Roman Public Life

by A. H. J. Greenidge

But, in spite of this unholy alliance of the ancient foes, the distinction between the orders never was abolished. In Cicero’s time the separate rights of the Patricians could still be enumerated and defended by the orator. Besides the shadowy and ineffective powers of the patrum auctoritas and the interregnum, they possessed half the places in the great priestly colleges, which were shared between the orders, and certain priests—the Rex Sacrorum, the three great Flamines and the Salii—were chosen exclusively from their ranks.[508] The place of the Patriciate in the theory of the constitution—as illustrated by the auctoritas and the interregnum—is, as we shall see, very great indeed; but this theoretical importance conferred very little power, and the Plebeians, with their exclusive magistracies closed to the patres, with one place reserved for them in the consulship and censorship and the other accessible to their order, had won in the long race for honours.

CHAPTER III
THE CLASSES OF THE POPULATION AND THE THEORY OF THE CONSTITUTION IN THE DEVELOPED REPUBLIC

§ 1. The Classes of the Population

By the date of the lex Hortensia (287 B.C.) the Republican constitution had, in all essential points (considered as the constitution of a city-state), completed its growth; but, before we proceed to examine the theory and practice of the developed polity, it is necessary to pause and inquire what changes these centuries of Republican development had made in the status of the citizen, and in that of the other classes of the city, who shared partially in, or were excluded from, his rights, and what modifications had been undergone by the few main legal rules which mark the outline of their social environment.

The merging of Patricians and Plebeians into one community created the necessity for a universal conception of citizenship applicable to the whole body which possessed active political rights, while the growing practice of granting partial civic rights to the members of certain Italian communities led to the distinction between the fully-privileged and the partially-privileged citizen. The former is the civis optimo jure, the latter the civis non optimo jure. It is only of the former that we shall speak here; the consideration of the latter will be more appropriately deferred to that portion of our work which treats of the Italian confederation.

The normal mode of the acquisition of citizenship was naturally birth, either from two citizens or from a citizen and a foreigner. The question of the necessity of the marriage of the parents for the full citizenship of the children we shall soon consider; the primary question that presents itself to a nation is that of the allegiance of the child who is the product of a citizen and a foreigner. In such a case the older principle of Roman law (an instance probably of a universal principle of Italian law) was that, where conubium existed between the parents, the children followed the status of the father; where conubium did not exist, nature dictated that they should follow the condition of the mother.[509] But an arbitrary exception to this principle was made at an unknown date in Roman law by a lex Minicia which enacted that, in case of unions without conubium between a Roman and a foreigner, the children should follow the status of the less privileged parent; the child of a civis Romana by a peregrinus was, therefore, himself a peregrinus.

The exceptional modes by which citizens were created were (i.) state-conferment of the civitas on peregrini or of full civitas on cives non optimo jure, and (ii.) the manumission of slaves.

(i.) State-conferment of the civitas was only an exceptional measure in so far as it required a special legislative act.[510] The extraordinary liberality of Rome in this respect, never equalled in the life of the ancient city-state—a liberality which spread the name of Roman citizen first over Italy and then over the greater part of the civilised globe—was not an outcome of any suddenly adopted policy, but persisted from the birth of the city[511] to the world-embracing edict of Caracalla (212 A.D.). A few figures are sufficient to represent the extent of the increase effected by this means. The male citizens who appeared on the census rolls were, at the close of the first Punic war (240 B.C.), 260,000; in 124 they had risen to 394,726; in 85, after the incorporation of the greater part of Italy, to 963,000.[512] Under Augustus (28 and 8 B.C. and 14 A.D.) the figures were 4,063,000, 4,233,000, and 4,937,000; and the census of Claudius (47 A.D.) gave a return of 5,984,072 civium capita.[513]