In the short term Servius’ hopes of creating a popularly supported monarchy were to fail. His successor Tarquin the Proud (traditional dates 534-509 Bc) behaved in such a tyrannical way that he was thrown out by the outraged aristocracy in 509. The final straw, according to legend, was the rape of one Lucretia by Tarquin’s son. Rather than be shamed by a false accusation of adultery by her rapist, she chose to commit suicide. (The rape and suicide provided inspiration for many later European artists.) Some kind of power struggle appears to have followed. It may have been now that Lars Porsenna, ruler of a neighbouring Etruscan city, Clusium, attacked Rome. According to one legend, immortalized by the English historian Macaulay in his Lays of Ancient Rome, he was foiled by one Horatius holding a bridge against him, but there are some suggestions in the sources that he may have temporarily taken the city.
The final result, however, was a republican city which was now firmly under aristocratic control. The aristocracy were not necessarily anti-Etruscan. In fact Etruscan cultural influences persisted in Rome for some time. Rather, the elite proclaimed themselves the protectors of Rome against tyranny in general and this became central to the ideology through which they justified their political supremacy. From now on there would be intense suspicion of any individual who tried to use popular support to build personal power.
The aristocracy’s fear of tyranny was revealed in the new government they set up. Supreme power, imperium, in fact all the power originally enjoyed by a king, was now to devolve on two magistrates, the consuls, who would hold power for one year but who could not be immediately re-elected. Each had the right to check the other’s actions. Central to imperium was the right to command an army and it is probably at this time that the single Roman legion was split into two smaller legions with one available to each consul. (The centuries now became units of sixty rather than a hundred men.) Imperium was only effective outside the pomerium, the sacred central area of the city, and armed men could not be led into the city except to celebrate a triumph. (There is an excellent introduction: ‘The Constitution of the Roman Republic’ by J. A. North, in N. Rosenstein and R. Morstein-Marx (eds.), A Companion to the Roman Republic, Oxford, 2006.)
The consuls were elected by the comitia centuriata although their election still had to be given formal approval by the comitia curiata. Competition for office was
Intense and election depended on a shrewd manipulation of votes by the candidate that stopped short of appealing to the populace as a whole (thus arousing the fear of tyranny among the elite). The composition of the comitia centuriata was arranged so that the wealthier classes of soldiers, the cavalry in particular, who voted first and by class, could overrule the poorer classes. A prospective consul thus had to build up support among the more influential citizens. He could do this through his own auctoritas, authority and rank achieved through military achievement, and the status of his family, but a candidate also relied heavily on clients, men who would vote for him in return for protection and favours. (The word ‘candidate’ originates with the custom of prospective consuls dressing in specially whitened togas for the election, earning themselves the name candidati, from the Latin candidus, white.)
As the needs of the city grew other magistracies were established. The quaestors were financial officials. There were originally two but, from 421, four were elected annually. Later as many as twenty would be needed. The censors took charge of the records of citizenship, probably mainly to list those eligible for military service. (The verb censere means ‘to estimate’.) Unlike the other magistracies new censors were appointed only every five years for a period of some eighteen months while they drew up a revised list of citizens. It was an office of great authority later reserved for former consuls. The praetor, a term originally used of the consuls, became a separate post with special responsibility for judicial affairs in 366 Bc. Praetors and consuls were the only magistrates with the right to command an army.
With the magistrates normally confined to a single year of office and the comitia centuriata limited to voting (rather than debating), discussion of policy-making increasingly became the preserve of the senate. The senate had originated as a group of advisers to the kings and most senators were drawn from a group of ancient aristocratic families, the patricians, who also monopolized the priesthoods of Rome. After the fall of the monarchy the members of the senate seem to have been chosen each year by the consuls as their advisers, but the right to decide membership then devolved to the censors. One of them, Appius Claudius, caused outrage in the late fourth century when he tried to pack the senate with men from outside the traditional aristocratic families, and in the reaction that followed it became the custom for the senate to be made up of former magistrates who joined immediately after they had served their term of office. They then remained senators for life. The body thus contained a vast reservoir of collective experience and was to provide an impressive stability and continuity in Roman government during years of tumultuous change. The senate was presided over by a consul or praetor. It had few formal powers but it could express its feelings in a senatus consultum, the advice of the senate, which had no strict legal effect, but which came to be respected as if it did. The assemblies normally only passed legislation after they had heard the senate’s opinion.
In the fifth century the patrician families consolidated their grip on government. Patricians took 90 per cent of the consulships between 485 and 445 BC. However, their growing power was soon challenged by the plebs, plebeians, the mass of citizens who by law or custom had become excluded from the magistracies and the
Senate. The discontent of the plebeian masses was rooted in land hunger, economic distress (in a period of almost continuous warfare), and debt, but there must have been wealthier leaders with the leisure to organize agitation against the patricians. These conflicts over status and access to resources continued for 200 years. The weapon of the plebs was withdrawal from the city, probably to the Aventine Hill, where they set up their own assembly, the concilium plebis. It elected its own officials, the tribunes, eventually ten in number, whose persons were declared sacrosanct and who acquired the right to intervene on behalf of ordinary citizens against the arbitrary use of power by a magistrate.
A patrician family disappeared whenever it failed to produce a male heir. So the 132 patrician families recorded in 509 Bc had dwindled to 81 in 367 Bc. The patricians were in retreat and so had to accommodate themselves to pressures from the plebeians. They recognized the right of the concilium plebis to exist as early as 471 although it was not until 287 that its resolutions (plebiscita, hence the English ‘plebiscite’) were accepted as having the force of law. In the middle of the fifth century plebeian agitation resulted in the recording and publication of the Twelve Tables, the first public statement of Roman law. The magistracies were gradually opened to plebeians, the first plebeian quaestors being appointed in 409. After 342 one consul was always a plebeian. Both consuls were plebeians for the first time in 172 BC.
The plebeians did not achieve a social revolution in Rome, although there were some successes such as the abolition of nexum, a form of debt bondage, at the end of the fourth century. What happened in effect was that the wealthier plebeians became integrated into the ruling classes, the magistracies and the senate. Access to office and hence to the senate by an outsider was possible (the term novus homo, ‘new man, was used of the first member of a family to achieve a magistracy) but comparatively rare and so Rome saw the continued consolidation of oligarchical rule by a limited number of aristocratic families. Even the tribunes were drawn from the wealthier classes, and although the concilium plebis could act as a focus of popular agitation at moments of economic distress it never developed a coherent and sustained role as an opposition.
The cohesion of the state was also maintained through religious ritual. State ceremony was focused on the Capitoline Hill. Tarquin the Elder, the fifth Etruscan king, had laid the foundations of the first temple to Jupiter there and it was at the temple that the magistrates offered sacrifice on taking office and the first meeting of the senate each year took place. The spoils of war were brought here at the end of each triumphal procession by a victorious general. The so-called Capitoline Triad came to be made up, from the fourth century, of Juno, an ancient Italian goddess, associated with the needs of women, fertility, and the sanctity of marriage, who was now venerated as the wife of Jupiter, and Minerva, an Italian goddess of crafts, and each had their own cella within the temple. Another important state god was, perhaps inevitably, Mars, the god of war. Mars gave his name to the month of March, originally the first in the year and the time when military campaigning could begin again after the winter. These state gods were honoured through complex rituals overseen by priests chosen from members of the aristocratic families. Everyday religious activity was
Focused on a wide variety of other gods and spirits. Many of them—for instance, Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, the Lares, spirits of the land who protected the household, the Penates, the gods of the store cupboard—originated in the home and reflected the needs of a community largely dependent on agriculture.
World History
