In the year 286, the Romans conquer Antium, or, according to another more probable account, Antium opens its gates to them. In the narrative as we have it, the town is Volscian, and part of the population fly to the Volscians at Ecetræ. Antium, just like Agylla and the other towns on the coast, was originally Tyrrhenian; yet there may have been a party uppermost in it, which, feeling itself too weak, called in the Volscians, and Ecetræ, the south-eastern capital of this people, may have sent a colony thither. This colony again was opposed by part of the citizens; these called in the Romans, and the Volscians returned to Ecetræ. The Volscians now wished to regain what they had lost, and thence arose these obstinate wars. After Antium had surrendered to the Romans and their allies, it received a colony of Romans, Latins, and Hernicans,—a proof, that these three people divided their conquests in equal shares. It is evident enough how this is perverted in Dionysius: Livy thinks that too few Romans had liked to go thither. Antium was now linked to the three confederates. The old Antiates formed the commonalty, and the citizens of the three united states its colony, there being probably three hundred from each, and four hundred from the Hernicans only; for among these the division into four seems to have been prevalent, whence also the cohortes quadringenariæ are mentioned. The Antiates mille milites, who are met with in the later Volscian wars, seem to have reference to this colony. But as the Romans at that time were not the strongest in the field, and the old inhabitants were always badly off in a colony, it is quite accountable, that Antium after ten years should have fallen off again, in the same manner as it had joined the Romans.
This success of the Romans in the war was but transitory. Here ends our first period, and these contests now assume quite a new character.
The Æquians, who at that time must have been a great people (Cicero also calls them gens magna), seem until then to have taken little share in the war: yet by the loss of Antium, not only the Volscians of Ecetræ were roused to vigorous exertions, but also the Æquians. Over the disasters of the Romans which followed, a veil has been drawn. The enemy appear to have advanced to the confines of the Roman borders; in another place, we find the Volscians in the neighbourhood of Velitræ; and now they are every year on the Algidus, and get possession of the Arx of Tusculum, which is only with difficulty wrested from them. Several Latin towns utterly disappear: Corioli is destroyed; Lavici becomes an Æquian town; Gabii was as late as in Dionysius’ times devastated within its walls; Præneste is no more spoken of, and, when after a hundred years it is mentioned again, it is hostile to Rome; the nearest places only, as Tusculum and Lavinium, remain with the Romans; Rome’s boundary is on the other side of the hills of Tusculum, Circeii, Velitræ, Norba, and other places farther to the east, are lost. Thus it is certain that more than half of Latium is conquered; by the Æquians, from the Anio, and by the Volscians, from the sea shore.
We find some sort of allusion to this in the story of Coriolanus; for the Romans tried to console themselves by attributing these victories to one of their own countrymen, as indeed is so natural. Yet the whole story of Coriolanus is for all that neither more nor less than a poem, in which on one man and into one period events are concentrated which are spread over several years; and besides this, it is dated too early. However hard pressed the Romans may have been, it is not to be supposed that whilst the enemy were marching victorious from one town to the other, there should have been nothing said either of consuls or of armies sent against them. Only in the enumeration of the places which were destroyed, have we the intimation of those, which after the breaking up of Latium became Volscian.
The Volscians advanced so far that men and beasts had to be brought within the walls of Rome, and a plague arose from this crowded state of the city. Lowness of spirits always makes people susceptible to epidemics. Thus in the Peloponnesian war, it was the despair of the Attic peasants, at seeing from the battlements their farms set fire to, and their olive groves cut down, which developed the seeds of the epidemic; the yellow fever at Cadiz in 1800 grew much more violent from the despondency of the host of people which had flocked in without any means of livelihood. The unfavourable season,—it was in August,—the unwonted manner of life, the effluvia from the cattle, the want of water and of cleanliness, might have contributed much to the breaking out of the plague; yet it is likely that the great epidemic, which thirty years later broke out in Greece, and afterwards in Carthage, had begun already then. The mortality was very great; it was a true pestilence, not a mere fever, which might have been brought on by passing the night in the open air. There died the two consuls, two of the four augurs, the Curio Maximus, the fourth part of the senate, and a countless number of citizens of all ranks; so that the dead carts did not suffice even to throw the corpses into the river. They were cast into the sewers by which the evil became still greater. In the meanwhile, the Volscians and Æquians were overrunning Latium. The Latins resisted, but suffered a terrible defeat in the valley of Grotta Ferrara. In the following year, we read nothing of victories: the disease may have attacked the enemy also, and Rome thereby been saved. After some years, the plague shows itself again.
The details of the accounts of this war are in part deserving of no notice whatever: many of them were invented only very late, in order to enliven with some cheerful images that dismal time. The scene of the wars is always on the Algidus, which is not a mountain, but a cold rugged height extending several leagues between Tusculum and Velitræ, where the different streams divide, which partly flow towards the Liris and the Pontine marshes, and partly towards the Anio. Horace says, nigræ feraci frondis in Algido. The country round is barren, and was in olden times, as is it to this day, overgrown with evergreen holm oaks. It was several years ago the constant haunt of robbers, so that I did not see it; but I have gathered very accurate information concerning it. Here the Æquians and Volscians always appear, and unite their armies. Here also is the scene of the poetical tale of the victory of Cincinnatus over the Volscians. This, at least in the form in which it has been handed down to us, belongs to a very fine cycle of legends; but it is connected with the earlier events which happened at home.
The Publilian law could not remain without consequences unfavourable to peace. The great grievance was the unlimited rule of the consuls. The consuls had come into the place of the kings, and though restricted as to time, in their power they were hardly beneath them, the consequences of which became apparent when there was an enlistment of troops. As the tribunes were now authorized to propose laws, it was first moved by C. Terentilius Harsa to appoint five men who were to draw up a law declaring the limits of the consular authority. This undertaking was very difficult to carry out. In reality, the supreme power can never be perfectly defined, and least of all in free republics: it ought to have a certain degree of pliancy, in order to admit of extraordinary expedients. The Roman republic acknowledges this principle in the formula, videant Consules, ne quid detrimenti res publica capiat, which in the earlier times was something quite ordinary; and in such conjunctures the limits of lawful use or of abuse could not be easily laid down. This is one of those points with regard to which we may fully understand, how with the greatest honesty on both sides, people may have spoken for and against. At the same time, if there existed a difference of opinion, it ought not to have been envenomed. The question may, however, from the very beginning have had a wider meaning: it was perhaps intended by it to divide the consulship equally between the two orders.
During the first year, the commotions were still moderate; in the next they grew more violent, since another tribune, according to Dionysius’ account, again took up the lex Terentilia, but with this addition, that Decemvirs,—five from the Patres, and five from the plebeians,—were to make a general revision of the laws. The legislations of old did not only comprehend civil and criminal law and judicial procedure, but political law besides, and even transient measures also. Solon’s legislation, for instance, was a complete alteration of the constitution; but it likewise contained regulations concerning matters of quite momentary interest, as for the payment of debts. The idea so lately in vogue, that general legislations were to issue from a great assembly of men learned in the law, was quite foreign to the ancients, who were well aware, that a few only ought to discuss the laws, and the larger assembly merely to adopt or reject, inasmuch as it had to sanction them. This is the natural course of legislation, and for this reason the ancients for the most part held the principle, that lawgiving ought to be quite independent of magistracy. In all the republics of antiquity, one or a few were appointed to make the laws, and the people said yes or no. It was the same among the Romans: ten men were to be nominated legibus scribundis, to whom moreover consular power was to be granted. When we see from the remnants of the Roman laws, how lengthy a single statute was, the fact is easily accounted for that few only read them; yet the majority did not know in the least what was spoken of, and thus republican form in such transactions is necessarily a mere phantom.
Dionysius has this very happy expression, that the Romans had aimed at ἰσονομία, and that they had attained to ἰσηγορία.[101] From an occasional remark of Tacitus we know, that the ancient laws were for the most part ascribed to kings, Romulus, Numa, Tullus, and Ancus. This shows, that each of the three old tribes and the Plebes had their own peculiar law which was derived from their first founders. These tribes and the Plebes, which had originally been separate civic communities, had retained their old statutes when they united into one state. I think I have been told of more than a hundred sets of statutes, all of which, before the revolution, were in force in the States of the Church. Many a village in Italy which does not number a hundred hearths, has its own common law: Abbate Morelli has collected three hundred different varieties of statutes in Italy. This is likewise the case in many districts of Germany; yet there are also very large tracts of country there, in which one and the same law of the land prevails. It cannot even be stated with certainty whether the whole of the Plebes had the same law; whether in places like Medullia and Politorium a different system was not in vogue. This seems indeed to be contradicted by the fact that Servius Tullius swept away every difference among the plebeians; but on the other hand it seems confirmed by the circumstance that there were towns like Cameria and others, which existed as Coloniæ Romanæ, and formed separate communities. The ancients had a tradition according to which the clause in the Twelve Tables, that the Fortes and the Sanates were to have equal rights, applied to certain places, as for instance, to Tibur.
On the establishment of such an equality, the chiefs of the Plebes might very well insist, as the disadvantages of this difference of usages must have been great enough to have been very severely felt. Abolition of all that constituted a glaring and oppressive inequality was the object of this reform, and this the tribunes might certainly demand. Still there existed no connubium between patricians and plebeians; the child took its rank from the parent of the worse blood (deteriorem partem sequi). Thus in the Italian cities, Lombards, Franks, Romans, and others, lived together for centuries under their own peculiar laws; but this, by its very inconvenience, afterwards gave rise to the statute law with equal rights.