[33] Perhaps the result of a partial conquest. Cp. Mommsen, vol. i, ch. 6, ad init., as to the precedence of the Palatine priests over those of the Quirinal.
[34] So Ihne, Early Rome, p. 5.
[35] Cp. Pelham, ch. iii. Ihne, who argues that the narratives concerning the Etruscan kings are no more trustworthy than those as to their predecessors, recognises that Pliny's record of the humiliating conditions of peace imposed on the Romans by Porsenna "would not have been made if the fact of the subjugation of Rome by an Etruscan king had not been incontestable" (Early Rome, p. 79; cp. pp. 85-86).
[36] Cp. Mérimée, Études sur l'histoire romaine, t. i, Guerre sociale, 1844, p. 352 sq.; Mommsen, B. ii, ch. i (i, 265).
[37] Cicero (De Officiis, ii, 12) and Sallust (cited by Augustine, De Civ. Dei, iii, 16) preserved the belief (accepted by Niebuhr) that the oppression of the poor by the rich had been restrained under the kings. Cp. Mahaffy (Problems in Greek History, pp. 81-83; Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. p. 83) and Wachsmuth (Hist. Antiq. of the Greeks, Eng. tr. i, 416) as to Greek despots. And see Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, ii, 203, as to the weakness of Rome through class-strifes after the expulsion of the kings.
[38] Greenidge, pp. 47-48; Mommsen, i, 72.
[39] Greenidge, pp. 147, 262, 273.
[40] Niebuhr, Lect. xxv, 3rd Eng. ed. p. 134. So Ihne, Early Rome, p. 80; and also Schwegler, ii, 200. Mommsen takes the traditional view. Cp. Shuckburgh (History of Rome, p. 71), who remarks that the battle was at least not a decisive victory. Meyer (Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 812) gives no verdict.
[41] The demand for the admission of plebeians to the consulate was thus met on the patrician plea that religion vetoed it. Only in 367 was it enacted that one of the two consuls should always be a plebeian.
[42] Plebeians first admitted to the Quæstorship, 421 B.C.; to the Military Tribuneship, 400; to the Consulate, 367; to the Dictatorship, 356; to the Censorship, 351; to the Prætorship, 337. This left the patricians in possession of the important privilege of membership of the sacred colleges. But that, in turn, was opened to plebeians in 300 or 296.