Roman Public Life

by A. H. J. Greenidge

To effect this object, and at the same time to make a concession to the Plebs, it was decided to replace the consulship by the office of military tribune with consular power (tribunus militum consulari potestate).[431] The change, permission for which may have been granted by a special lex,[432] consisted in raising some of the ordinary legionary delegates of the consul to a level with the commanding officer and suppressing the latter.[433] These extraordinary officials were elected at the comitia centuriata under the presidency of one of the chief magistrates, whether consul or consular tribune, for the time being. The normal number, six, was no doubt suggested by the six tribunes of the old legio or army. But this full number was not always appointed. The question how many military tribunes should be created for a given year depended on the exigencies of the state. Sometimes three were elected, sometimes four, at other times six, a number which seems never to have been exceeded.[434] It rested formally with the magistrate who guided the elections, practically perhaps with the Senate, to determine how many of these officers should be appointed for any given year. As military posts below the supreme command had long been opened to the Plebs, it goes without saying that Plebeians were eligible to the consular tribunate; their admission, in fact, had been one of the motives of the change.[435] Yet the patrician element was almost exclusively present in the earlier years of this magistracy, and to the end of the office it largely preponderated. Even if we reject the account that it was not until forty-five years after the institution of the consular tribunate (400 B.C.) that a Plebeian was actually elected to this post,[436] it is a significant fact that while purely patrician colleges are found, there is no instance of one composed exclusively of Plebeians. This fact may be simply a demonstration of the aristocratic character of elective office, and shows that the masses preferred the safety of the state to the advancement of their own order; for military skill and experience, and even knowledge of law, were still chiefly to be sought in the ranks of the patres.[437] Gradually, however, the Plebs became familiarised with power and displayed greater trust in the leaders of their own order. The year 400 does in any case mark a turning point in the history of the office. After it we find more Plebeians elected; in 399 and 396 they form a majority of the college, and events were tending to the demand, which was soon to be made, that a place in the supreme magistracy should be reserved for candidates who represented a majority of the citizens.

The power exercised by the consular tribunes was, briefly, that of the consuls; they had the same jus, imperium, and potestas,[438] and they enjoyed their insignia.[439] They presided over the elections for their successors, and took the auspices on these occasions, the recognition of a Plebeian’s right to consult the people auspicato breaking down the last barriers of religious prejudice.[440] If this magistracy was considered inferior in dignity to the consulship and only a “shadow” of that high office,[441] it must have been only because it was shared by more colleagues, and from a conviction of its occasional character. Yet it was noted as a curious fact that, from constitutional reasons unknown even to the early annalists, no consular tribune had ever enjoyed a triumph.[442]

It must not be supposed that the consulship was in any way abolished by this exceptional magistracy; it was simply kept in suspense during certain years. Each year it was decided afresh whether consuls or military tribunes should be appointed. Tradition represents the decision as resting with the Senate;[443] but whether it exercised this function by law,[444] or merely as the advising body of the magistrate who was to hold the election, is unknown. This discretionary power shows that the tribunate was regarded as an exceptional office; but its military and political convenience caused it practically to replace the consulship during the years when it was in vogue. The period of the military tribunate is one of seventy-seven years, extending from 444 to 367. These years show twenty-two consular collegia, and fifty-one of military tribunes.[445] The stop-gap lasted for half a century, and the compromise was maintained until in 367 a final settlement of the plebeian claim was reached.

Meanwhile the consulship had been modified in yet another way—one which was detrimental to the power of the office, but was meant to preserve influence to the Patriciate. In the institution of the censorship we find at work the same double motive which had influenced the government in creating the consular tribunate—the sense that two men could not manage all the business of a growing state, and the desire not to share with the Plebeians the unimpaired powers of the supreme office.

It had been the custom for the king, and subsequently for the consuls, to make an estimate, at certain intervals of time, of the effective military strength of the state. This was originally a registration of all the patrician burgesses; but, after the Servian reforms, it became a numbering of all the citizens, for the purpose of discovering those liable to military service, the class in which they should be enrolled, and, in case of tribute being imposed, the liability of each household to the property-tax (tributum). For these purposes it was sufficient for the heads of families (patres familiarum) to be summoned and questioned. Their answers formed the record, in accordance with which military and financial burdens were imposed, and political influence in the comitia centuriata was determined. The recognition of citizenship itself was dependent on this enrolment, for it is probable that from the earliest times membership of a tribe was the symbol of the possession of civic rights; while now the fact that the tribe was the basis of the concilium plebis and the comitia tributa gave a vote to every one enrolled in one of the tribus. The importance which the census had assumed was not compatible with the consular performance of its duties. The judicial and military functions of the annual magistrates interfered both with its regularity and its completeness, and the temporary suspension of the consulship offered a chance of vesting these duties in other magistrates. In the year 443 B.C. two new officials, called censores, were created,[446] who were to be elected by the comitia of the centuries. The office was to be confined to the Patriciate, possibly because it was felt that the solemn ceremony of purification (lustratio) which closed the census could not adequately be performed by plebeian hands. No one as yet dreamed of the future greatness of the office; its beginnings were small,[447] and the tribunes offered no opposition to the law which established an office which was to become the greatest of political prizes.

The censorship, though a standing, was in a certain sense an occasional office, for the tenure of power by the censors could never have been coterminous with the interval between each census—an interval usually of five years. The original tenure is unknown; possibly the censor was supposed to continue in office until his duties were fulfilled. It was not until the year 434 B.C. that the censorship was limited to a definite term of a year and a half by a lex Aemilia, proposed by the dictator Mamercus Aemilius.[448] The censors’ duties were as wide as the ramifications of the census. His primary function was that of registration, but one of the meanings of registration was the imposition of pecuniary burdens on individuals; hence the censor’s first connexion with finance. Another consequence of registration was of still greater import. Qualifications of character must always have been considered a necessary condition for the performance of even the meanest public functions at Rome. Admission to the centuries and to the tribes, and therefore the exercise of the active rights of voting and serving in the army, was possible only to one not stained by crime. The secular ground, one quite sufficient for a self-respecting community, was perhaps assisted by the religious idea that no impure man should be present at the mystic ceremony of purification. Such a testing of character could have been performed only in the most cursory way by the consuls. But now that a magistracy had been appointed which had leisure for a rigorous scrutiny, it was inevitable that the rule of manners (regimen morum) should in time overshadow every other aspect of the censor’s office, and that this dual papacy should become the most dignified and dreaded organ of the state.

Beyond the establishment of the consular tribunate, the censorship and the transference of the election of quaestors to the newly created comitia tributa,[449] the years 449 to 377 are not marked by any great constitutional changes. They were years of compromise but not of settlement; the restlessness of the reforming party was stayed by the constant pressure of war. It could not accuse the military policy of the governing class, which led its armies to victory and made all needful concessions to plebeian talent. It was the epoch of wars with the Aequians, Volscians, and Etruscans, of the siege of Veii, in which Rome made her first great territorial conquest, and of the Celtic migrations, which laid Rome in ashes, but made her the bulwark of the central Italian nations against northern invasions, and gave her strength to remodel and reform the Latin coalition of which she was the immediate head. Occasional discontent was at this, as at every other period, excited by the need of land distributions and the pressure of debt. Sp. Maelius fell in 439 and M. Manlius in 384; but the government, though it would not have its hand forced, was not wholly unwilling to make concessions to poverty. The citizen troops on foreign service were given pay in 406, and the land conquered from Veii was some years later allotted amongst the Plebs. While the discontent of the poor was thus kept in check, the government could afford to make harmless and unavoidable concessions to Plebeians of higher rank. In 421 the number of quaestors was raised from two to four; for, owing to the prolonged absence of armies, it was thought fit that a special quaestor should be assigned to each consul in the field.[450] The tribunes demanded that a fixed proportion of these places should be reserved for Plebeians. This was refused, but the compromise was arrived at that any of the four places might be filled from the Plebs, a concession which was unavoidable, for the absurdity of admitting Plebeians to the highest rank in the state and excluding them from this subordinate duty must have been felt. The permission did not, however, take effect until twelve years later (409 B.C.); but then Plebeians were returned for three out of four vacancies at the comitia of the tribes.[451] The first regular elective magistracy, however limited its powers and dignity, had now been won for the Plebeians.

Meanwhile the provisional government drifted on. It won military successes; it was gradually building up a hegemony in Italy. But the effect of war now, as at an earlier period, was ruinous to those to whom this government had to look for support. In spite of the palliative measures of pay for the army and occasional land distribution, a large portion of the yeoman farmers were again in a pitiable state. We cannot now speak of the social grievances of Plebeians as a whole; those members of the Plebs who began to occupy the benches of the Senate,[452] and who aspired to the military tribunate or quaestorship, were as wealthy as their patrician compeers. The race for office was keen between the members of the two orders. The Patrician had now to beg for his place on the curule chair. The first law against canvassing (ambitus) was passed in 432; it prohibited a candidate from whitening his toga with chalk before the elections[453]—a primitive measure, but one which shows that the plebeian electorate had at last become a power. But though isolated members of the Plebs were soaring into the upper regions, the mass of this body still consisted of bankrupt agriculturists. The situation which they regarded as desperate was, apart from the harsh law of debt, the normal condition of a modern proletariate. But the ideal of the ancient citizen was higher than our own; they wished to be proprietors of freehold land or of land held on an undisturbed tenure from the state.

This discontent was the opportunity of the richer Plebeians,[454] who wished to secure perfect political equality between the orders. In 378 loud cries were raised against the capitalists; a war with the Volsci gave the tribunes the chance of impeding the military levy, and some temporary concessions to debtors were unwillingly wrung from the government.[455] When the next year saw the burdens reimposed, two ambitious Plebeians, L. Sextius and C. Licinius Stolo, came forward with the proposition that the only sure way of permanently remedying the evils of the lower class was by securing one of the places in the consulship to members of their own order. They formulated a programme which was an attractive jumble of social and political measures. The plebiscitum which they promulgated promised a temporary relief from debt, proposed a limit to the amount of public land which any individual might possess, and declared that the military tribunate should be abolished, the consulship should be restored, and that one of the two consuls must henceforth be a Plebeian. This comprehensive measure, which attacked land, capital, and office,[456] was easily met. The two tribunes stood alone, and their eight colleagues were without difficulty induced to put their veto on the revolutionary measure. But it was soon shown that, if the veto might be used against the interest of the Plebs, the negative powers of the tribunes might be employed, with as much legality and as little justification, to paralyse the life of the state. The two tribunes, in virtue of the paramount authority which their sacrosanctitas had in the course of years secured to them, forbade the election of any magistrate of the people. For five years successively Licinius and Sextius were re-elected tribunes; during the whole of this period (375-371) the only magistrates appointed were the plebeian aediles and tribunes, and the state was without a head. A war with Velitrae led the tribunes to relax their anarchical edict for the year 370. But the long stand had reduced the number of vetoing tribunes to five. Another clause was now added to the original proposals to the effect that the two duumviri sacris faciundis, the keepers of the sacred books, the storehouse which furnished political intrigue with its surest weapons, should be raised to ten, and that half of these decemviri should be Plebeians.[457] None of the tribunes of 368 seems to have been prepared to offer any effectual resistance to any of the provisions of the law,[458] and the Patricians, driven from their first stronghold, took refuge in a dictator. It was a sign that they had lost the game, for the dictatorship could not be perpetuated. But it required the most strenuous exertions of the leaders of the Plebs to keep their followers up to the level of their original demands. The spiritless commons who had failed to elect members of their own order, consular tribunes and quaestors, when it had been in their power to do so, were for dividing the proposals, passing the social measures at once and leaving the question of the consulship for a future time. But Licinius and Sextius were not prepared to be social leaders without reward. The only division to which they subjected the complicated measure was to carry in 368 the clause sharing the new decemvirate with the Plebeians; the other clauses were postponed. In the next year, 367 B.C., they were tribunes for the tenth time. The opposition was worn out, and the Licinio-Sextian laws were passed in their original form. The greatest of plebeian victories had been won; from this time the Plebs is really the dominant element in the state. It was of little consequence that it did not assert its omnipotence for some years yet; all that it desired further was bound to come. As the magistracy was far more powerful than the people at Rome, the body that exercised the whole of the highest prohibitive power through the tribunate, and monopolised half of the highest positive authority in the consulship, was bound to be supreme. Even the purely patrician privilege of the patrum auctoritas was no great disturbance to this power. It became more a matter of form, the more the plebeian element entered into the Senate.

The Licinian laws had the unexpected effect of adding two new magistracies to the state. These were known as the Praetorship and the Curule Aedileship. The institution of the former office was a constitutional change of the first magnitude, being nothing less than the addition of a third colleague to the consuls. It is represented as having been a part of the compromise between the orders, the Plebeians allowing a third purely patrician magistracy to be created in exchange for the confiscated consulship.[459] But, even if we assume that the praetorship was originally confined to the patres—a statement which has with some reason been doubted[460]—it was necessity rather than ambition which directed the creation of the office. The impossibility of the consul’s paying adequate attention to duties of jurisdiction had been one of the motives which led to the establishment of the consular tribunate. Now that the consulship was permanently restored, provision had to be made for the permanent severance of civil jurisdiction from that office. As jurisdiction implied the imperium, and all the possessors of this regal prerogative were necessarily colleagues, the praetor was a colleague of the consuls. He was created, as the phrase ran, “under the same auspices,”[461] and therefore by the same assembly and under the same formalities of election. He bore the early title of the consuls, which, in spite of its inappropriateness to his usual peaceful duties, came to cling to him exclusively. But, though he was needed chiefly for purposes of jurisdiction, one branch of the imperium could not be singled out to the exclusion of the others. The praetor possesses all the aspects of the supreme power, the capacity for command in war, for initiating legislation, for summoning and transacting business with the Senate. How these powers were harmonised with, and subordinated to, the similar powers of the consuls, will be described elsewhere. The main business of the original praetor did not clash with that of his colleagues, for, though in theory perhaps the consul never did lose his control of civil jurisdiction,[462] practice decided against his interference with it, and the praetor was for more than 120 years (366-242) the sole civil magistrate of Rome. At the close of this period a second praetor was appointed, whose duty it was to decide cases between foreigners (peregrini) and between Roman citizens and foreigners—an addition rendered necessary by the growth of Rome’s territory and business, and which has no further political significance.