The idea of clientship is that of a wholly private relation; the clients were something to their respective patrons, but to the state they were nothing. But wherever states composed in this manner, of a body of houses with their clients, had been long established, there grew up amidst, or close beside them, created in most instances by conquest, a population of a very distinct kind. Strangers might come to live in the land, or more commonly the inhabitants of a neighbouring district might be conquered, and united with their conquerors as a subject people. Now this population had no connection with the houses separately, but only with a state composed of those houses: this was wholly a political, not a domestic relation; it united personal and private liberty with political subjection. This inferior population possessed property, regulated their own municipal as well as domestic affairs, and as free men fought in the armies of what was now their common country. But, strictly, they were not its citizens; they could not intermarry with the houses; they could not belong to the state, for they belonged to no house, and therefore to no curia, and no tribe; consequently they had no share in the state’s government, nor in the state’s property. With whatever belonged to the state in its aggregate capacity, these, as being its neighbours merely, and not its members, had no concern.
Such an inferior population, free personally, but subject politically, not slaves, yet not citizens, was the original plebs, the commons of Rome.[12]
The mass of the Roman commons were conquered Latins. These, besides receiving grants of a portion of their former lands, to be held by them as Roman citizens, had also the hill Aventinus assigned as a residence to those of them who removed to Rome. The Aventine was without the walls, although so near to them: thus the commons were, even in the nature of their abode, like the Pfahlbürger of the Middle Ages—men not admitted to live within the city, but enjoying its protection against foreign enemies.
It will be understood at once, that whatever is said of the people in these early times, refers only to the full citizens, that is, to the members of the houses. The assembly of the people was the assembly of the curiæ; that is, the great council of the members of the houses; while the senate, consisting of two hundred senators, chosen in equal numbers from the two higher tribes of the Ramnes and Tities, was their smaller or ordinary council.
Within the walls every citizen was allowed to appeal from the king, or his judges, to the sentence of his peers; that is, to the great council of the curiæ. The king had his demesne lands, and in war would receive his portion of the conquered land, as well as of the spoil of movables.
THE STATUS OF THE MONARCHY
The dominion and greatness of the monarchy are attested by two sufficient witnesses; the great works completed at this period, and still existing; and the famous treaty with Carthage, concluded under the first consuls of the commonwealth, and preserved to us by Polybius.[f] Under the last kings the city of Rome reached the limits which it retained through the whole period of the commonwealth, and the most flourishing times of the empire. What are called the walls of Servius Tullius continued to be the walls of Rome for nearly eight hundred years, down to the emperor Aurelian. They enclosed all those well-known Seven Hills, whose fame has so utterly eclipsed the Seven Hills already described of the smaller and more ancient city.
The line of the mound or rampart may still be distinctly traced, and the course and extent of the walls can be sufficiently ascertained; but very few remains are left of the actual building. But the masonry with which the bank of the Tiber was built up, a work ascribed to the elder Tarquinius, and resembling the works of the Babylonian kings along the banks of the Euphrates, is still visible. So also are the massy substructions of the Capitoline temple, which were made in order to form a level surface for the building to stand on, upon one of the two summits of the Capitoline Hill. Above all, enough is still to be seen of the great cloaca or drain, to assure us that the accounts left us of it are not exaggerated. The foundations of this work were laid about forty feet under ground, its branches were carried under a great part of the city, and brought at last into one grand trunk which ran down into the Tiber exactly to the west of the Palatine Hill. It thus drained the waters of the low grounds on both sides of the Palatine; of the Velabrum, between the Palatine and the Aventine; and of the site of the Forum between the Palatine and the Capitoline. The stone employed in the cloaca is in itself a mark of the great antiquity of the work; it is not the peperino of Gabii and the Alban hills, which was the common building stone in the time of the commonwealth; much less the travertino, or limestone of the neighbourhood of Tibur, the material used in the great works of the early emperors; but it is the stone found in Rome itself, a mass of volcanic materials coarsely cemented together, which afterwards was supplanted by the finer quality of the peperino. Such a work as the cloaca proves the greatness of the power which effected it, as well as the character of its government. It was wrought by task-work, like the great works of Egypt; and stories were long current of the misery and degradation which it brought upon the people during its progress. But this task-work for these vast objects shows a strong and despotic government, which had at its command the whole resources of the people; and such a government could hardly have existed, unless it had been based upon some considerable extent of dominion.
What the cloaca seems to imply, we find conveyed in express terms in the treaty with Carthage. As this treaty was concluded in the very first year of the commonwealth, the state of things to which it refers must clearly be that of the latest period of the monarchy. It appears then that the whole coast of Latium was at this time subject to the Roman dominion: Ardea, Antium, Circeii, and Tarracina, are expressly mentioned as the subject allies (ὑπήκοοι) of Rome. Of these, Circeii is said in the common story to have been a Roman colony founded by the last Tarquinius; but we read of it no less than of the others as independent, and making peace or war with Rome, during the commonwealth down to a much later period. Now it is scarcely conceivable that the Romans could thus have been masters of the whole coast of Latium, without some corresponding dominion in the interior; and we may well believe that Rome was at this time the acknowledged head of the Latin cities, and exercised a power over them more resembling the sovereignty of Athens over her allies than the moderate supremacy of Lacedæmon. On the right bank of the Tiber the Romans seem to have possessed nothing on the coast; but the stories of Etruscan conquests which we find in the common accounts of Servius Tullius, are so far justified by better testimony as to make it probable that in the direction of Veii the Roman dominion had reached beyond the Tiber, and that the territory thus gained from the Etruscans formed a very considerable part of the whole territory of Rome. It is well known that the number of local tribes established by the later kings was thirty; whereas a few years after the beginning of the commonwealth we find them reduced to twenty. Now, as even the common account of the war with Porsenna describes the Romans as giving up to the Veientines a portion of territory formerly conquered from them, it becomes a very probable conjecture that the Etruscans, soon after the expulsion of the kings, recovered all the country which the kings had taken from them; and that this was so considerable in extent, that by its loss the actual territory of the Roman people was reduced by one-third from what it had been before.