ity of the Consuls.63 It was not from any inherent dignity in either office of the quæstorship, that the Plebeians were excited, on the occasion of increasing the number of the financial Quæstors, to demand that two of the four should be elected from their estate; nor was it for the same reason that the Patricians were both anxious and able to change the form of the Plebeian claim, in such a way as to make either estate eligible, which, as it left the election of Plebeians optional, rendered their elevation virtually impossible. The Quæstor, on retiring from office, was admitted to the Senate; so that the Plebeians were seeking to be Senators far more than to be Quæstors, while the Patricians were zealous to keep the Senate free from Plebeians, in carrying on the controversy which arose and temporarily terminated as has been observed. Some years, during which the four Quæstors were chosen just as the two had been, went on; but in the election following that in which the Tribune Mænius was disappointed, three Quæstors of the Treasury were elected from the Plebeians. It was opening the way to higher honors.64

Reactions were not yet over; but the character they assumed was of altogether a milder kind. It might

63 A. C. 446. "LXIII. anno 64 A. C. 408. "Patefactus ad post Tarquinios exactos, ut rem militarem comitarentur." Tac., Ann., XI. 22. "Ut, præter duos urbanos quæstores, duo consulibus ad ministeria belli præsto essent." Liv., IV. 43. Livy's date, however, is twenty-five years later.

consulatum ac triumphos locus novis hominibus videbatur." See the whole account in Liv., IV. 55. "Henceforward," says Niebuhr, somewhat prematurely, “the Roman people was victorious over the Patricians." Vol. II. p. 196.

happen, as it did a few years subsequently, that the Patricians were able to control an election of Tribunes with sufficient influence, or even authority, to secure the choice, in part at least, of the candidates they preferred. But there was no longer a lack of hearts or voices to uphold the prerogatives of the Plebeians, nor did they think any one they had more precious than the nomination of their own good magistrates. "Is the matter come to such a pass," cried Trebonius, a Tribune, and the namesake of him whose law provided the security of the tribunitian elections, "to such a pass that our Tribunes are to be Patricians or Patricians' slaves?"66 And the answer was returned from the people, spite of every effort, even among the Tribunes, to close their mouths, when, at the end of the year, four of six Consular Tribunes were elected from the Plebeians.67 It was thus, at last, that the promises which Publilius and Canuleius had set before their order were beginning to be fulfilled, near a century from the time of the secession to the Sacred Hill.

65 Liv., V. 10.

66 Ibid., V. 11. Note 28. 67 A. C. 399. Liv., V. 12.

the fact that four were Plebeians, see Arnold's Hist., Ch. XIX.

For note 9.

CHAPTER V.

WARS AND DOMESTIC INTERESTS.

"From a variety of concurring accounts, it appears to me that the political concerns of this country are, in a manner, suspended by a single thread." -WASHINGTON to Patrick Henry, 24th Sept., 1787.

WE have already heard too much of enlistments and campaigns to imagine we are reading the history of a nation whose labors were confined, at any time, to its own separate progress or decline. Yet it is not now that we can properly begin to measure the extended work assigned to Rome amongst the people of antiquity. We shall do all we can at present do, by pausing here to look beyond the Senate or the Forum or the Field of Mars to the places upon which the early battles were fought and to the nations against whom the Romans were year by year arrayed. A birdseye view will be sufficient; and we can then turn back to search the influences of warfare upon the character and the prospects of liberty in Rome. The connection between the two will be found to be more intimate than is generally allowed.

A few circumstances, like those of position some time since noticed, being excepted, there seems, at first sight, to have been no earthly reason to account for the fondness of the Romans for martial enter

prise. Other people besides themselves, about their plain and hills, were rude and vigorous, patriotic as well as savage warriors, in whom the love of home and that of spoils were equally keen. Mere position, even, will not wholly account for the fact, that the Romans, if not continually, at any rate eventually, came off victorious; their neighbours breathed the same air, saw the same mountains and the same sea, and even had their cities and their strongholds upon hills, like, and yet unlike, to the seven by the Tiber. The composition of the Roman nation is a better ground of explanation or anticipation respecting their conquests; inasmuch as the mingling of different blood and the fusion of various tactics into a single system would have inevitably improved the discipline and augmented the strength of any army or any people. It is uncertain, however, how far we can rely upon the junction of races in the Roman, to account directly for the success and the devastation wrought upon the earth by this the latest and the fiercest nation of ancient times; but it is, at least, a point to be trusted, that the union apparent in the origin has had its consequences in the continuation of our history, and that the consequences, becoming causes, made Rome the mistress of her neighbourhood, her peninsula, and, finally, her world.

It has been hitherto incumbent upon us to lay greater stress upon the separations than upon the attractions, so to speak, among the citizens of Rome. Yet the unity of the Commonwealth, especially in its earlier centuries, was, so far as it existed, much

more remarkable than its more evident dissensions. Every people but one in antiquity was divided against itself by the laws upon which it was founded, and more particularly still by the customs or the doctrines through which it was formed. The fabric, when reared, might stand by itself, built of its own materials, and remote from other monuments of the dead or the living upon the earth; but its want of symmetry was generally the more deplorable. If castes were avoided as the divisions. of a nation, the high-born were still of one mould and the low-born of another; rich and poor, free and slaves, warriors and drudges, were ranked in the manner and the proportions denoted by their names. Some of these were irretrievably unfortunate, without a hope of rising to a better place than that in which they were created or to which they were reduced; while others, higher in the scale, were often raised by their own demands or by the natural concessions of their superiors, especially as these latter were everywhere diminished in numbers and weakened in strength, if not in pride. Of this progress the previous pages will have furnished several examples, but none so remarkable as that which has taken place in Rome. At the period where we for the present stand, there are virtually three classes of free citizens in the Commonwealth: one of Patricians, another of the independent, and a third of the indigent Plebeians. If the reader will remember the numerous instances in which, notwithstanding divisions and subdivisions of interests, these