This right of intercession soon assumed a high significance. Without actual legal right to resist the laws passed by patrician rulers the tribunes yet could, by simply declaring their readiness to support the plebeians in their passive stand against the demands of senate and consuls for troops of war, offer effectual opposition to the enforcement of the state’s decrees. In this way they came to have a widely extended power of intervention, and at an early date they claimed the right of being present at all meetings of the senate. Unquestionably the mass of the citizens would gladly have seen the plebeian tribunes driven from office, and on both sides party hatred ran high. In this period tradition, untrustworthy as history, places the murder (473) of Genucius, the tribune, and the legend of Coriolanus.
SPURIUS CASSIUS AND THE FIRST AGRARIAN LAW
[494-466 B.C.]
The taxation abuses and the tyranny of the laws regulating debt, as well as the monopoly by patricians of state domains, had been allowed to go uncorrected until 494. In this year a high-minded citizen, Spurius Cassius Viscellinus, who was appointed consul for the third time in 486 and who then brought about the alliance with the Hernicans, as he had earlier, in 493, brought about that with the Latins, took an important conciliatory step in agrarian matters by proposing that the public lands be surveyed and given out in grants to the poorer plebeians, the remaining portions to be rented to patricians under much stricter conditions of payment than formerly. His law, it appears, was passed, but was never actually enforced.[22] Out of revenge his compeers hurled at him the accusation, fatal in republican Rome, of having aspired to mount the throne; and in the following year at the expiration of his term of office he was sentenced to death.
From this time until 466, when it was again driven into oblivion by the pressure of outside wars, the tribunes demanded the full enforcement of the Lex Cassia. Important advance in the development of the constitution was meanwhile made in another direction. With the institution of the tribunes, the informal, irregularly held meetings of the peasant assemblies were organised into the officially recognised diet of the whole plebeian body, which excluding the patricians and their clients (the latter now casting in their votes with the plebeians in the centuriata, thus considerably strengthening the position of the patricians in this assembly) broke up into smaller assemblies presided over by their tribunes and called the comitia tributa (or assembly of the tribes) from the twenty-one district tribes into which the new organisation had divided the plebeians. These assemblies or comitia offered an opportunity to the tribunes gradually to educate the commonalty up to the high political standard set by the ablest of the plebeians.
In this manner alone could the plebeians develop their full strength and importance as a class, since all the advantages conferred by ancient tradition and political routine, by a clear insight into their own needs, and a firmly established social, religious, and political position, were on the side of the patricians, the plebeians having further to contend against the disadvantage of being widely scattered over a great extent of territory and of having received no preparatory political training or instruction. It was precisely these hindrances to the advancement of their people that the more active among the tribunes set about to overcome. A series of truly notable plebeian statesmen now came to the fore, the most prominent among them being the Icilii, the Virginii, and later the Duilii.
[492-452 B.C.]
As early as 492 an Icilius had passed a law making it a punishable crime to interrupt or in any way disturb the tribunes when in the act of laying their criminal decisions before the plebeians in the assembly of the tribes. Furthermore the tribunes, preventing as they did any violent interruption of the process of development by holding the plebeians, in all their upward strivings, strictly to the line of legal right, came to be the most powerful factor in the gradual development and formation of the Roman constitution. In domestic legislation they also constantly took the initiative, being chiefly concerned in gaining for the tribal assembly and their proceedings—which latter as merely “legislative monologues” had hitherto remained without result—a recognised position in the magistracy of the state. The centuriate assembly was at that time of comparatively little service to the plebeians. The plebeians eligible to vote greatly outnumbered the patricians of the same class; yet the arrangement of “voices” in the centuriata was such that the patricians largely predominated. The first census class consisted of eighty centuries, the mass of the members possessing the least means being united into one, while the second, third, fourth, and fifth census classes—those formed of the peasantry of the middle class—were divided up into ninety centuries.
Punishment of Cassius[23]