The Historians' History of the World 05

In the records of the first century and a half of the republic the development of the state system and administration from this primary and general basis and the modifications it underwent during the growth (slow at first and then more rapid) of the power and greatness of Rome, are obscured by the fact that a struggle for higher political employment—i.e., over the question whether it should be extended from a close corporation of burgesses (the patricians) to the whole body of citizens—is intermingled with a struggle between aristocracy and democracy for changes in the character of the system and administration itself. This twofold aspect has not been clearly perceived by later writers,[136] and was probably not adequately brought out in the brief historical records of remote antiquity. We shall probably not be wrong in assuming that the patricians, though gradually forced to resign their class privileges, and the institutions and ordinances associated with them, such as the comitia curiata, continued to maintain aristocratic interests and institutions by assuming more and more the position of nobles and allying themselves with the most prominent plebeian families; while the plebeians, as long as they were engaged in the struggle for equal rights, asserted the interests of democracy and extended democratic principles to the whole working of the state.

The first step in the change and development of the older system which had survived the abolition of monarchy, a step which decided the whole subsequent course of the movement, was the creation of an office for the benefit of the less privileged citizens, the tribunate of the plebs (tribunatus plebis), an office which had originally no executive functions but was charged with the protection of the individual citizen and the control of the action of the magistracy. By degrees the tribunate acquired an initiative, first as the medium of the demand of the less privileged citizens for equal rights, and then as the promoter of the interests of the common people and of a general democratic tendency in legislation and administration. The latter function came more decidedly into the foreground when the struggle between patricians and plebeians had been fought out (after 366-300 or 286), though for a considerable time it manifested itself only in constitutional opposition to everything that bore the semblance of encroachment on the part of the senate or of magisterial authority.

But although a twofold initiative had thus come into being in the legislature, that of the consulate in the comitia curiata, relying mainly on the support of the senate, and that of the tribunate in the comitia tributa, legalised by the lex Publilia in 339, the government preserved its aristocratic character during the period between the formation of a confederated state (340-338) and the end of the Punic War, the senate retaining a strong executive authority and an undisturbed supremacy in all affairs, general and particular, without any signal interference on the part of the people beyond what was sanctioned by ancient usage; the reason for this being that only in exceptional cases did the tribunes advance legislative proposals in direct opposition to the will of the senate.