Book XI.
Chap. 15, & 16.self a citizen, because each had the tye of a parent. The senate and people resumed a liberty which had been committed to ridiculous tyrants.
No people were so easily moved with spectacles as the Romans. The impurpled body of Lucretia put an end to the regal government. The debtor who appeared in the public market place covered with wounds, caused an alteration in the form of the republic. The decemvirs owed their expulsion to the fight of Virginia. To condemn Manlius, it was necessary to keep the people from seeing the capitol. Caesar's bloody garment flung Rome again into slavery.
CHAP. XVI.
Of the legislative Power in the Roman Republic.
THERE were no rights to contest, under the decemvirs: but upon the restoration of liberty, jealousies revived; and as long as the patricians had any privileges left, they were sure to be dripped of them by the plebeians.
The mischief would not have been so great, had the plebeians been satisfied with depriving the patricians of their prerogatives; but they also injured them as citizens. When the people assembled by curia's or centuries, they were composed of senators, patricians, and plebeians. In their disputes the plebeians gained this point[1], that they alone without patricians or senate should enact laws called plebiscita; and the comitia in which they were made, had the name given them of comitia by tribes. Thus there were cases in
- ↑ Dionys. Halicarn. Book 11. p. 725.
