the plebs, the noble patrician Spurius Cassius, so on this occasion there appeared as their champion a prudent and brave plebeian, Caius Licinius Stolo, a tribune of the people. His measures were very similar to those of Spurius Cassius—namely, a compromise on the subject of debts (not, however, an abolition of them); and an agrarian law, prohibiting any citizen from occupying any more than five hundred jugera (about 330 acres) of the public land, and depriving all who exceeded that quantity of the surplus for distribution among indigent commons. To these he added a proposal for constitutional reform—namely, that the military tribunate should be abolished, and that the consulship should be reverted to, one of the consuls to be of necessity a plebeian. After a hard struggle, these important measures were carried in the year 384, nineteen years after the Gaulish invasion. Under these Licinian Laws, as they were called, the state enjoyed tolerable repose for a long period of years—the principal source of disturbance being the attempts of the wealthy citizens to evade the operation of the agrarian law. The next great movement was in the year of the city 416, when, under the auspices of a plebeian dictator (for the dictatorship had also been thrown open to the plebeians), a considerable simplification of the constitution was effected. It was now rendered essential that one of the censors should be a plebeian; and the old patrician body of the curies was struck out of the machinery of the legislature, so as to leave the business of the state in the hands of the senate (itself become partly a plebeian body) and the people. Met in their centuries, the people could only accept or reject the measures proposed by the senate; but met in their tribes, they could originate a measure, and oblige the senate to consider it. Thus sometimes in the shape of a matured scheme descending from the senate to the people, sometimes in the shape of a popular resolution sent up to the senate, a measure became law. From this simplification of the constitution commences, according to historians, the golden age of Roman politics. The extension of dominion in the Samnite wars, by providing a large subject-population inferior both to patricians and plebeians, disposed these bodies to forget their differences, and to fall back upon their common consciousness of Roman citizenship. During the Samnite wars, however, a third party appeared in the field claiming political rights. These were the Ærarians, the name applied to all those residents in town pursuing mechanical occupations, who, as not belonging to any of the tribes (now thirty-three in number), did not rank as citizens. The claims of this class—the city rabble, as both patricians and plebeians called it—were supported by a daring and able patrician, Appius Claudius, who, during his censorship, admitted ærarians into all the tribes indiscriminately. Eventually, however, a compromise was effected: the ærarians were enrolled in the four city tribes, thus obtaining some influence, but not so much as Appius seemed to destine for them. It appears to have been at some period also during the Samnite wars that a modification took place in the constitution of the comitia centuriata, the leading feature of which seems to have been a blending of the tribes with the centuries, so as to accommodate the assembly to the altered state of society and the altered scale of wealth. Of the precise nature of this change, however, as of the precise time at which it occurred, we are ignorant. It may be considered, nevertheless, to have perfected the Roman constitution, and to have adapted it for the function of maintaining the government of the entire peninsula.
