The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 05

by Unknown

POPULAR INSTITUTIONS

Other good and popular institutions were ascribed to the reign of Servius. As he had made the commons an order in the state, so he gave them judges out of their own body to try all civil causes; whereas before they had no jurisdiction, but referred all their suits either to the king or to the houses. These judges were, as Niebuhr[c] thinks, the centumviri, the hundred men of a later period, elected three from each tribe, so that in the time of Servius their number would probably have been ninety.

To give a further organisation to the commons, he is said also to have instituted the festivals called Paganalia and Compitalia. In the tribes in the country, many strongholds on high ground, pagi, had been fixed upon as general refuges for the inhabitants and their cattle in case of invasion. Here they all met once a year to keep festival, and every man, woman, and child paid on these occasions a certain sum, which being collected by the priests gave the amount of the whole population. And for the same purpose, every one living in the city paid a certain sum at the temple of Juno Lucina for every birth in his family, another sum at the temple of Venus Libitina for every death, and a third at the temple of Youth for every son who came to the age of military service. The Compitalia in the city answered to the Paganalia in the country, and were yearly festivals in honour of the Lares or guardian spirits, celebrated at all the compita, or places where several streets met.

Other laws and measures are ascribed to Servius, which seem to be the fond invention of a later period, when the commons, suffering under a cruel and unjust system, and wishing its overthrow, gladly believed that the deliverance which they longed for had been once given them by their good king, and that they were only reclaiming old rights, not demanding new ones. Servius, it is said, drove out the patricians from their unjust occupation of the public land, and ordered that the property only, and not the person, of a debtor should be liable for the payment of his debt.

Further, to complete the notion of a patriot king, it was said that he had drawn out a scheme of popular government, by which two magistrates, chosen every year, were to exercise the supreme power, and that he himself proposed to lay down his kingly rule to make way for them. It can hardly be doubted that these two magistrates were intended to be chosen the one from the houses and the other from the commons, to be the representatives of their respective orders.

Ruins of a Temple of Saturn, Rome

But the following tyranny swept away the institutions of Servius, and much more prevented the growth of that society for which alone his institutions were fitted. No man can tell how much of the story of the murder of the old king and of the impiety of the wicked Tullia is historical; but it is certain that the houses, or rather a strong faction among them, supported Tarquinius in his usurpation: nor can we doubt the statement that the aristocratical brotherhoods or societies served him more zealously than the legal assembly of the curiæ; because these societies are ever to be met with in the history of the ancient commonwealths, as pledged to one another for the interests of their order, and ready to support those interests by any crime. Like Sulla in after-times, he crushed the liberties of the commons, doing away with the laws of Servius, and, as we are told, destroying the tables on which they were written; abolishing the whole system of the census, and consequently the arrangement of the classes, and with them the organisation of the phalanx; and forbidding even the religious meetings of the Paganalia and Compitalia, in order to undo all that had been done to give the commons strength and union.

Further it is expressly said by Dionysius[e] that he formed his military force out of a small portion of the people, and employed the great bulk of them in servile works, in the building of the circus and the Capitoline temple, and the completion of the great drain or cloaca; so that in his wars, his army consisted of his allies, the Latins and Hernicans, in a much greater proportion than of Romans. His enmity to the commons was all in the spirit of Sulla; and the members of the aristocratical societies, who were his ready tools in every act of confiscation, or legal murder, or mere assassination, were faithfully represented by the agents of Sulla’s proscription, by L. Catilina and his patrician associates. But in what followed, Tarquinius showed himself, like Critias or Appius Claudius, a mere vulgar tyrant, who preferred himself to his order, when the two came into competition, and far inferior to Sulla, the most sincere of aristocrats, who, having secured the ascendency of his order, was content to resign his own personal power, who was followed therefore by the noblest as well as by the vilest of his countrymen, by Pompey and Catulus no less than by Catiline.

Thus Tarquinius became hated by all that was good and noble amongst the houses, as well as by the commons; and both orders cordially joined to effect his overthrow. But the evil of his tyranny survived him; it was not so easy to restore what he had destroyed as to expel him and his family; the commons no longer stood beside the patricians as an equal order, free, wealthy, well armed, and well organised; they were now poor, ill armed, and with no bonds of union; they therefore naturally sank beneath the power of the nobility, and the revolution which drove out the Tarquins established at Rome not a free commonwealth, but on the other hand an exclusive and tyrannical aristocracy.