BOOK II. The narrative been proposed that they alone should have the conquered land, but they could not make up their minds to share it with the Latins, and therefore they condemned Cassius to death; although, apart from the intended boon of the agrarian law, he had thought to win their favour by proposing that the money which they had paid for the corn sent from Sicily in the year of the famine should be restored to them. The whole of this story is mere moonshine. The war with the Hernicans was invented to account for the well-known treaty with them, as we have already seen,' and the alleged proposal to divide the money paid for the Sicilian corn among the plebs is as unauthentic as the whole story of the famine of the year 493 B.C., as the conquests of Coriolanus, and as the gift of the Sicilian tyrant. Perhaps Niebuhr is right in his ingenious conjecture that this feature of the story was borrowed from a similar proposal of C. Gracchus in 122 B.C., and was therefore of very recent date.2 of Dionysius. sius. 3 Still wilder than the account of Livy is that of DionyAccording to him, Sp. Cassius proposed to give away two-thirds of the Roman public land to the Latins and Hernicans, and to divide the remainder among the Roman plebs. This astounding misrepresentation is, like the report of Livy, an inference from the same treaty of Rome with the Latins and Hernicans. And in the story of Dionysius also we can trace, as in that of Livy, a reminiscence of the civil disturbances of the second century B.C. Dionysius says that Cassius, in order to carry his law, invited the Latins and Hernicans to an assembly of the Roman people, and that, by an edict of the consul Virginius, they were prevented from taking part in the Roman comitia. This feature of the story is plainly borrowed from the year 123 B.C., not less than 363 years later, when C. Gracchus invited the Latins and the Italian allies to come to Rome to vote, and when the See above, p. 155. Niebuhr, Röm Gesch., ii. 190; English translation, ii. 168. Consul Fannius ordered them to leave the town. Such are the reports of one of the most important measures, which gave the first impulse to an agitation calculated to shake the republic to its very foundations. We know with certainty nothing more than the fact that an agrarian law was proposed by Sp. Cassius and frustrated by the patricians; and we can only suppose that that far-seeing statesman proposed what subsequently the plebs perseveringly struggled for, viz., a limitation of the exclusive right of the patricians to occupy the public land, and the admission of all citizens to a share in what was thus rescued from the grasping monopoly of the privileged class. As to the end of Cassius, our authorities are partly contradictory, partly so vague that we are obliged to give up altogether the attempt to understand it, or to rest content with conjecture. It is universally reported1 that Sp. Cassius, after the expiration of his third consulship, was accused by the quæstors L. Valerius and K. Fabius of trying to obtain absolute power, but we are left quite in the dark as to the comitia that tried him. It is not likely that he was condemned in an assembly where, as in the comitia of centuries, the plebeians were numerous; for, in spite of all that Livy has to say about the discontent of the plebeians on account of the liberality of Cassius to the allies, he acknowledges that they suffered a defeat in his condemnation. It is, therefore, most likely that Cassius was accused before the patrician curiæ, and judicially murdered by the exasperated party of the nobility, under the always ready and easily proved accusation of an attempt to obtain absolute power.2 There was, however, another, and a totally different, account about the end of Sp. Cassius, namely, that he was 1 Cicero, Philipp., ii. 44, 114: Sp. Cassius propter suspicionem regni appetendi est necatus.' Cicero, De Rep., ii. 35, 60. Livy, iv. 15. Dionysius, viii. 77, 87; ix. 1, 3, 51; x. 38. Diodorus, xi. 37. As the assembly of the curiæ had to invest the magistrates with the imperium, the same assembly might very properly be considered entitled to judge what use the magistrates had made of the imperium. CHAP. VII. The death of Spurius Cassius. BOOK II. sentenced and put to death by his own father.' It is difficult to say what we are to think of this story; we see, however, in it a new and striking example that the sources of our information are still far from being clear, consistent, and trustworthy. 1 Livy, ii. 41. Valer. Maxim., v. 8, 2. CHAPTER VIII. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION BEFORE THE DECEMVIRATE. CHAP. affairs after the ment of THE establishment of the tribuneship of the people had apparently introduced no new principle into the constitution of the republic. The authority of the patrician State of consuls, of the patrician senate, of the assembly of centuries, in which the patricians were paramount, remained establishwhat it had been before. The plebeian magistracy of the tribunes of the people was intended only to inforce the buneship. carrying out the law which granted lawful protection to the plebeians. It was, therefore, not hostile to the spirit of the old constitution, but rather in conformity with it. the tri tion of the plebs by the populus. Yet, in spite of this apparent preservation of the old Recogniinstitutions of the state, the beginning was made of a great revolution. The plebeians had already become so important a body that the apparently small privilege which secured to them nothing more than the right of protection became a weapon in their hands, by which they could gradually obtain full and equal rights with the old citizens. In the first place, the election of plebeian magistrates by the plebs was formally acknowledged and recognised by the patrician consuls and senate. This implied the recognition by the state of the plebs as a distinct and legally constituted body, as one of the constituent parts of the Roman people. The plebeian tribes, no doubt, had been self-governing bodies from the very beginning; and had managed their own affairs in their plebeian assemblies, without interference on the part of the patricians; but of BOOK II. The comitia of tribes. their proceedings hitherto the consuls and the senate had taken no notice. Their resolutions had had no more weight or legal effect on the officers of the state than the resolutions carried by an association or society not recognised by law or not invested with political functions. The chief officers whom the plebeians had hitherto chosen for themselves were not invested with any authority to cooperate with or to control the patrician magistrates; they were, in the eyes of the latter, nothing more than private individuals. This was altered now. Since the representatives of the plebs were, by a solemn covenant with the patricians, endowed with specified rights and functions, which could not be ignored by the patrician magistrates, and since their persons had received a special dignity and inviolability, the elections of the plebeian officers were binding on the whole state, and the plebeian comitia as such took a part in the political transactions in which the sovereignty of the Roman people was expressed. The immediate consequence of the tribuneship of the people was the organisation of the assembly of tribes, the comitia tributa, whereby they lost their former character as factional or party meetings, and were raised to the dignity and functions of assemblies of the Roman people. In what way this constitution of the comitia of tribes was effected cannot be shown with certainty. Even the mode of election adopted for the first tribunes during the secession, and for their successors until 471 B.C., is by no means ascertained beyond doubt. Livy,' who often carefully avoids or skilfully conceals difficulties, does not say by which assembly the first and the succeeding tribunes were elected, and in his account of the year 471 B.C. he mentions for the first time that, in consequence of the Publilian law, the tribunes were from this time forward elected in the comitia of tribes. Dionysius,2 who endeavours to compensate for the deficiency of his sources by his rich imagination, states that the first tribunes were 1 Livy, ii. 38. 2 Dionysius, vi. 89; ix. 41. |