Plems Romana, page 5
• Praetors, 367 BC: Responsible for the court system and in charge of private law cases concerning the rights of people and property. They too held imperium, were accompanied by lictors and were military commanders. They had the right to consult the gods through the auspices (p. 40).
• Quaestors, sixth century bc?: Romans speculated that these perhaps began under the kings as administrative assistants, perhaps with some legal authority, and then assisted the consuls. They had duties connected with the state treasury, its statutes and documents, and financial affairs. In the main their job was to support the holders of imperium, and they therefore had a wide range of responsibilities.
• Aediles, 494 BC: Appointed by the Concilium Plebis and the Comitia Tributa, they were responsible for the fabric of the city, the upkeep and cleaning of the roads and paths, the distribution of water, and public behaviour. They had responsibility for controlling prices, especially of corn. They also put on games and other large-scale public entertainments (e.g. chariot racing and gladiatorial shows) at their own expense, which could advance their political ambitions.
• Tribunes of the plebs, 494 BC: Their function was to preside at the Plebeian Assembly and to present bills to it for ratification, to assist any citizen who had been seized by an official, and to veto any proposal by an official or the Senate of which the Plebeian Assembly disapproved. They could also prosecute an individual on a wide range of charges, which would be heard before an assembly of all the people.
• Dictator, early fifth century BC: Appointed, usually by a consul, during emergencies, with absolute authority to take charge of the state – and, to prove it, he was accompanied by twenty-four lictors. His period of office was limited to six months, and the other officials acted as his subordinates. The office disappeared after the Second Punic War (202 BC), but was briefly restored during the chaos of the first century BC (p. 188 ff.).
• Censor, 443 BC: p. 45.
The result of this division of responsibilities and limitation of tenure meant that it was very difficult for any one person to establish a real power base. Influence and authority, yes, but permanent, personal imperium, no. That would await the emperors.
THE RESULT OF THE CENSUS
The purpose of the census was to structure the whole of society – including the many ‘new Romans’ created by Rome’s conquests – to create a group solidarity about its military responsibilities.
The long-term result of this reform was to turn Rome into the most formidable fighting force that the ancient world had yet seen. In politics and on the battle line, both patricians and plebs now knew exactly what their responsibilities were to each other and to Rome. In this respect at least, they were now all equal, with the same responsibility of confronting, within their newly defined duties, Rome’s political and military battles.
At the same time, the armaments they possessed did away with any guesswork about what their individual role in battle would be. This sense of one’s individual responsibility, enhanced by regular training and tactical awareness, provided the basis of a discipline unmatched among the other Italian tribes. It is, of course, perfectly true that the Roman army could be beaten. But if it was, there was no doubt about what would happen next: they would be back.
Likewise, the sheer amount of fighting that Rome had to do acted as serious training ground for the patricians of the Roman battle command group.
THE FOUNDING OF THE REPUBLIC?
But at this point, you might be saying: ‘That is all very well, but Servius was the sixth king of Rome, and we know that Rome had seven kings. So what’s all this about consuls already, then? What is going on?’ The answer is – we don’t know. Early Roman history is full of such problems. All we can say is that the ‘Servian constitution’ seemed to click in after the reign of the seventh and final king, in 509 BC. It was then that the patricians became senators, and the top power-brokers in Rome became the two annually elected consuls.
That, believed the Romans, was the start of their republic. It would last 482 years, from 509 BC to 27 BC, the year the first Roman emperor Augustus was proclaimed (during the chaotic period when Livy was writing his history).
SERVIUS OVERTHROWN
The young Lucius Tarquinius, son of the previous Etruscan king, Tarquinius Priscus, was keen to displace Servius and started rumours to suggest that Servius did not have the people behind him.
So Servius made another very significant move. He divided up among the citizens the land that he had gained by conquering enemy peoples. This went down very well with the plebs but was not so popular with the patricians, who regarded ownership of the land as their right – to be parcelled out in any way they chose.
Inevitably, Lucius Tarquinius took advantage of this move to whip up the ‘lesser patricians’ – those who had been appointed to the position by his father – and the wealthy, and then summoned a meeting of the patricians, taking the king’s seat in front of their council chamber.
There he accused Servius of being in league with the lowest classes of society, robbing the wealthy with his latest land reforms and carving up precious land among the riff-raff of the poor. Servius disputed that claim, but Tarquinius picked him up and threw him down the steps of the patricians’ chamber, where he was killed by Tarquinius’ cronies.
534–509 BC: TARQUINIUS SUPERBUS, THE FINAL KING
In the chaos that followed, the Etruscan Lucius Tarquinius was declared Rome’s seventh king, a man who came to be given the moniker Superbus (‘haughty, arrogant, proud’). As king, Tarquinius S.:
• Refused burial to Servius.
• Executed those patricians who had not supported him.
• Appointed a bodyguard.
That last was a move always seen as the mark of the tyrant – a man who had come to power by force, unelected by the people, unsanctioned by any official authority, who could rule only by fear.
Tarquinius S. at once began to try people without any procedures, and condemn to death, exile or confiscation of property those he disliked:
• He drastically reduced the number of patricians and intentionally kept that body weak, ruling without consulting them.
• Alliances were broken or entered upon without the agreement of the patricians or the plebs.
STRENGTHENING ROMAN POWER
But Tarquinius S. was keen to bring the Latins on board, and made an agreement with them to combine the Latin and Roman armies. He rearranged the military units into equal numbers of Roman and Latin troops, with each unit under the command of a Roman centur-ion. The Latins were now fully on Rome’s side, greatly expanding Rome’s power and prestige. At least in this respect, Livy agrees, Tarquinius S. was a success. Further:
• He started waging war against the powerful Volsci, taking the fabulously wealthy town of Suessa Pometia (and then flattening it).
• He used its resources to fund the building of a magnificent temple to Jupiter on the Capitoline, one of the seven ridges of Rome (compare Capitol Hill in Washington, DC);
• He turned his attention to taking the neighbouring town of Gabii – which, Livy says, became so difficult that ‘unlike a Roman, he had to rely on deceit and treachery’. But it worked, and Gabii became Roman.
ROMAN COLONISTS, C. 510 BC
Tarquinius S. now devoted himself to completing his gigantic temple of Jupiter. He called in workmen from Etruria and the poorer Roman plebs, who were happier working on the temple, Livy tells us, than they were slogging away at the Cloaca Maxima and building the Circus (pp. 41–2).
But there were still too many of the ‘idle plebs’ in Rome, who seemed to Tarquinius S. to be a burden on the city. So he sent them out as colonists to various locations around Rome, where they could guard the city by land and sea – in the process, of course, extending the frontiers of his dominions.
A FARMER’S LIFE: SLAVES
Do not appoint that idle and dreamy rank of slaves, accustomed to leisure, the countryside, the circus, theatres, gambling, taverns, and brothels. They never stop dreaming of the same trivialities, which when transferred to agriculture, lead to losses. Choose only someone who has been hardened by rural work from childhood and has been tested by experience, or someone who has endured laborious servitude.
Varro
THE KEY TO POWER:
KISSING YOUR MOTHER
There then occurred a terrifying omen: a snake slid out of the crack in a wooden pillar in his palace. Tarquinius S. decided that nothing less than a visit to the famous oracle at Delphi in Greece would be enough to assess its significance. So he sent off his two sons, accompanied by (Lucius Junius) Brutus, the son of his sister Tarquinia.
Brutus, knowing that he could not trust Tarquinius S., had from a young age pretended to be a dimwit, and had been happy to see all his possessions seized by the king and to be called Brutus (in Latin, ‘thick as a brick’). Presumably Tarquinius S. thought his nephew’s presence would be a way of keeping his sons amused on the journey.
When they had carried out their father’s instructions, his sons could not resist asking the oracle which of them would succeed to the throne in Rome. The oracle replied, ‘The man among you who first kisses his mother.’
The brothers kept this secret to themselves and agreed that, when they got back to Rome, they would draw lots as to who would kiss their mother first. But Brutus thought the oracle had a different meaning – and, pretending to stumble, he fell to the Earth and pressed his lips against it, regarding her as the common mother of all mortals.
509 BC: THE RAPE OF LUCRETIA AND THE END OF THE KINGS
When the brothers returned, they found Tarquinius S. preparing for war against Ardea, a very wealthy town about twenty miles
from Rome, near the sea. He needed the money to refill Rome’s coffers after all his building, but also to appease the plebs, who had been kept hard at work like slaves on his various projects. The initial assault failed, and the Romans settled down to besiege the town.
One evening, a group of young elite soldiers were drinking and thought it would be fun to gallop back to Rome and see what their wives, caught unawares, were up to. So off they went – among them Sextus Tarquinius, one of Superbus’ sons – to find most of their wives at luxurious banquets having fun with their friends. But not Lucretia, the wife of Tarquinius Collatinus. She was wool-working late at night, together with her slaves. Lucretia welcomed them in and fed them, and Sextus was captivated by her beauty and obvious chastity.
A few days later, without telling Collatinus, Sextus returned to the house and was as usual welcomed in, served dinner and shown to the guest chamber. That evening he raped Lucretia and fled. She sent messengers to Collatinus and her father that they should each come at once with a trusty friend: a terrible thing had happened.
Her father brought Publius Valerius; Collatinus brought Brutus. Lucretia described the event. They urged her to understand that it was the mind that sinned, not the body; where there was no intention, there was no guilt. But she said that she could not allow herself to live after such a disgrace and stabbed herself to death. Brutus seized the bloody dagger and swore to destroy Tarquinius S. and his family, come what may: ‘I will never allow any of them, or anyone else, ever again to be King in Rome.’
And so it was done. All the Tarquins were driven out and two consuls were elected by the Servian method – Collatinus and Brutus. By this time, Rome had a population of about 40,000, occupying some 350 square miles – larger than any other city in the region.
CONCLUSION
Livy comments that kings had reigned Rome for 244 years from its foundation to its liberation, and that the theme of his history from now on would be ‘Rome’s achievements in peace and war, their annually elected officers of state and the construction of a legal system superior to the authority of men’.
Clearly, he saw annual rotation of office and a secure legal system as essential features of good government – and these were certainly not typical of the rule of the kings.
Nevertheless, for Livy it was to their credit that the kings had maintained control over what was in those early days of Rome something of a rabble. In fact, Livy judged Rome’s rule by kings as a period of great importance because it fostered a political maturity whose ‘ripened powers bore the good fruit of liberty’. Was that partly down to the fact that none of the early kings had been Roman (Romulus was from Alba)? All were brought in from outside. As has been noted already, that seems to have been one of Rome’s greatest strengths.
Livy was less than enthusiastic about the Roman plebs. That seems slightly out of tune with some aspects of his account of early Rome. After all, on a number of occasions he mentions the plebs’ involvement in making political and social decisions, and never seems to find them wanting in their willingness to fight in support of the kings’ desire to enlarge the Roman state.
But perhaps, in making this overall critical assessment of the Roman plebs as a rabble, it is possible that he was looking to make comparisons with events in the Rome of his day, when law and order had almost entirely broken down.
But Livy does end his reflections on a positive note, when he describes how Brutus not only restored to 300 the number of the patricians in the Senate (after the Tarquins had murdered so many) but also looked outside the rank of ‘patrician’, i.e. to the equites, to do so. This meant that wealthy plebs were now in positions of power equal to the patricians. He concludes: ‘This was wonderfully effective at promoting national concord and uniting plebs and patricians in a sense of common purpose’ (something sadly lacking in Livy’s day).
But the question was: whose side would those patrician-plebs now be on? In the event, that move was not enough to bring about a lasting peace between those two groupings, as Livy would go on to demonstrate as the struggle intensified.
Note: From this point on, Livy was able to date events by the consular fasti. These were the records kept of the names and dates of the Roman consuls, two of whom were elected for every year, and of other important officials, which went back to the start of the republic. There is every reason to believe that these were pretty reliable records, as were the events associated with them. From now on, Livy’s account has a firmer historical basis.
III
THE FOUNDING OF THE REPUBLIC:
509–473 BC
THE PLEBS: AN IMPORTANT NOTE
However positive Livy felt about the introduction of wealthy plebs into the patricians, a far greater division in the ancient world was that between the rich and the poor. That is the really important distinction, because the poor not only vastly outnumbered the rich; they also made up the great majority of the troops fighting the battles that kept Rome safe, thereby extending Rome’s control of resources and so wealth. That is what gave the poor their possible influence over events.
THE CLANS/TRIBES
Note: This guide gives some idea of the system as Livy himself would have understood it in the first century BC. Elements of it appeared perhaps as early as the sixth century BC.
Every Roman citizen belonged to a clan/tribe, by assignment or heritage, of which the number increased from three in Romulus’ day to thirty-five (four urban tribes, thirty-one rural tribes). Freed slaves, who became partial citizens, automatically joined an urban tribe.
For the purpose of voting, citizens gathered in the Forum, or on the Capitoline ridge – or later, as Rome grew, on the Campus Martius (an area covering 600 acres, or roughly 340 soccer pitches). There they were grouped by tribe. They would know what the ‘either/or’ issue was because it had already been discussed in an assembly (see below).
Officials then asked each tribe in turn to vote for its decision, probably by raising hands, or shouting, or (from the late second century BC) by secret ballot. Voting ended as soon as eighteen tribes had made the same decision.
The two tribal decision-making assemblies were:
• The Comitia Tributa: This assembly of plebs and patricians elected lower officials (military tribunes, quaestors, aediles), enacted legislation proposed by officials, and adjudicated on non-capital cases, fines, appeals, etc. Voting was by tribe (trib-uta), not by wealth. That meant it was dominated by plebeian votes to create plebeian officials.
• The Concilium Plebis: This body, founded in 494 BC, passed plebiscites, laws relating originally just to the plebs, but after 287 BC to everyone; elected inviolate plebeian tribunes to protect the plebs’ interests in the Senate; adjudicated on cases involving plebeians; and generally legislated to advance plebeian interests. It is sometimes known as the (Plebeian) Tribal Assembly.
The Comitia Centuriata worked differently. It elected the highest state officials (e.g. consul, praetor), passed laws, determined war or peace, heard appeals on capital trials, ratified censuses and dealt with religious issues. Its electorate consisted of all Roman citizens categorized by wealth into (eventually) 193 ‘colleges’ (called ‘centuries’, hence the title). Each ‘college’ had one vote. The wealthiest ‘colleges’ numbered 98 and therefore controlled 98 votes. The remaining ‘colleges’ therefore numbered 95 votes. (On all this, see p. 48.)
How many citizens actually turned up to vote in the first century BC cannot be estimated. Guesses range from 5,000 to 20,000, from a population (more guesses) of 400,000–500,000. At the time we are dealing with here, Rome’s population was around 40,000.
THE LAST OF THE TARQUINS
The first thing that Brutus did as consul was to propose that his fellow consul Tarquinius Collatinus be removed from office because of his associations with the Tarquins. He brought the issue before the assembly of the plebs, assuring Collatinus that he would lose none of his possessions and would still remain a friend. Collatinus finally agreed and went into exile, being replaced by Publius Valerius, who had been present when Lucretia killed herself (p. 57).
