Licinio-Sextian laws were passed in their original form. The greatest of plebeian victories had been won; from this time the Plebs is really the dominant element in the state. It was of little consequence that it did not assert its omnipotence for some years yet; all that it desired further was bound to come. As the magistracy was far more powerful than the people at Rome, the body that exercised the whole of the highest prohibitive power through the tribunate, and monopolised half of the highest positive authority in the consulship, was bound to be supreme. Even the purely patrician privilege of the patrum auctoritas was no great disturbance to this power. It became more a matter of form, the more the plebeian element entered into the Senate.
The Licinian laws had the unexpected effect of adding two new magistracies to the state. These were known as the Praetorship and the Curule Aedileship. The institution of the former office was a constitutional change of the first magnitude, being nothing less than the addition of a third colleague to the consuls. It is represented as having been a part of the compromise between the orders, the Plebeians allowing a third purely patrician magistracy to be created in exchange for the confiscated consulship.[1] But, even if we assume that the praetorship was originally confined to the patres—a statement which has with some reason been doubted[2]—it was necessity rather than ambition which directed the creation of the office. The impossibility of the consul's paying adequate attention to duties of jurisdiction had been one of the motives which led to the establishment of the consular tribunate. Now that the consulship was permanently restored, provision had to be made for the permanent severance of civil jurisdiction from that office. As jurisdiction implied the imperium, and all the possessors of
- ↑ Liv. vi. 42 "concessum . . . a plebe nobilitati de praetore uno, qui jus in urbe diceret, ex patribus creando," probably by a clause introduced into the Licinian rogations when they were submitted by the consul to the Populus (see p. 97). The true motive is given by Pomponius in Dig. 1, 2, 2, 27, "Cum consules avocarentur bellis finitimis neque esset, qui in urbe jus reddere posset, factum est ut praetor quoque crearetur, qui urbanus appellatus est, quod in urbe jus redderet."
- ↑ Mommsen (Staatsr. ii. p. 204) doubts it, chiefly on the ground that no law is mentioned as opening the office to Plebeians thirty years later. Probably the same doubt hung over the praetorship as over the second place in the consulship, i.e. whether the Licinian law, by reserving one consulship to the Plebs, had left the other posts open to both orders or not.
