been a public enemy of the Romans,—perhaps the remote ancestor of that Anician family which was so brilliant in the last days of the western empire,—was elected in opposition to two distinguished plebeians, a Pœtelius and a Domitius; which proves that in this case, isopolites and libertini, the factio forensis, combined, and decided the election. We find from Pliny, that Flavius made a vow, si populo reconciliasset ordines; by populo the patricians are meant, and as Flavius performed his vow, the reconciliation must have been effected: very likely he acted as mediator during the later censorship of Fabius and Decius, inducing the libertini to allow their rights to be abridged, as the good of the republic required. For from the mingling of these men with the tribes, there arose great fermentation, down to the censorship of Q. Fabius Maximus and P. Decius. A reconciliation then took place (449): the libertini could not entirely forego their rights; but they were combined by Fabius into four tribes, the tribus urbanæ, which always remained tribus libertinorum, and consequently minus honestæ. This measure had most beneficial results. For when we call to mind that the votes were given by tribes, in each of which it was the majority which decided; we may easily imagine, that if the libertini, who were engaged in trades and dwelt in the city, were scattered through all the tribes, they, being always present, must have formed the majority in any meeting which was suddenly called; as among the plebeians of each tribe, but few of those who lived out of the town, could have made their appearance: and thus, in such assemblies of the commonalty, the whole power had passed into the hands of the libertini. The system of Appius would therefore have become most pernicious, without this wholesome change.

At the time of the second Samnite war, another change took place, namely, the abolition of the nexum, which Livy assigns to the consulship of C. Pœtelius and L. Papirius; but according to Varro, as corrected from the MS., it was brought about during the dictatorship of Poetelius, 441. With this also agrees the circumstance, that the impoverished state of the families of the bondmen for debt is said to have been a consequence of the disaster at Caudium. We thus see, how even at so late a period, events which did not strictly belong to the province of real political history, were arbitrarily interpolated in the annals. A youth is ill treated; he rung to the forum; a tumult arises: then it came to pass that the nexum was abolished, so that the person of the debtor, or those of his children, were now no more to be detained. This shows us a state of things in which the mob have already great power. We cannot doubt but that by this time indeed, wealthy people pledged themselves realiter by the fiducia, if they had quiritary property; and this kind of mortgage may have become more general, the more the quiritary property increased among the plebeians. It was now permitted as the only one, and it was forbidden to pledge one’s person. But if any one incurred a debt by a delictum, the relation of the addictio remained; and he was to continue in it, until he redeemed himself: this is certainly the case, even as late as in the war with Hannibal. The continuance of this relation has led many into error, and has awakened in them a suspicion of the law of Pœtelius; but addictio is something quite different from the nexum. Livy calls this law novum initium libertatis plebis Romanæ.

In consequence of the Ogulnian law, from the year 462, the number of the Pontifices majores was increased from four to eight, and those of the augurs from four to nine: the increase was taken from the ranks of the plebeians. A ninth pontiff was the Pontifex maximus, who without doubt was chosen promiscue from both orders. Afterwards cooptatio was by a decree: whether it were thus from the beginning, is hidden in darkness. Twenty years later, Ti. Coruncanius was the first plebeian Pontifex maximus. Livy gives us the suasoria of Decius on the occasion of the Ogulnian law; but the speech is not quite in the character of that age: for, the patricians now knew right well, that they could no longer keep their privileges. This change is evident from the fact, that, although at that time there is no doubt that the nominations to the priesthoods were made by the curies, or by cooptation on the part of the college, yet the law was not transgressed at all, and the plebeians were at once admitted to these offices. Thus the spirit of real life had prevailed over the letter of mere institutions. People as yet only called themselves patricians and plebeians; but there existed already the parties of those who were noble, and of those who were not: the former comprised all the eminent patrician and plebeian families.

The admission to the priesthoods was a point in which the plebeians were highly interested; as the pontiffs were the guardians of the civil law, and the keepers and the fountain head of the whole of the jus sacrum, and the augurs, whose declarations in that age were certainly still considered authentic, exercised influence upon all transactions of importance.