It was in the period following the passage of the Licinian Laws that the greatest inequalities in wealth began to appear at Rome, and the numbers of free small landowners to decrease.
The history of the Licinian Laws and of the following period show conclusively how mere political equality is never sufficient to secure the welfare of the mass of the community, and that the power held by a class possessed of great wealth, but without special political privileges, is greater than that of a recognized nobility, and far more apt to be abused, on account of the absence of any feeling of class honor.
Two slight efforts were made by the patricians to counteract the political provisions of the Licinian Laws. For the first eleven years after the passage of the Licinian Laws one consul was a plebeian and one a patrician. In the thirteen years beginning with 355 B.C., two patricians were elected consuls in eight of the years; after this, violations of the law ceased, and one consul belonged to each order down to the year 172 B.C., when both consulships were open to the plebeians. The wealthy class of both orders had been so mingled by this time that thereafter consuls were elected indiscriminately from either order, although this election was almost invariably restricted to the members of the great families.
Immediately after the passage of the Licinian Laws the patricians secured the creation of a new office. The man holding this office was called prætor, and was given the judicial powers formerly belonging to the consuls. At a later period the number of prætors was increased to two, one of whom, known as the prætor urbanus, had jurisdiction over controversies between Roman citizens, and the other, the prætor peregrinus, who had jurisdiction over controversies between foreigners residing at Rome and between Romans and foreigners.
CHAPTER V
The Period of Foreign Conquest
The most glorious period of Roman history, from the military standpoint, followed closely upon the cessation of fierce national contests in the fourth century before Christ. The united efforts of patricians and plebeians, devoted to the task of foreign conquest, proved sufficient in a few generations to win for Rome her world empire.
"The fifth century is the most beautiful century of Rome. The plebeians had conquered the consulship and are succeeding in conquering their admission to other magistracies which the patricians wished to reserve; they free themselves from the servitude which, under the name of Nexus, weighed on the debtors. They arrive at political equality and individual independence; at the same time the old aristocracy still dominates in the Senate and maintains there the inflexibility of its resolves and the persistence of its designs. It was thanks to this interior condition that the Roman people was able to survive the strongest tests from without over which it had triumphed, and to make that progress which cost it most dear. We see the peoples fight, one by one, and often all together; the Latin people, the Etruscans, the Goths, the Samnites, the other Sabellic peoples of the Apennines; and the end is always victory. The beginnings of this history were somber. Rome was afflicted by one of those pestilences which one finds in all the epochs of the history of this unsanitary city. Thence was the origin of those scenic pieces imported by the Etruscans and giving origin to comedy—a means devised to appease the gods; so that Roman comedy had an origin religious and dismal. The fifth century is for Rome the age of great devotions and of grand sacrifices." (J. J. Ampère in L'empire romaine à Rome.)