CHAPTER VII.

THE LICINIAN LAWS.

"It is vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good."- MADISON, Federalist, No. X.

ONE of the Tribunes, chosen, as we have formerly supposed, after the return of the Plebeians from the Sacred Hill, was a Licinius.' The first Consular Tribune elected from the Plebeians was another, Licinius Calvus.2 The third great man of this distinguished family was Caius Licinius Calvus Stolo, who, in the prime of life and of popularity, was chosen among the Tribunes of the Plebeians for the fourteenth year3 of that sorrowful season which followed the invasion of the Gauls. The ill-fated Manlius was dead seven years before; but Camillus, at the head of his extreme party, was still living in green old age. Such were the memories and such the times of Licinius Stolo; and there is little to add to these few dates and names, except that he was married to the daughter of an eminent Patrician, surrounded by devoted friends, and possessed of a very

1 Livy makes him one of the first two. II. 33. Cf. Dion. Hal., VI. 89.

2 Liv., V. 12.

3 Chosen in A. C. 376 for 375, the dates, again, being altogether arbitrary.

large estate, in the year of his legislation, or, as it might be styled, his revolution. His character may be better judged as we read on.

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Another Plebeian, Lucius Sextius by name, was chosen Tribune for the same year. Apparently a tried friend of Licinius, whose purposes, at all events, aroused his sympathy and strenuous coöperation, Sextius was younger than his more famous colleague, but equally earnest and more sincere. Marcus Fabius Ambustus, latterly a Consular Tribune, and of high descent, as his name denotes, was the father-in-law of Licinius, and his strong supporter. A tradition, of the same value as those which made Manlius and Cassius ambitious for a crown, represented the Patrician and the Plebeian as having been united in designs by a whim of the wife and daughter through whom they were connected by domestic ties; but the plans of Licinius Stolo were far too widely extended and too deeply laid to have sprung from a woman's envy. Some revolutions, it is true, are the effect of an instant's passion or an hour's weakness; nor can they

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for her having married a Plebeian. Liv., VI. 34. It is only necessary to repeat the common remark, that this timid creature who had never heard the knocking of the lictors was the daughter of a Patrician and a Consular Tribune. Besides, the aim of Licinius Stolo was not to make himself a Consular Tribune, but to do away with the office altogether.

then conceal their origin and their progress behind promises unbelieved or achievements unprepared. But a change like that Licinius wrought with the help of his father-in-law, his colleague, and his friends, reached back one hundred years and more, on the one side, to the law for which Cassius died, and forward to the end of the Commonwealth in opening new honors as well as fresh resources to the Plebeians. We know nothing about the man before his tribuneship; yet it is almost certain that he had long been anxious, or at least considerate, in behalf of the work he wrought at last.

The two Tribunes together brought forward the three bills which yet bear the name of Licinius as their author. One, as the historian says, concerning debts, provided, that, after deducting from the principal the interest already paid, the remainder should be discharged, in equal instalments, within three years. The statutes against excessive rates of interest, or in protection of the debtor before the debt fell due, having utterly failed to prevent injustice as well as continual embarrassment, it was plain to any one who thought at all upon the matter, in which effort of thought, however, the power of all reformers begins, that there must be some preventive to the further increase of obligations already swollen beyond all common means of payment. It might be

7 "C. Licinius et L. Sextius pro- quod superesset, triennio æquis pormulgavere leges, . . . unam de tionibus persolveretur." Liv., VI. ære alieno, ut, deducto eo de capite, 35.

quod usuris pernumeratum esset, id,

a preventive as desirable to the creditor as to the debtor; but that would only add to its justice, without detracting from its benevolence.

The next bill of the three leaves no room for doubting the intentions of Licinius and his coadjutors to have been what Livy describes them, as contrary to the power of the Patricians as they were favorable to the comfort of the Plebeians.8 This second bill related to the public lands, prohibiting any one from occupying more than five hundred jugers, about three hundred acres, and reclaiming all above that limit from the present occupants, in order to divide it in suitable proportions amongst the people at large. Two further clauses followed, one ordering that a certain number of freemen should be employed on every estate, and another forbidding any single citizen to send out more than a hundred of the larger or five hundred of the smaller cattle to graze upon the public pastures.10 These latter details are of consequence, not so much in relation to the bill itself, as to the simultaneous increase of wealth and slavery which they plainly signify. It is not, however, requisite to add a word in explanation of the bill, except that it was more than a fulfilment

8 "Leges omnes adversas opes patriciorum et pro commodis plebis." Liv., VI. 35.

9 The terms that Livy (VI. 35) rehearses are only these: "De modo agrorum, ne quis plus quingenta jugera agri possideret"; which may best be completed from Nie

buhr's account, Vol. III. p. 16. See, also, Varro, De Re Rustica, I. 2. As to the Agri being the public lands, there need be no doubt after the admirable articles by Prof. Long in the Classical Museum, Vol. II.

10 Appian., De Bell. Civ., I. 8. See Niebuhr again.

of the hopes which had risen and sunk, like corpses on the sea, for full a century in Rome.

Within that century, however, and especially within the last ten years, many of the richer Plebeians had obtained so wide a hold upon the public lands, from which they had at first been kept asunder, as to be threatened with loss in consequence of this second bill, devised, like the first, in favor of the lower part of the middle classes. A third bill was to console these richer men, by putting an end to the consular tribunate, and insuring the election of one of the two Consuls from the Plebeians," -meaning, of course, the Plebeians who were able to seek the office. The argument adduced in favor of this latter bill appears to have been the urgent need of other authority in the hands of the Plebeians than was provided for their Tribunes, Ædiles, and Quæstors, in order to secure the settlement of debts and lands.12 This sounds as if the advocates of the bill were obliged to stimulate their order to its support; the great body of the Plebeians being quite contented with the independence promised them in the first bills, without seeking any thing besides, much less such power as the last bill offered them. If the poor, however, did not need the consulship, the rich men did; and the claim upon it by such as Licinius and Sextius seems now, at least,

11 Ne tribunorum militum comitia fierent, consulumque utique alter ex plebe crearetur." Liv., VI. 35.

12 It is so reported as an argument in Liv., VI. 37.