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centuries before, were gone, at least from the vicinity of the hills. Old forts or barriers had been preserved; but dwellings had fallen or been demolished to supply the fortification with repairs and new materials. Some of the Plebeians, however, still lived where their ancestors had been overcome; but the woods or pastures of the Patricians stretched wider wherever the dominion of their state extended.

It is equally impossible to mark the boundary as to number the population belonging to the Roman territory under its last king; for his banishment, as we shall soon read, gave rise to great disasters. These, however, had not yet occurred in all their violence, when the Census, taken in the first year of the Commonwealth, returned one hundred and thirty thousand citizens as capable of bearing arms.2 This is almost undoubtedly an exaggerated estimate, to which the ancient writer, familiar with later history, very naturally inclined; and unless it include the citizens of the states allied to Rome, it can scarcely be accepted as indicating the number of warriors even at the close of the Monarchy, when many could be counted whom a few months detached from their transitory allegiance. Supposing the people, after the shocks of the revolution were passed, to be about two hundred thousand in all, the largest proportion of this number was unquestionably composed of Plebeians, whom the Patricians, even with their clients, would scarcely equal; while the slaves were yet too

2 Dion. Hal., V. 20.

few to be reckoned as any considerable part of the population. These are the only statistics which, though partly imaginary, can be of any advantage to the intelligence of the events which followed the revolution against the Roman monarchy.

Near the close of the last reign, an embassy, consisting of the king's two younger sons and their relation Brutus, was sent, as the story ran, to Delphi, for the purpose of consulting the oracle upon some recent prodigies by which the royal family had been alarmed. After their mission was fulfilled, the sons of Tarquin, desirous, it seems, of learning to whom their father's power was destined to descend, asked of the oracle the knowledge it was supposed efficient to impart. But when the answer came, that he who first embraced his mother should reign at Rome, their companion, Brutus, pretended to fall by chance, and kissed the earth he thought the common parent of them all. The man thus eager to fulfil the condition which the oracle imposed on the attainment of supreme dominion at Rome3 was the same who swore revenge over Lucretia's corpse, the hero of the revolution by which the Tarquins were expelled, and of which the only object, if the spirit of the followers resembled that which their leader1 showed at Delphi, was to transfer the authority of the monarch to the Patricians. Brutus would as soon have thought of

3 "Imperium summum Romæ." as a Patrician in Dion. Hal., IV. Liv. I. 56. 71, 81.

4 Brutus is expressly described

recalling the king, as of permitting, much more promoting, the election of a Plebeian Consul.

6

The Consuls, or, as they were called for sixty years, the Prætors, must be regarded as having been, at first, the successors of the king. Livy fervently begins the second book of his history with much rejoicing that he had thereafter to write of the "free Roman people"; yet he straightway confesses that their new liberty consisted in the limitation of the term rather than of the power of the supreme magistracy. The exultation and the reflection of the old historian are equally reasonable; yet he did not quite sufficiently describe the nature of the change to the Commonwealth. It was the assembly of the Centuries over which Lucretius presided as Interrex at the election of the first Consuls; and that it should have been the Centuries formed of all classes, instead of the Patrician Curies, who had always elected and confirmed the kings, was in itself a revolution worthy of all hopeful anticipations. Brutus and Tarquinius Collatinus, the husband and the avenger of Lucretia, were returned as Consuls; and their first act, after gathering their lictors, was to make the people or the Patricians swear that they would suffer no one to reign, or, if dangerous to freedom, even to live, in

5 In their capacity as generals. Göttling, Röm. Staatsv., Sect. 99.

6" Liberi populi Romani." II. 1. 7 "Libertatis autem originem inde magis, quia annuum imperium consulare factum est, quam quod deminutum quidquam sit ex regia

8

potestate, numeres." Ibid. Cf.
Plut., Publ., 1. As Machiavelli
says,-"Vennero a cacciare di Roma
il nome e non la potestà regia."
Disc. sop. Tit. Liv., I. Cap. 2.
8 Dion. Hal., IV. 84.

Rome. The authority of the Consuls themselves was hedged about with what were thought sufficient safeguards. Elected by the Centuries, as has been stated, they were then to be invested with their commission by the Curies and solemnly inaugurated by the Augurs in the Capitol,10 where, probably, they took the oath which was further required from them, that they would be faithful to the laws." After these various ceremonies, they could rule, or judge, or lead, as if they reigned; 12 and the similitude they bore the king of old was the more remarkable, in that the dignity, if not the authority, of their office was attached to each of the two separately, for alternate months in the city or alternate days in the field.13 One part only of the royalty was abstracted from the consulate, by the creation of the sacrificial king to preside at some of the public ceremonies of religion; 14 and the priestly power of the Consuls was confined to the auspices, in which they were entitled, however, to participate as Patricians rather than as magistrates. Politically, they were more powerful, nor only by themselves, but in connection with the Senate and

9 Liv., I. 60, II. 1, 2; Dion. bernacula reipublicæ," etc. Ibid., Hal., IV. 85.

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Pro Muren., 35.

13 Dion. Hal., IX. 43. Liv., II. 1, XXII. 41. Sometimes it was otherwise. Liv., III. 70.

14 Rex sacrificulus. He was elected in the Comitia Calata, under the presidency of the High Pontiff, to whom he was subordinate. Aul. Gell., XV. 27. Liv., II. 1.

the two principal assemblies, the Curies and the Centuries,15 over all which, in the early times, their nominal supremacy extended, yet by which, likewise, they were themselves, as the agents or leaders of the Patrician order, both elected and controlled.16 It was the pleasant fiction in after days, that the Consuls appointed to these high powers were so named that they might remember the duty bounden on them above all others, to consult the good of their country.17

Through the new magistracy and the older assemblies, even through that of the Centuries, the liberty of Rome was still the possession of the Patricians.18 Nor was it merely on these political supports that their authority and their capacity were raised preëminent above their countrymen, but by their personal privileges, which gave them an exclusive hold upon the auspices and the social ties of the state they called a Commonwealth.19 Even the richer Plebeians who rose to knighthood and then to the Senate, as happened in the same year of the revolution,20 will

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