Roman Public Life

by A. H. J. Greenidge

§ 1. The Growth of the City

In the developed political life of Italy there is a survival of a form of association known as the pagus[1]—an ethnic or, at least, a tribal unit, which is itself composed of a number of hamlets (vici, οἶκοι). This district with its group of villages perhaps represents the most primitive organisation of the Italian peoples engaged in agriculture and pastoral pursuits.[2] The pagus seems to resemble the tribe (tribus) of the fully formed city-state,[3] while the vicus may often have represented, or professed to represent, a simple clan (gens). In the centre of the district lay a stronghold (arx, castellum), in which the people took shelter in time of danger.

There are, indeed, traditions of isolated units still smaller than the pagus. The clan is sometimes pictured as wandering alone with its crowd of dependants.[4] But migration itself would have tended to destroy the self-existence of the family; the horde is wider than the clan, and the germ of the later civitas must have appeared first, perhaps, in the pagus, later in the populus which united many pagi. The union may have been slight at first, and may often have been based merely on the possession of some common shrine. Much of the civil and criminal law was administered within the family in the form of a domestic jurisdiction which survived in historical Rome; but a common market would involve disputes, and these would have to be settled by an appeal to an arbitrator (arbiter) even before the idea of a magistracy was evolved. Lastly come military necessities whether of defence or aggression. It is these that create a power which more than any other makes the state. The mild kingship of the high-priest of the common cult gives way to the organised rule of an imperium, and the king, praetor or dictator, is the result, the coherence of infant organisation being dependent on the strength of the executive power.

In the earliest city of Rome, to which we are carried back by tradition or archaeological research, this development has already been attained. The square city (Roma quadrata) was the enclosure of the Palatine, the “grazing-land” of the early Roman shepherd;[5] the bounds of the oldest pomerium were known in later times to have been the limits of this site,[6] and traces of the tufa ring-wall may yet be seen. From this centre the city spread in irregular concentric circles.[7] Traces of ritual have preserved a memory of a city of the seven hills (Septimontium)—not those of the Servian Rome, but five smaller elevations, three (Palatium, Cermalus, Velia) on the older city of the Palatine, and two (Oppius, Cispius) on the newly-included Esquiline; while two valleys on the latter (Fagutal and Subura) also bear the name montes,[8] and are, with the sites that really deserve the name, inhabited by the montani, who are distinguished from the pagani, the inhabitants of the lower-lying land beneath. It is not impossible that these seven “hills” were once the sites of independent or loosely connected villages (vici, or perhaps even pagi) which were gradually amalgamated under a central power, and, as the walls of the state could never have been coterminous with its territory, each successive enclosure must show the incorporation, voluntary or enforced, of a far greater number of smaller political units than those which the fortifications directly absorbed. Modern inquirers, following up a further hint supplied by the survival of a ritual, have held that there was another advance before the epoch of the Servian Rome was reached, and that what is known as “the Rome of the four regions” survives in the sites associated with the chapels of the Argei,[9] and is preserved in the administrative subdivisions of the city to the close of the Republic.[10] To form these regions the Caelian, the Quirinal, and the Viminal hills were added, while the Capitol with its two peaks now became, not indeed a part of the town, but, as the “head” of the state, its chief stronghold and the site of its greatest temples. The final step in the city’s growth was the enclosure associated with the name of Servius Tullius, a fortification extending beyond the limits of the true pomerium, which added to the city the whole of the Esquiline to the north-east, the Aventine to the south-west, stretched to the west to the bank of the Tiber where the Pons Sublicius crosses the river, and formed the enceinte of Republican Rome.

It is possible that an amalgamation of slightly different ethnic elements may be associated with this extension of the city. That a difference of race lay at the basis of the division of the primitive people into their three original tribes was believed in the ancient, and has often been held in the modern world. The Tities (or Titienses) were supposed to be Sabine,[11] the Ramnes (or Ramnenses) Roman; the Luceres were held by some to be also Latin, by others to be Etruscan. There is, however, a rival tradition of the artificial creation of these tribes by the first Roman king,[12] and, when we remember the arbitrary application in the Greek world of tribe-names that had once been significant,[13] we may hold it possible that the great συνοικισμός typified by the name of Romulus was not accompanied by any large alien intermixture with the primitive Latin population. The existence of Sabine gods like Sancus, or Sabine ritual as typified in Numa Pompilius, is no more evidence of Sabine intermixture than the early reception of Hellenic deities is of Greek;[14] and though it is possible that a Sabine tribe once settled on the Quirinal, and it is almost certain that at the close of the monarchical period an Etruscan dynasty ruled in Rome, yet the language, religion, and political structure of the early state were of a genuinely Latin type. There was, indeed, contact with peoples more developed in material civilisation or more gifted in their spiritual life, and to this contact the debt of Rome was great. Rome adopts the Chalcidian alphabet; she receives early Greek divinities such as Hercules, Castor, and Pollux; she models her statue of Diana on the Aventine on that of Artemis at Massilia; she imitates the Greek tactical organisation in her early phalanx. But it is very doubtful whether the obligation extended to the reception of the political ideas of Hellas. Parallels between Roman and Hellenic organisation may be observed in certain institutions such as the equites and the census; but these are military rather than purely political, and in all the fundamental conceptions of public law—the rights of the citizens individually and collectively, the power of the magistrate and the divine character even of secular rule—Rome differed widely from the developed Greek communities with which she was brought into contact, and seems in her political evolution to have worked out her own salvation. The more developed civilisation of Etruria doubtless filled up certain gaps in her political and religious organisation both by contact and by rule. The strength of the religious guilds (collegia) of Rome may be due in part to an imitation of the Etruscan hierarchy; the refinements of the science of augury may also be Tuscan; and tradition, as we shall see, derives from the same source the insignia of the Roman king.

§ 2. The Elements of the Population—Patricians, Plebeians, Clients

The free population of Rome as a developed city-state was composed of the two elements of Patricians and Plebeians. The ultimate source of this distinction, which is undoubtedly anterior to the foundation of the city, can only be a matter of conjecture; but the origin of the Patriciate may probably be explained as the result partly of earlier settlement, partly of superior military prowess. The warriors within the pale receive the new settlers, but only on certain conditions; these conditions are perpetuated and become a permanent badge of inferiority. The happiest guess of the many made by Roman antiquarians as to the origin of the Patricians was that they were originally the “free-born” men (ingenui), the men who could point to fathers (patres) and in their turn become full heads of families[15]—the men in short who, at a time when the family with its juristic head, and not the mere individual, was the true unit of life, were the only full citizens of Rome. Such men alone could be partners in the true ownership of property, or sue and be sued in their own right,[16] and such an exclusive right to a full personality in private law they claimed in virtue of their public services or privileges—the duty of taking the field on horseback or in heavy armour, the right of uplifting their voices in the assembly when they acclaimed a king or ratified a law.

The whole free community, other than the patres or Patricians, is regarded as the “complement” of the latter, “the multitude” (plebs, plebeii) which, with the fully privileged class, makes up the state.[17] It is possible that, in a very primitive stage of Roman history, these Plebeians may all have been in the half-servile condition of clientship; but, even when the earliest records of Rome are revealed to us, this has ceased to be the case. Not only has the son of the original client evolved a freedom of his own, but a man may become a plebeian member of Rome without subjecting himself to the degradation of clientela. No less than five ways are described or can be imagined in which the non-citizen could become a citizen, and at least one of these reveals the possibility of the perfectly free Plebeian. In the old life of the pagus and the gens, the weaker sought protection of the stronger by a willing vassalage, which ripened, when the state was formed, into the Plebeiate which had its origin in clientship. A similar position was ultimately gained by the descendant of the manumitted slave. The stranger (hostis) from a city which had no treaty relations with Rome, or no relations which guaranteed a mutual interchange of citizenship, must, if he wandered to this new home, also make application to a patron and become his client. It is less certain what was the fate of the inhabitants of a conquered city who were violently deported to Rome. The annalists, indeed, represent such men as being received into the citizen body, and as becoming members of the tribe and the curia;[18] but it is probable that in the prehistoric period they became clients, immediately of the king to whom they had made their subjection, ultimately perhaps of patrician houses to which he chose to attach them as dependants.[19] In all these cases clientship may have been the original lot of the Plebeian; but this could hardly have been the fate of the immigrant who moved to Rome from a city which already possessed the jus commercii with that state, and by the exercise of the right of voluntary exile from his native land (jus exulandi) claimed the Roman civitas. The existence of such relations between Rome and cities of the Latin league is attested for a very early period, and they may even have been extended to cities outside the league.[20] As the jus commercii implies the right of suing and being sued in one’s own person before Roman courts, there seems no reason why such an immigrant should make application to a Roman patron;[21] but, if he did not, he was in the chief aspects of private law a perfectly free man, and illustrated a status to which the quondam-client must from an early period have tended to approximate. Where the right of intermarriage (jus conubii), as well as the right of trade, was guaranteed in a treaty between Rome and some other town, it is questionable whether this gift ever implied the possibility of matrimonial union with members of the Patriciate. It is at least certain that, at the time of the Twelve Tables (451 B.C.), and therefore probably from a very early period, a disability common to all the Plebeians was that they might not intermarry with members of patrician clans. Yet, although there was this great gulf parting the two orders, it was possible for either class to be transferred to the status of the other. We shall see that tradition represents a vote of the Patricians in their assembly as a means sufficient to recruit their order by the addition of a new family; while, after the Plebs had evolved an assembly of its own, a transitio ad plebem might be effected by an act of that body.[22] Adoption from a patrician into a plebeian family produced the same result.

That the clientship of which we have spoken was not peculiar to Rome, but was an old established Italian institution, is a truth reflected in the legend of the gens Claudia which moved from Regillum to Rome with a vast multitude of dependants.[23] It is separated by but a thin line from slavery. While the latter was based on conquest in war, the former was probably the result of voluntarily-sought protection in the turmoil of a migratory life, or perhaps at times the consequence of the suzerainty of a powerful village being extended over its weaker neighbours. In the developed state the principal object of this relation is legal representation by the patronus, for the client possesses no legal personality of his own. For the condition of the client we can but appeal to that of the slave and the son of the family. Such property as he possessed may have been merely a peculium, the small accumulation of cattle and means of husbandry which his master allowed him to form; had the client wronged a citizen, we may assume that his body might be surrendered in reparation of the damage (noxae deditio); the origin of Roman occupation of land on sufferance (precario) may perhaps be traced to the permission by the patron to till a little plot of land which might be resumed at will;[24] in default of direct heirs (sui heredes) such personal belongings as the client possessed may have fallen to the members of the protecting clan (gentiles), for it was to the clan rather than to the family that he was attached.

The description which we possess of the mutual obligations of patrons and clients,[25] although it contains many primitive elements, obviously refers to a time when the client was allowed to possess property of his own and was often a man of considerable wealth, but when, in spite of this power, he does not seem to have appeared in person in the public courts. It was the duty of the Patricians to interpret the law to their clients, to accept their defence in suits, and to represent them when they were plaintiffs.[26] The client, on the other hand, was bound to help to dower the daughter of the patron if the latter was poor; to pay the ransom if he or his son were captured by enemies; and, if his lord was worsted in a private action or incurred a public fine, to defray the expense from his own property. If any of these duties were violated by the client, he was held guilty of treason (perduellio), and as the secular arm suspended him from the unlucky tree, so the religious power devoted to the infernal gods the patron who had woven a net of fraud for his dependant.[27] Even after the effective infliction of religious sanctions had disappeared, the duty to the client ranked only second to that which was owed by a guardian to his ward.[28] The earliest clientship was strictly hereditary; but the bond must have become weaker with successive generations, after the evolution of plebeian rights, and at a time when clientes themselves possessed votes in the comitia curiata.[29] Nay, the Plebeian at this period may himself be a patron, and his attainment of full citizenship in private law must have been held to qualify him for this duty of protection. Yet the client body still continues to be recruited by new members; for the antique form of applicatio still exists, and the manumitted slave owes duties to his patron. We know too that in the fourth and third centuries the patronal rights over the freedman extended to the second generation.[30]