in one common blow the common antipathy of the countryside and themselves towards the money economics of the city.
The counterstroke came quickly; it is recognizable in the number ten of the tribunes who appear after the withdrawal of the Decemvirs,[1] but there were other events too that cannot but have belonged with it — the attempt of Sp. Mælius to set up a Tyrannis (439), the setting-up of Consular Tribunes by the army in place of the civil officials (438), and the Lex Canuleia (445) which made an end of the prohibition of connubium between patricians and plebeians.
There can be no doubt, of course, that there were factions within both the patrician and the plebeian parties which would have liked to upset this fundamental trait of the Roman Polis, the opposition of Senate and Tribunate, by abolishing the one or the other; but the form turned out to be so right that it was never seriously challenged. With the enforcement by the Army of plebeian eligibility to the highest offices (399) the contest took a quite different turn. The fifth century may be summed up, under the aspect of internal politics, as that of the struggle for lawful Tyrannis; thenceforward the polarity of the constitution was admitted, and the parties contended no longer for the abolition, but for the capture, of the great offices. This was the substance of the revolution that took place in the period of the Samnite Wars. From 287 the Plebes had the entrée to all offices, and the proposals of the tribunes, when approved by them, automatically became law; on the other hand, it was thenceforward always practicable for the Senate by corruption or otherwise to induce some one tribune to exercise his veto and thus to deprive the institution of its power. It was in the struggle of two competent authorities that the juristic subtlety of the Romans was developed. Elsewhere decisions were usually by way of fist and bludgeon — the technical word is "Cheirocracy" — but in this "best" period of Roman constitutional law, the fourth century, the habit was formed of using the weapons of thesis and interpretation, a mode of contest in which the slightest points of legal wording could be decisive.
But Rome was unique in all Classical history in this equilibrium of Senate and Tribunate. Everywhere else it was a matter not of swaying balance, but of sheer alternatives, namely Oligarchy or Ochlocracy. The absolute Polis and the Nation which was identical with it were accepted as given premisses, but of the inward forms none possessed stability. The victory of one party meant the abolition of all the institutions of the other, and people became accustomed to regard nothing as either venerable enough or useful enough to be exempt from the chances of the day's battle. Sparta's "form," so to say, was senatorial, Athens's tribunician, and by the beginning of the Peloponnesian War,
- ↑ According to B. Niese. Modern investigators are right in the view that the Decemvirate was at first intended to be temporary; but the question is — what were the views of the party that backed them concerning the new constitutional order that was to follow. It was on that that a crisis had inevitably to come.
