THE HISTORY OF ROME AND THE RISE OF DEMOCRACY
Heroic society in the period of youthful vigour above described contains within itself, rigorously repressed, and in fact made into a support, the element of opposition; the slaves, clients or vassals, that is to say the plebs. But this element little by little succeeds in detaching itself from and opposing itself to the society, engaging it in a continual and undisguised conflict, so as by degrees to overthrow this old society and give life and form to a new society of which it is itself the material: a democratic society, the popular republic. Vico believes this process to be uniform in all peoples; but since references to histories other than that of Rome are either absent or very vague (he hardly mentions the origin of the Athenian democracy) the description of this process appears in the pages of the New Science as a fragment of Roman history, or as we should nowadays call it the social history of Rome.
Vico's guesses about the population and primitive culture of Italy are of no great importance. The subject belongs rather to archaeology and ethnography than to history, and Vico did not make a special study of it. In the De antiquissima sapientia Italorum he had provided the origins of Rome with a basis in an Italian civilisation of high antiquity, earlier than the Greek and derived from Egypt, which the Romans absorbed in a manner agreeing with their character; by rejecting, that is to say, its theoretical hypotheses while taking over their practical results, just as they adopted from the Etruscans their tragic religion and their art of tactics, and as they later adopted laws from Athens and Sparta. In this way their ignorance and savagery remained unchanged, and hence they spoke the language of philosophers without being philosophical. In his later writings Vico still for a time maintained the priority and independence of the earliest Italian civilisation as regards that of Greece, and considered Pythagoras less as the founder than as the student of Italian wisdom. Finally, however, he seems to have given up this view, just as he definitely abandoned that which explained the origins of Roman religion, language, customs and law by the imitation of foreign peoples and "frankly confessed that he had been in error here" owing to the example of Plato's Cratylus. What conditions brought about the rise of Rome Vico does not precisely say. He is certain that if Rome and the world did not begin together, at least the foundation of Rome was a new beginning. The point of departure which he assumes is the asylum of Romulus, consisting of the "families" of fathers who gave their hospitality to wanderers and made them into famuli. There was no Trojan colonisation; Vico knows Bochart's treatise (1663) criticising the legend of Aeneas's arrival in Italy and accepts its conclusions, which only confirm the doubts already entertained by certain ancient historians. For Vico, the Trojan origin of Rome is a legend sprung from the union of two different examples of national arrogance: that of the Greeks, who made such a noise about the Trojan war and forced their Aeneas into the history of Rome, and that of the Romans, who accepted him in order to boast of a distinguished foreign origin. The legend moreover could not have arisen much before the time of the war with Pyrrhus, when Rome began to acquire a taste for things Greek. In order to explain the infusion of Greek names and myths into the story of primitive Rome and the similarity of the Roman alphabet to the ancient Greek, Vico would incline rather to the hypothesis that early in their history the Romans conquered and destroyed some Greek colony on the Latin coast, of which all trace has since been lost in the mists of antiquity; and that through receiving its inhabitants in Rome as refugees and allies, they came under the influence of several Hellenic traditions and customs.
Vico does not spend much time over the historical events of the royal period. Here in fact lay one of the chief differences between his criticism and that which had already been originated and was continued after his time dealing with the first centuries of Roman history. Vico aims not at substituting historical for legendary anecdotes but at understanding the essence of institutions and the ways in which they change. He uses two guiding principles, as we have seen in considering the royal period: first, that it was a period not of monarchy but of aristocracy and that therefore the type of heroic society or the patriarchal republic is applicable to it: secondly, that the names of the kings are symbols or "poetic characters" for the institutions of this society. In Vico's judgment, as we have had occasion to observe, the constitution of Servius Tullius should not be considered the basis of popular liberty, as the later Romans considered it; it was really the basis of the liberty of the feudal lords, since by it the patricians granted to the plebeians the bonitary tenure of their land together with the duty of paying rent to and serving at their own expense in war themselves, the patricians. And Junius Brutus, in driving out the Tarquins and replacing them by two consuls or annual aristocratic kings, restored to the Roman republic its primitive form; that is to say, he delivered the lords from the domination of their tyrants but left the people under the domination of their lords.
The patricians' oppression of the plebeians after the restoration of Junius Brutus and the struggles and resistance caused by it constitute the soul of the new development and contain the secret of the greatness of Rome, the "key to universal Roman history," clavis historiae Romanae universae. Polybius's explanation of this greatness is too vague. He describes it as due to the virtue or the religion of the patricians and relates the facts of this virtue rather than their cause. Vico also criticises Machiavelli, at one time because he adduces certain civil and military institutions as the cause of Rome's greatness without investigating the cause of those institutions, that is to say the character of Roman society: at another time for adducing what was only a partial cause, the high spirit of the plebeians. He thinks Plutarch worst of all, since envy of the virtue and wisdom of Rome leads him to ascribe her greatness to fortune. The fact was that Rome subjugated the other cities of Latium and then Italy and the world because her heroism was still young, while among the other Latin peoples it had begun to decay. Thanks to this youthful vigour the patricians were strong enough to preserve their order and the religion which formed its foundation and safeguard (the nobles, Vico observes at this point, were always and everywhere religious, so that the first sign of contempt for religion among them is a symptom of national decadence); the plebeians were spirited enough to demand a share in religion, auspices and all civil rights; the lawyers, lastly, were wise enough to interpret the old laws and apply them to any new case that might arise, and strove with all their might to alter the text of these laws as little and as slowly as possible. These were the chief causes of the growth and permanence of the Roman empire; for in all its political changes it contrived to remain faithful to its principles. Prowess in war was another result of the rivalry of the orders; since the nobles were naturally consecrated to the safety of their country, as the only means of preserving the civil privileges of their order, and the plebeians accomplished brilliant deeds in order to prove themselves worthy of patrician honours. And when the Romans extended their conquests and their victories over the whole world, they made use of four rules which they had already applied to the plebeians within Rome itself. They reduced barbarian provinces to the position of clients by planting colonies in them: they granted civilised provinces bonitary tenure of their land: to Italy they gave the quiritary tenure: and to the municipia, the towns which had earned better treatment, they accorded the same equality with themselves which the plebs had finally won.
The result of the first struggles, in which the point at issue was according to Vico the bonitary possession of land (a right already recognised in the constitution of Servius, but cancelled by the nobles in return for arrears of rent), is seen in the tribunate, and later, when the plebeians claimed the right of quiritary tenure, in the laws of the Twelve Tables, ratifying this plebeian victory. But the law of the Twelve Tables represented at the same time the victory of written law, the end of the secrecy with which the laws had been fenced round by the patricians, who alone knew, understood, interpreted and therefore applied them as they thought fit. This publication and codification of a written law cannot have been benevolently granted by the patricians out of that anxiety "not to despise the wishes of the plebs" of which Livy speaks; rather they must have resisted it with all the stubbornness which Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes and expresses in the phrase "mores patrios servandos, leges ferri non oportere" (our fathers' customs must be preserved, and laws must not be passed).
Later historians decorated the origin of the Twelve Tables with various legends. They told, among other things, of the mission sent by the decemvirs to Athens to bring back new laws: a tale given by Livy and Dionysius, but unknown to Polybius and discredited by Cicero. How, in the savage aloofness of primitive nations, between whom oral communication could only have been instituted by the necessities of warfare, alliances and commerce, could the fame of Solon's wisdom have crossed the seas from distant Attica to Rome? How could the Romans of that time have possessed such accurate knowledge of the quality of Athenian law as to believe it capable of setting at rest the strife between their plebeians and their nobles? How could ambassadors have travelled between Greece and those Romans whom seventy-two years later the Greeks of Tarentum could still maltreat as strangers? And what shall we say of ambassadors who returned carrying with them the Greek laws from Athens but without knowing what they meant; so that but for the coincidence by which Hermodorus the pupil of Heraclitus, an exile from his country, happened to be in Rome, the Romans would have been unable to make any use of this unintelligible and inaccessible treasure? Again, how could Hermodorus have translated the laws into Latin of such purity that Diodorus Siculus pronounced it devoid of the slightest taint of Hellenism, and with a perfection unattained by any subsequent writer of any period in a translation from the Greek? How did he contrive to clothe Greek ideas in Latin words so appropriate (for instance, auctoritas) that Greeks, Dio Cassius among them, declare that their own language has no corresponding words by which to explain them? Heraclitus's letter to Hermodorus must have been conveyed by the same mail that served Pythagoras in his distant voyages up and down the world: it is, in fact, an imposture of the first quality, and the whole story of the Athenian origin of these laws is due to the arrogance of scholars, who derived them first from the other Latin peoples (such as the Aequi), then from the Greek cities of Italy, then from Sparta and finally from Athens, with whose name, thanks to the renown of the Athenian philosophers, they were at last satisfied. No doubt, the laws of the Twelve Tables present resemblances not only to Athenian or Spartan laws but to those of various nations, the Mosaic code among others; but this is due to the uniformity of national history. No doubt, the decemvirs were in antiquity supposed to have originated laws bearing clear traces of Greek influence, such as that prohibiting the Greek style of mourning at funerals: but this is because as we have seen the decemviral legislation, like the names of the various kings, became a "poetic character," and to it were referred all laws later recorded in the public archives which tended to the equalisation of liberty. But the original law of the Twelve Tables, with its primitive rudeness, inhumanity, cruelty and ferocity, which agrees so ill with the period of highly-developed civilisation at Athens, is a document of the greatest value for the ancient natural law of the Latin peoples, and the customs which had existed among them from the age of Saturn.
Quiritary tenure of land and a written code of law once gained, the struggle recommenced over the question of the right of marriage. The true meaning of this contest has been lost among the absurdities written on the subject by the ancient historians themselves, in the belief that its basis was the desire on the part of the plebeians (who were little more than wretched and common slaves) to be allowed to form connexions with the nobles. This error has made Roman history even less credible than the legendary history of Greece; for if we do not know the meaning of the latter, the former is in opposition to the true order of human desires. It shows us a plebs aspiring first to nobility, secondly to offices and magistracies, and finally to wealth: whereas men desire first of all wealth, then offices in the state, and lastly nobility. What the Roman plebs really claimed was not "connubio, cum patribus" but "connubio, patrum": not the right of connexion by marriage with the nobles—a claim which they would not have wished to make, and was at bottom unimportant—but the right of contracting solemn marriages as the nobles did. For without such solemn marriages, without privilege of the auspices, the plebeians were in fact unable to enjoy the quiritary tenure of land and to transmit it to their families, deprived as they were of descent, kindred and relatives. The demand for connubio was, in a word, simply equivalent to a demand for the rights of citizens, and it was satisfied by the Canuleian law.
The next demand of the plebeians was for privileges depending on public rights. Of these they gained first the imperium together with the consulship, and lastly the offices of priest and pontifex, which carried with them knowledge of the law. In this way the system of seigneurial liberty planned by Servius Tullius grew into a system of popular liberty, and the census, which was originally paid to the patricians, was paid hereafter into the public treasury, out of which the expenses of the plebeians in war were paid. The tribunes now proceeded to demand the power of legislation; for the previous laws, the Horatian and Hortensian, had not made plebiscites binding on the whole people, except upon the two special occasions which led to the secession of the plebs to the Aventine and Janiculum respectively. This new victory, which established the superiority of the plebs and transformed the aristocratic into a popular republic, was the Publilian law due to the Dictator Publilius Philo and decreeing that plebiscites should "be binding on all the Quirites" (omnes quirites tenerent). The authority of the senate came out of the struggle somewhat impaired, for while formerly the fathers had acted as "auctores" for the deliberations of the people, they were now the proposers of law to the people, which the latter then approved according to the formula submitted to them by the senate, or else "antiquated" the proposal (antiquo, to vote against a measure) and decided to make no innovation. Besides this, the plebs won the last office to be conceded to them, that of censor. The Petelian law, a few years later, abolished the last remnant of feudalism, the bond (nexus) which made the plebeians the bondmen of the nobles for debt and often compelled them to spend their lives working in their private prisons.
Some time later, when the division between patriciate and plebs with the corresponding comitia curiata and tributa was replaced by Fabius Maximus's division according to the property of citizens, who were now grouped into three classes of senators, knights and plebeians, the order of the nobles disappeared entirely: "senator" and "knight" were no longer synonymous with "patrician," nor "plebeian" with "base-born." The Senate however preserved sovereign dominion over the finances of the Roman Empire, though the Empire itself had passed to the plebeians; and thanks to the so-called "senatusconsultum ultimum" it maintained this dominion by force of arms as long as Rome remained a popular republic. Whenever the people attempted to take it into their own hands, the Senate armed the Consuls, who forthwith declared traitors and put to death plebeian tribunes who had originated these attempts. This may be explained as a right of feudal sovereignty subject to a higher sovereign, a view confirmed by the language of Scipio Nasica when he armed the people against Tiberius Gracchus: "whoever wishes for the safety of the republic, let him follow the consul" (qui rempublicam salvam velit, consulem sequatur). And indeed, once the road to office was opened by law to the multitude which rules in a popular republic, there was nothing left in time of peace but to contest its rule not by laws but by force of arms, and for those in power to pass laws for self-enrichment like the Gracchan agrarian measures, resulting at once in civil wars at home and unjust wars abroad.
With the triumph of the plebs and the change of constitution from aristocratic to popular, the whole face of society changed. In the first place, the aspect of the family changed. Here, during the rule of the patriciate, testamentary succession was admitted only at a late date and was easily cancelled, in order to keep wealth in patrician hands: kindred even in the seventh degree excluded the emancipated son from the paternal heritage: emancipation had the effect of a penalty: legitimising was not allowed: and it is doubtful whether a woman could inherit. But in the democratic society, since for the plebs wealth, strength and power all depended on the number of their children, family feeling began to grow up, and the praetors began to consider its claims and to satisfy them by means of the "honorum possessiones," thus remedying the faults or shortcomings of wills and facilitating the diffusion of wealth, the only thing desired by the common people.
A change took place, again, in the meaning of the institutions of property. The civil tenure was no longer a matter of public right, but was dispersed among the various private tenures of the citizens now forming the body of the popular state. "Eminent" tenure no longer signifies the strongest kind of tenure, unencumbered by any actual charge, even a public charge, but applies simply to an estate free from any private charge. Quiritary tenure is no longer that of which the noble was feudal lord and under the obligation to aid his client, the plebeian, if ousted from it: it has become a private civil tenure, capable of being defended by a civil suit as opposed to the bonitary which could be maintained by possession only.
The forms of legal process were pruned of the luxurious growth of fictions, solemn formulae and symbolic acts, simplified and rationalised: the intellect, the thought of the legislator was brought into play and the citizens conformed to an idea of a common rational utility, understood as spiritual in value. Causes, which were originally formulae safeguarded by accurate and precise language, became affairs or negotiations solemnised by agreement and, in the case of transference of tenure, by natural tradition; and it was only in contracts said to be completed by word of mouth, that is to say in stipulations, that the safeguards remained "causes" in the strict ancient meaning of the word. Thus the certitude of the law, when the human reason was fully developed, passed into the truth of ideas determined by the circumstances of fact, a "formula devoid of any particular form" (formula naturae, as Varro calls it) which, like a light, informs in all the minutest details of their surface the details of fact over which it extends. In popular republics the ruling principle is the aequum bonum, natural equity.
The harsh punishments of the periods of domestic monarchy and heroic society (the laws of the Twelve Tables condemned those who set fire to another's crops to be burnt alive, perjurers to be thrown from the Tarpeian rock, and insolvent debtors to be cut in pieces while living) were replaced by milder penalties, since the multitude, whose members are weak, is naturally disposed to clemency.
Laws, which under the aristocracy were few, inflexible and religiously observed, multiplied under the democracy and became liable to change and modification. The Spartans, who preserved their aristocracy, said that at Athens they had many laws and wrote them; at Sparta few, but they obeyed them. The Roman plebs, like the Athenian, passed new laws every day, and the attempt by Sulla, the leader of the noble party, to reduce them by the institution of "quaestiones perpetuae" or permanent courts was in vain, for after his time laws were again multiplied.
War itself, which was under the aristocratic republics very cruel and resulted in the destruction of conquered towns and the reduction of the vanquished to the condition of labourers scattered over the country-side and cultivating it on behalf of the victors, was mitigated by the popular republics, which while they deprived the conquered of the rights of heroic society left them in possession of the natural rights of the human race. Empires grew, since a popular republic is much more adapted to conquest than an aristocratic, and a monarchy most of all.
But with all this humanisation of customs, the power of wise rule, political virtue, diminished. The ancient patricians enforced a rigid respect for law; and each, possessing a large share of the public utility, set his own minor personal interests below this greater particular interest, guaranteed as it was by the state. Hence all courageously defended and wisely consulted for the good of the state. In a popular state on the other hand since the citizens controlled the state property by dividing it among themselves into as many small portions as there were citizens in the body of the people, and through the causes which produced that form of state, ease, paternal affection, conjugal love and desire of life, men were led to consider the smallest details favourable to their own private interest; that is to regard nothing but the aequum bonum, the only interest of which a multitude is capable.
At this point arises spontaneously a new form of government, which has long been preparing and has now become inevitable, namely monarchy. The ordinary political writers make monarchy originate, without any of the numerous and complex causes which are necessary to produce it, at the very outset of human history, "as a frog," says Vico, "is born of a summer shower." Still less did it originate artificially by the royal law which Tribonian believes to have deprived the Roman people of its free and sovereign power and conferred it upon Octavius Augustus. The law which brought monarchy into being was a natural law whose formula of eternal validity is as follows: when in a popular republic every one seeks his private interest only and presses the public forces into its service at risk of destruction to the state, to preserve the latter from ruin a man must arise, as Augustus did at Rome (who as Tacitus says "received under his sovereign power the whole state, worn out with civil wars, taking the title of Princeps": qui cuncta bellis civilibus fessa nomine principis sub imperium accepit): a single man, who by force of arms takes in hand all the affairs of the state and leaves his subjects to look after their own affairs or after any public business he may entrust to them; surrounding himself with a small number of statesmen as a cabinet to discuss public questions or principles of civil equity. Such a monarch is welcomed by nobles and plebeians alike: by the nobles, who after having been already humiliated by their subjection to plebeian rule abandon their ancient aristocratic claim to sovereignty and think only of securing a comfortable life; and by the plebeians, who after an experiment in anarchy or unbridled demagogy (than which no tyranny is worse, since it produces as many tyrants as there are bold and dissolute men in the state) are led by their own misfortunes to welcome peace and protection.
Monarchy is then a new form of popular government. In order that a powerful man may become sovereign, it is necessary that the people shall take his side, and that he should rule in a popular manner; making all his subjects equal, humiliating the great to protect the multitude against their oppression, keeping the people satisfied and content as regards the necessaries of life and the enjoyment of natural liberty, and employing a well-balanced system of concessions and privileges granted sometimes to whole classes (in which case they are called "privileges of liberty") sometimes to particular persons, by promoting into a higher class men of unusual merit and exceptional virtues.
In monarchy, a "humane" government no less than democracy, the process of humanisation or softening of customs and laws, already begun under popular republics, still continues. The rigid bonds of the patriarchal family and kinship relax further. The Emperors, who tended to be overshadowed by the splendours of the nobility, made efforts to promote the rights of human nature common to nobles and plebeians. Augustus strove to safeguard the trusteeships by which formerly property had passed to persons incapable of inheritance thanks only to the conscientiousness of the injured heir; he transformed such understandings from a right into a necessity, by obliging heirs to execute them. A number of senatusconsulta followed which placed cognati (relations generally) on a level with agnati (relations through the father). Finally, Justinian abolished the difference between property inherited and property in the hands of trustees, confused the Falcidian quarter with the Trebellian and put cognati and agnati on precisely the same footing as regards inheritance "ab intestato." The latest Roman law was so entirely on the side of testaments that, while originally these could be broken for the slightest cause, they now had to be interpreted in the way most adapted to secure their validity. Once the "cyclopean" right of the father over the persons of his children had disappeared, his economic right over property acquired by them disappeared also; and hence the emperors first introduced the peculium castrense (property obtained during military service) to attract young men to war, then the peculium quasicastrense, to attract them into the praetorian guard, and finally to satisfy those who were neither soldiers nor scholars the peculium adventitium. They deprived the patria potestas of its influence over adoptions, now no longer restricted to the small circle of relations; they uniformly countenanced formal adoption (arrogatio) which was somewhat difficult owing to the difficulty of a father's becoming a subordinate member of another family; they considered emancipation as a benefit and gave to legitimization "by a subsequent marriage" all the efficacy of solemn wedlock. The imperium paternum, as an arrogant title seeming to detract from the imperial majesty, was altered into patria potestas. The humane tendencies of the monarchs extended moreover to that part of the ancient "family" which consisted of slaves: for the emperors restrained the cruelty of masters towards these, and benefited them by increasing the force and decreasing the solemnity of manumission; and citizen rights, which were given originally only to distinguished foreigners who had deserved well of the Roman people, were granted to every one born in Rome, even of a slave father provided his mother were free or enfranchised. Punishments were also made milder, and the monarchs distinguished themselves by the gracious title of "clement." The letter of the law always tended to be more freely interpreted in the light of natural equity, and it may be said that Constantine absolutely cancelled the letter when he laid down the principle that any particular motive of equity should override the law. Thus was attained the precise opposite of the "privilegia ne irroganto" of the Twelve Tables ("that no exceptions be made"): all privileges were exceptions to the law dictated by some particular merit in the facts which lifted them out of the sphere of legal generalisations. The restriction of rights to particular peoples was by degrees abolished: under Caracalla the whole Roman world was converted into a single Rome, since great monarchs desire the whole world to become one city, according to the thought of Alexander the Great, when he said that for him all the world was a single city of which his phalanx was the citadel. The praetor's edict gives place, under Hadrian, to the "perpetual edict" of Salvius Julianus, almost exclusively composed of provincial edicts.
With monarchy, the natural law of races gives place to the natural law of nations; and hence this political, social and juridical form is the most suitable to human nature at its fullest rational development. Here too, as we have already had occasion to remark, we reach again after a long process the unity which existed in the person of the primitive father under domestic monarchy; and the course of national history must be considered as absolutely complete. To go further is impossible: the only possibility, at this stage of the highest human civilisation and refinement, is corruption, the return of barbarism as a "barbarism of reflection" and a relapse into a kind of new state of nature, to return once more into a new and heroic barbarism.