Such was the office which the seceders were wise enough to demand should be established, as the condition of their return. Neither their spirit nor its powers require to be magnified in order to exhibit the difference created in the relations between the two estates of Rome. From the moment that the lower estate was furnished with defensive arms, the higher was itself compelled to take a new position, not yet, indeed, of mere defence, but no longer of the same offensive front it had before maintained. The treaty between the seceders and the Senate was the Magna Charta of the Plebeians.60

60 Kortüm, Röm. Gesch., p. 75.

CHAPTER II.

THE FIRST WORKS OF THE TRIBUNES.

"Plebs..... agitari cœpta tribunitiis procellis." — Livy, II. 1.

But Justice aims constantly to remedy Inequali

"Justice does not require Equality. . . . ty." WHEWELL, Moral. and Pol., Sect. 998.

THE reconciliation between the citizens of Rome was of little longer duration than the smoke which rose from the altar of sacrifice on the Sacred Hill. Again they began to tread the same dangerous ground from which their former troubles issued; and the city again resounded with menaces and lamentations. But the character of the collisions or the stumbles, so to speak, which still occurred, was very greatly changed. The Plebeians had gained what is commonly called personal freedom, through the protection of their Tribunes; and the new chase in which they now engaged was at first for social, and then for political liberty. They were the poor, and they sought to become rich; the inferior class in the rights of family, government, and religion, and they would have their share in all. Indeed, there were two commonwealths or two cities,' instead of one, in Rome; and the natural impulse with every inhabitant of the lesser

1 "Duas civitates ex una factas: suos cuique parti magistratus, suas leges esse." Liv., II. 44.

was to break down the barriers of division, or else, by scaling them, to become an inhabitant of the greater, where the curule chair was set or the solemn shrine upreared. Yet the Patricians, with magistracies, assemblies, and priesthoods in their possession, were unprepared to bate a jot of their authority, or admit the citizens they had kept without their pale into the midst of their stately habitations.

In relating the events of the period immediately following the secession, in such defiance as is possible to make of an obscurity which no researches can remove, we shall sometimes be obliged to follow a peculiar course. Where any tradition is to be had, it may be adopted with great reservation upon its authenticity of detail, but also, according to the principle thus far maintained, with perfect reliance upon its general testimony to some occurrence that has faded like an ancient fresco from the walls of history. Those which belong to the progress of liberty will be inserted without much commentary, and, in one or two instances, wherever they seem to fit in best with the circumstances of the conflict between the Patricians and the Plebeians.

Accordingly, the first narrative to attract our attention is that of the proposal by Spurius Cassius of an Agrarian law, the earliest of a series, each one of which, for centuries, will form an epoch in the history of Roman liberty. Cassius was a Patrician, the same who had been chosen Consul during the secession, and who, some seven years afterwards, was elected for the third time to the highest office of the

Commonwealth. He was, plainly, of distinguished birth, and, but for one or two occurrences, would be as plainly illustrious for having supported the liberal principles which then depended, in chief degree, upon the character of the moderate party, by which they were maintained amongst the Patricians. One of these equivocal circumstances is his election to the mastership of the Knights, at the time the office was first established with the dictatorship; for though the sole purpose of these magistracies may not have been the oppression of the Plebeians, it was yet such as to make both the Master and the Dictator suspected, whatever might have been their previous conduct towards the lower estate. Cassius was likewise the reputed author of the league concluded with the Latins, while the seceders held the Sacred Hill; by which, however earnestly he urged the proposal and the ratification of peace betwixt his fellow-citizens, he showed himself determined to uphold his order against the perils on which many of the Plebeians were relying for their own success. He could not, therefore, but be doubted by his countrymen on both sides: by the Patricians for his professions in behalf of their inferiors, and by the Plebeians for his decision, in the moment of universal danger, to sustain their adversaries. As years, however, passed, and the course he had pursued could be more calmly judged, Cassius was again appointed to the consulship, as if the prepossessions against him had been forgotten.

2 Liv., II. 18.

It happened in the ensuing year, according to the narrative of Livy,3 that the Hernicans, a nation of Sabine race, and long at enmity with Rome, were reduced to peace on conditions that could have been accepted by them only after disastrous conflicts. A large part of their territory being formally surrendered by the treaty, which Cassius is again supposed to have framed, he preferred a law to divide the newly acquired domains according to a different system from that which had hitherto put the Patricians in possession, or, as we should say, in occupation, of all conquered lands. This law, called the Agrarian, in relation to the Agri Publici, or public lands, alone, ordered that one portion of the Hernican territory should be left to the nation from whom the whole was taken, that a second should be given over to the Latins, and still a third distributed among the Roman Plebeians. But as the wants of his own countrymen were too large to be satisfied by a few acres of the land last acquired by their arms, Cassius went farther still in venturing for their relief; and proposed in the same law, that some of the public domain previously conquered, and long in the occupation of the Patricians, should be surrendered to the Commonwealth by its richer tenants, and then assigned, in moderate shares, to the necessitous citi

3 Which is here followed, simply for the sake of the illustration it affords concerning the proposed division of lands. All probabilities are against the submission of the Hernicans at the present time; but

it is only conjecture that can substitute the real terms of the league. See Liv., II. 41; Dion. Hal., VIII. 77; and Niebuhr's chapter on the League with the Hernicans, in his second volume.