Part 863

"It is impossible to suppose that the assembly of the plebs advanced at a single step from the meeting of a private corporation to be the delegated alter ego of the sovereign populus Romanus. We may be sure that the right of the plebs to legislate for the nation was accorded under checks and qualifications, long before they were invested with this absolute authority. We find, in fact, two occasions prior to the Hortensian law, on which the legislative competency of the plebs is said to have been recognised. The first of these is the Valerio-Horatian Law of B. C. 449 [see ROME: B. C. 449], the year after the decemvirate, the second the law of the dictator Publilius Philo, B. C. 339 [see ROME: B. C. 340]. Unfortunately the historians describe these laws in words which merely repeat the contents of the Hortensian law. … Some modern writers have been disposed to get over the difficulty by the conjecture that the laws of Publilius Philo and Hortensius were only re-enactments of that of Valerius and Horatius, and that the full powers of the plebs date back to the year B. C. 449. Mommsen's arguments against this view appear to me conclusive. Why should the jurists universally refer the powers exercised by the plebs to a mere re-enactment, rather than to the original source of their authority? … Niebuhr believes that the law of Valerius and Horatius gave the plebs legislative authority, subject to the consent of a sort of upper house, the general assembly of the patrician body; he identifies this assembly with the 'comitia curiata.' … Mommsen's method of dealing with the question" is to strike out the Valerio-Horatian law and that of Publilius Philo from the series of enactments relating to the plebs. "He believes that both these laws regulated the proceedings of the 'comitia populi tributa,' and are transferred by a mere blunder of our authorities to the 'concilium plebis tributum.' … But the supposition of a possible blunder is too small a foundation on which to establish such an explanation. … I believe that, for the purpose of showing how the legislative power of the plebs may gradually have established itself, the known powers of the sovereign 'populus,' of the magistrates of the Roman people, and of the senate, will supply us with sufficient material; and that the assumptions of the German historians are therefore unnecessary. … I imagine … that the law of Valerius and Horatius simply recognised de jure the power which Icilius [see ROME: B. C. 456] had exercised de facto: that is to say, it ordered the consul to bring any petition of the plebs at once to the notice of the senate, and empowered the tribune to plead his cause before the senate; perhaps it went further and deprived the consul of his right of arbitrarily refusing to accede to the recommendation of the senate, if such were given, and directed that he should in such case convene the comitia and submit the proposal to its vote. If this restriction of the power of the consul removed the first obstacle in the way of tribunician bills supported by the vote of the plebs, another facility still remained to be given. The consul might be deprived of the opportunity of sheltering himself behind the moral responsibility of the senate. Does it not suggest itself as a plausible conjecture that the law of Publilius Philo struck out the intervening senatorial deliberation and compelled the consul to bring the petition of the plebs immediately before the 'comitia populi Romani'? If such were the tenor of the Publilian law, it would be only a very slight inaccuracy to describe it as conferring legislative power on the plebs. … The Hortensian law which formally transferred the sovereign power to the plebs would thus be a change greater de jure than de facto. … This power, if the theory put forward in these pages be correct, was placed within the reach of the plebeians by the law of Valerius and Horatius, and was fully secured to them by the law of Publilius Philo."

_J. L. Strachan-Davidson, The Growth of Plebeian Privilege at Rome (English Historical Review, April, 1886)._

"With the passing of the Lex Hortensia the long struggle between the orders came to an end. The ancient patrician gentes remained, but the exclusive privileges of the patriciate as a ruling order were gone. For the great offices of state and for seats in the senate the plebeians were by law equally eligible with patricians. The assemblies, whether of people or plebs, were independent of patrician control. In private life inter-marriages between patricians and plebeians were recognised as lawful, and entailed no disabilities on the children. Finally, great as continued to be the prestige attaching to patrician birth, and prominent as was the part played in the subsequent history by individual patricians and by some of the patrician houses, the plebs were now in numbers and even in wealth the preponderant section of the people. {2674} Whatever struggles might arise in the future, a second struggle between patricians and plebeians was an impossibility. Such being the case, it might have been expected that the separate organisation, to which the victory of the plebs was largely due, would, now that the reason for its existence was gone, have disappeared. Had this happened, the history of the republic might have been different. As it was, this plebeian machinery—the plebeian tribunes, assemblies, and resolutions—survived untouched, and lived to play a decisive part in a new conflict, not between patricians and plebeians, but between a governing class, itself mainly plebeian, and the mass of the people, and finally to place at the head of the state a patrician Cæsar. Nor was the promise of a genuine democracy, offered by the opening of the magistracies and the Hortensian law, fulfilled. For one hundred and fifty years afterwards the drift of events was in the opposite direction, and when the popular leaders of the first century B. C. endeavoured to make government by the people a reality, it was already too late."

_H. F. Pelham, Outlines of Roman History, book 2, chapter 1._

ROME: B. C. 282-275. War with Tarentum and Pyrrhus.

The conquest of the Samnites by the Romans, which was completed in 290 B. C., extended the power of the latter to the very gates of the Greek cities on the Tarentine gulf, of which Tarentum was the chief. At once there arose a party in Tarentum which foresaw the hopelessness of resistance to Roman aggression and favored a spontaneous submission to the supremacy of the formidable city on the Tiber. The patriotic party which opposed this humiliation looked abroad for aid, and found an eager ally in the Molossian king of Epirus, the adventurous and warlike Pyrrhus (see EPIRUS), who sprang from the family of Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great. In the autumn of 282 B. C., the inevitable war between Rome and Tarentum broke out, and early in 280 B. C. Pyrrhus landed a powerful army in Italy, comprising 20,000 heavy-armed foot-soldiers, 3,000 horse, 2,000 archers and 20 elephants. The Romans met him soon after at Heraclea, on the coast. It was the first collision of the Roman legion and the Macedonian phalanx, and the first encounter of the Latin soldier with the huge war-beast of the Asiatics. Pyrrhus won a bloody victory, but won it at such cost that it terrified him. He tried at once to arrange a peace, but the proud Romans made no terms with an invader. Next year he inflicted another great defeat upon them near Asculum, in Apulia; but nothing seemed to come of it, and the indomitable Romans were as little conquered as ever. Then the restless Epirot king took his much shaken army over to Sicily and joined the Greeks there in their war with the Carthaginians. The latter were driven out of all parts of the island except Lilybæum; but failing, after a long siege, to reduce Lilybæum, Pyrrhus lost the whole fruits of his success. The autumn of 276 B. C. found him back again in Italy, where the Romans, during his absence of three years, had recovered much ground. Next year, in the valley of Beneventum, they had their revenge upon him for Heraclea and Asculum, and he was glad to take the shattered remains of his army back to Greece. His career of ambition and adventure was ended three years afterwards, under the walls of Argos, by a tile which a woman flung down upon his head.

See MACEDONIA: B. C. 277-244.

In due time all Magna Græcia succumbed to the dominion of Rome, and the commerce and wealth of Tarentum passed over under Roman auspices to the new port of Brundisium, on the Adriatic side of the same promontory.

_T. Arnold, History of Rome, chapters 36-37 (volume 2)._

ALSO IN: _W. Ihne, History of Rome, book 3, chapters 14-17._

ROME: B. C. 275. Union of Italy under the sovereignty of the republic. Differing relations of the subject communities to the sovereign state. Roman citizenship as variously qualified.

"For the first time Italy was united into one state under the sovereignty of the Roman community. What political privileges the Roman community on this occasion withdrew from the various other Italian communities and took into its own sole keeping, or in other words, what conception of political power is to be associated with this sovereignty of Rome, we are nowhere expressly informed. … The only privileges that demonstrably belonged to it were the right of making war, of concluding treaties, and of coining money. No Italian community could declare war against any foreign state, or even negotiate with it, or coin money for circulation. On the other hand, every war and every state-treaty resolved upon by the Roman people were binding in law on all the other Italian communities, and the silver money of Rome was legally current throughout all Italy. It is probable that formerly the general rights of the leading community extended no further. But to these rights there was necessarily attached a prerogative of sovereignty that practically went far beyond them. The relations, which the Italians sustained to the leading community, exhibited in detail great inequalities. In this point of view, in addition to the full burgesses of Rome, there were three different classes of subjects to be distinguished. The full franchise itself, in the first place, was extended as far as was possible, without wholly abandoning the idea of an urban commonwealth in the case of the Roman commune. Not only was the old burgess-domain extended by individual assignation far into Etruria on the one hand and into Campania on the other, but, after the example was first set in the case of Tusculum, a great number of communities more or less remote were gradually incorporated with the Roman state and merged in it completely. … Accordingly the Roman burgess-body probably extended northward as far as the neighbourhood of Caere, eastward to the Apennines, and southward as far as, or beyond, Formiae. In its case, however, we cannot use the term 'boundaries' in a strict sense. Isolated communities within this region, such as Tibur, Praeneste, Signia, and Norba, had not the Roman franchise; others beyond its bounds, such as Sena, possessed it; and it is probable that families of Roman farmers were already dispersed throughout all Italy, either altogether isolated or associated in villages. Among the subject communities the most privileged and most important class was that of the Latin towns, which now embraced but few of the original participants in the Alban festival (and these, with the exception of Tibur and Praeneste, altogether insignificant communities), but on the other hand obtained accessions equally numerous and important in the autonomous communities founded by Rome in and even beyond Italy —the Latin colonies, as they were called—and was always increasing in consequence of new settlements of the same nature. {2675} These new urban communities of Roman origin, but with Latin rights, became more and more the real buttresses of the Roman rule. These Latins, however, were by no means those with whom the battles of the lake Regillus and Trifanum had been fought. … The Latins of the later times of the republic, on the contrary, consisted almost exclusively of communities, which from the beginning had honoured Rome as their capital and parent city; which, settled amidst peoples of alien language and of alien habits, were attached to Rome by community of language, of law, and of manners; which, as the petty tyrants of the surrounding districts, were obliged doubtless to lean on Rome for their very existence, like advanced posts leaning upon the main army. … The main advantage enjoyed by them, as compared with other subjects, consisted in their equalization with burgesses of the Roman community so far as regarded private rights—those of traffic and barter as well as those of inheritance. The Roman franchise was in future conferred only on such citizens of these townships as had filled a public magistracy in them: in that case, however, it was, apparently from the first, conferred without any limitation of rights. … The two other classes of Roman subjects, the subject Roman burgesses and the non-Latin allied communities, were in a far inferior position. The communities having the Roman franchise without the privilege of electing or being elected (civitas sine suffragio), approached nearer in form to the full Roman burgesses than the Latin communities that were legally autonomous. Their members were, as Roman burgesses, liable to all the burdens of citizenship, especially to the levy and taxation, and were subject to the Roman census; whereas, as their very designation indicates, they had no claim to its honorary rights. They lived under Roman laws, and had justice administered by Roman judges; but the hardship was lessened by the fact that their former common law was, after undergoing revision by Rome, restored to them as Roman local law, and a 'deputy' (praefectus) annually nominated by the Roman praetor was sent to them to conduct its administration. In other respects these communities retained their own administration, and chose for that purpose their own chief magistrates. … Lastly, the relations of the non-Latin allied communities were subject, as a matter of course, to very various rules, just as each particular treaty of alliance had defined them. Many of these perpetual treaties of alliance, such as that with the Hernican communities and those with Neapolis, Nola, and Heraclea, granted rights comparatively comprehensive, while others, such as the Tarentine and Samnite treaties, probably approximated to despotism. … The central administration at Rome solved the difficult problem of preserving its supervision and control over the mass of the Italian communities liable to furnish contingents, partly by means of the four Italian quaestors, partly by the extension of the Roman censorship over the whole of the dependent communities. The quaestors of the fleet, along with their more immediate duty, had to raise the revenues from the newly acquired domains and to control the contingents of the new allies; they were the first Roman functionaries to whom a residence and district out of Rome were assigned by law, and they formed the necessary intermediate authority between the Roman senate and the Italian communities. … Lastly, with this military administrative union of the whole peoples dwelling to the south of the Apennines, as far as the Iapygian promontory and the straits of Rhegium, was connected the rise of a new name common to them all—that of 'the men of the toga' (togati), which was their oldest designation in Roman state law, or that of the 'Italians,' which was the appellation originally in use among the Greeks and thence became universally current. … As the Gallic territory down to a late period stood contrasted in law with the Italian, so the 'men of the toga' were thus named in contrast to the Celtic 'men of the hose' (braccati); and it is probable that the repelling of the Celtic invasions played an important diplomatic part as a reason or pretext for centralizing the military resources of Italy in the hands of the Romans. … The name Italia, which originally and even in the Greek authors of the 5th century—in Aristotle for instance—pertained only to the modern Calabria, was transferred to the whole land of these wearers of the toga. The earliest boundaries of this great armed confederacy led by Rome, or of the new Italy, reached on the western coast as far as the district of Leghorn south of the Arnus, on the east as far as the Aesis north of Ancona. …The new Italy had thus become a political unity; it was also in the course of becoming a national unity."

_T. Mommsen, History of Rome, book 2, chapter 7 (volume 1)._

ROME: B. C. 264-241. The first Punic War. Conquest of Sicily.

"The ten years preceding the First Punic War were probably a time of the greatest physical prosperity which the mass of the Roman people ever knew. Within twenty years two agrarian laws had been passed on a most extensive scale, and the poorer citizens had received besides what may be called a large dividend in money out of the lands which the state had conquered. In addition to this, the farming of the state domains, or of their produce, furnished those who had money with abundant opportunities of profitable adventure. … No wonder, then, that war was at this time popular. … But our 'pleasant vices' are ever made instruments to scourge us; and the First Punic War, into which the Roman people forced the senate to enter, not only in its long course bore most heavily upon the poorer citizens, but, from the feelings of enmity which it excited in the breast of Hamilcar, led most surely to that fearful visitation of Hannibal's sixteen years' invasion of Italy, which destroyed for ever, not indeed the pride of the Roman dominion, but the well-being of the Roman people."

_T. Arnold, History of Rome, pages 538-540._

"The occasion of the First Punic War was dishonourable to Rome. Certain mercenary soldiers had seized Messana in Sicily, destroyed the citizens, and held possession against the Syracusans, 284 B. C. They were beaten in the field, and blockaded in Messana by Hiero, king of Syracuse, and then, driven to extremity, sent a deputation to Rome, praying that 'the Romans, the sovereigns of Italy, would not suffer an Italian people to be destroyed by Greeks and Carthaginians,' 264 B. C. It was singular that such a request should be made to the Romans, who only six years before had chastised the military revolt of their brethren Mamertines in Rhegium, taking the city by storm, scourging and beheading the defenders, and then restoring the old inhabitants (270 B. C.). {2676} The senate was opposed to the request of the Messana deputation; but the consuls and the people of Rome, already jealous of Carthaginian influence in Sicily and the Mediterranean, resolved to protect the Mamertine buccaneers and to receive them as their friends and allies. Thus dishonestly and disgracefully did the Romans depart from their purely Italian and continental policy, which had so well succeeded, to enter upon another system, the results of which no one then could foresee. Some excuse may be found in the fact that the Carthaginians had been placed by their partisans in Messana in possession of the citadel, and this great rival power of Carthage was thus brought unpleasantly near to the recent conquered territory of Rome. The fear of Carthaginian influence overcame the natural reluctance to an alliance with traitors false to their military oath, the murderers and plunderers of a city which they were bound to protect. Thus began 'the First Punic War, which lasted, without intermission, 22 years, a longer space of time than the whole period occupied by the wars of the French Revolution.' In this war Duilius won the first naval battle near Mylæ (Melarro). Regulus invaded Africa proper, the territory of Carthage, with great success, until beaten and taken prisoner at Zama, 256-255 B. C. The war was carried on in Sicily and on the sea until 241 B. C., when peace was made on conditions that the Carthaginians should evacuate Sicily and make no war upon Hiero, king of Sicily (the ally of the Romans), that they should pay 3,200 Euboic talents (about £110,000) within ten years, 241 B. C. The effects of an exhausting war were soon overcome by ancient nations, so that both Rome and Carthage rapidly recovered, 'because wars in those days were not maintained at the expense of posterity.' Rome had to check the Illyrian pirates and to complete the conquest of Cisalpine Gaul and the Ligurians 238-221 B. C. Meanwhile the Carthaginians, hampered by a three years' rebellion of its mercenary troops, quietly permitted the Romans to take possession of Corsica and Sardinia, and agreed to pay 1,200 talents as compensation to Roman merchants. On the other hand, measures were in process to re-establish the Carthaginian power; the patriotic party, the Barcine family, under Hamilcar, commenced the carrying out of the extensions and consolidations of the territories in Spain."

_W. B. Boyce, Introduction to the Study of History, period 4, section 4._

ALSO IN: _Polybius, Histories, book 1._

_R. B. Smith, Carthage, chapters 4-7._

_A. J. Church, The Story of Carthage, part 4, chapters 1-3._

See, also, PUNIC WAR, THE FIRST.

ROME: B. C. 218-211. The Second Punic War; Hannibal in Italy. Cannæ.

"Twenty-three years passed between the end of the first Punic War and the beginning of the second. But in the meanwhile the Romans got possession, rather unfairly, of the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, which Carthage had kept by the peace. On the other hand a Carthaginian dominion was growing up in Spain under Hamilcar Barkas, one of the greatest men that Carthage ever reared, his son-in-law Hasdrubal, and his son Hannibal, the greatest man of all, and probably the greatest general that the world ever saw. Another quarrel arose between Carthage and Rome, when Hannibal took the Spanish town of Saguntum, which the Romans claimed as an ally. War began in 218, and Hannibal carried it on by invading Italy by land. This was one of the most famous enterprises in all history. Never was Rome so near destruction as in the war with Hannibal. He crossed the Alps and defeated the Romans in four battles, the greatest of which was that of Cannae in B. C. 216."

_E. A. Freeman, Outlines of History (or General Sketch of European History), chapter 3._