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supporters and the opponents of the three remaining bills was resumed and decided. The Tribes were persuaded, we know not how, to pass the bills, and the only mention concerning their ratification is of greater conflicts than had yet arisen; 26 but the bills were laws, at last. The revolution was none the less important, because its completion was shrouded in silence, or told only in traditions of desperate com

motions.

Lucius Sextius, the faithful Tribune, was elected by the Centuries the first Consul from the Plebeians. But the Curies refused to confirm his election by the grant of his commission, the name, in our language, corresponding to the Imperium. And again, as through a riven cloud, the lightning seems to flash over terrors and contentions, which the historian affirms to have wellnigh ended in a secession of the Plebeians.27

It is here, too, that Camillus is introduced in the broken story, which crowns his long life with far the purest renown it at any time attained. Either holding the powers with which he had been armed to meet the Gauls, or else again appointed to the dictatorship for the present emergency, he came between the angry factions of the Commonwealth, as the bearer of olive-branches to either side. At his proposal, though it was not made without the counsels of others more wise than he had been, the Patricians

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consented to the confirmation of the Consul Sextius, while the Plebeians agreed that a new magistracy should be instituted for the Patricians, under the old name of the consulship, -the prætorship,-to which a great part of the judicial authority 23 was then transferred from the office now opened to the Plebeians. Long-enduring passions were for a moment stilled, and the old Dictator began the building of a temple to the goddess Concord.29 The Senate decreed that a fourth day for the Plebeians should be added to the festival which the Patricians yearly celebrated as the Great Games of Rome; and the opportunity was improved, perhaps insidiously,30 to introduce a new Patrician magistracy, that of the Curule Ediles, to conduct the Games in the name of the whole people.

The consequences of the revolution which was thus achieved by Licinius Stolo and Lucius Sextius are to be measured only as we proceed with the subse

30 The words in the Digest are as follows: "Tunc ut aliquo pluris patres haberent, placuit duos ex numero patrum constitui: ita facti sunt

28 Strictly speaking, the province of the Prætor was the city; where he not only administered justice ("qui jus in urbe diceret," says Livy, VI. 42), but acted as a depu- diles Curules." Lib. I. Tit. II. ty for the Consuls in their absence, 2, sect. 26. If the games had been and even took the place of the Cen- previously celebrated by the Consors for the three years and a half suls, the purpose of the curule during which, out of every five ædileship is very plain. The story years, there were none of those of the refusal of the Plebeian Ediles magistrates in office. The first to manage the games is the more Prætor was the son of the great absurd, because the Plebeians were Camillus. still excluded from the spectacle. 29 Plut., Camill., 42. Liv., VI. Cf. Liv., VI. 42, with Niebuhr's Hist., Vol. III. p. 24.

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quent history of their country. But the immediate working of their laws, though dependent for description upon exceedingly scanty statements, will serve, in part at least, to terminate our present, and introduce our coming narrative. Of the regard paid to the new Decemvirs, or of their influence in uniting the two estates to which they belonged, we actually know nothing. The operation of the law concerning the consulship is better ascertained. The authority of this great office was, after the institution of the prætorship, in addition to the censorship already in existence, a very different affair from the absolute power of its early occupants; yet, as the commission of the Consuls was still supreme in all respects a mile beyond the city walls, and as the military superiority with which it invested them was undisturbed, the Plebeians were satisfied with the dignity it still maintained, and to which they were themselves, for the first time, raised. Sometimes, it is true, the Patrician candidates were alone elected; on other occasions, the election of a Plebeian, if not prevented, was virtually nullified by the appointment of a Patrician Dictator; 31 and there were reasons, at one period, for the Plebeians to dread, that, even though their candidates might be chosen, they were taken from so small a number of families as to threaten them with an oligarchy amongst themselves.32 But, as a general remark, it

31 See Liv., VII. 21, 22, etc.; there being no less than fourteen Dictators within a comparatively brief period.

32 Arnold remarks that eight Plebeian families furnished Consuls for twenty years. Hist. Rome, Vol. II. p. 65.

may be safely said, that the elevation of the lower estate was secured by the law which opened the consulship and the priesthood of the Commonwealth to their ambition.

It marks the character of the Romans, and, therefore, of their liberty, that the laws of ambition, as they may be called, which Licinius carried, should alone have really succeeded. The recovery and the distribution of the public domain were never actually accomplished. They who had lands to surrender would resist, either from unwillingness to part with estates they considered, and in some cases with apparent reasonableness, to be their own, or else from sheer determination to elude the laws they had not been able to suppress. Others, who waited to receive the lands, would be exasperated by delay, and by discontent, at last, that they had not gained a principality, instead of a little, and, as it might easily happen, a worthless farm. Conflicting claims amongst the poor would lead to angry feelings or silent sufferings; and much as may have been done, much more was surely and necessarily left undone. The law respecting debts would meet the same sort of obstacles; and though many were relieved and some undoubtedly discharged, the causes of embarrassment and of downright poverty, being undisturbed, soon wrought effects which no reduction of interest or instalment of principal could relieve. It must be confessed how much easier it is to describe the inefficacy than the efficacy of laws like these concerning debts and lands, even if their own inherent

defects were not so plain. plain. The chronicles composed by their opponents would bear little testimony to the good they really did in Rome.

Unfortunately, however, for the reputation both of the Licinian laws and of their author, there has been preserved an account of his own transgressions against them. About ten years from their passage, and after having been twice elected, in that interval, to the consulship, Licinius Stolo was brought to trial for being the occupant of one thousand jugers of the public lands, in violation of the limits he had himself prescribed. If his defence were made, as it appears to have been, on the ground that his son occupied half the land which was charged to him, the plea alone would have warranted his condemnation, inasmuch as the son could have been no more than a nominal tenant under the control and to the advantage of the father.33 Licinius was sentenced to pay a heavy fine, and the history of his laws must be concluded with the evidence of his shame.35

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Nor is it to be denied that the stain upon Licinius was one upon the principles of the whole people, as well as of the individual man. The freedom of many ancient nations had met its doom; and the few hopes of Greece were shrinking, or soon to shrink, before Philip of Macedon. It was only nat

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tia."

Dissimulandi criminis graVal. Max., VIII. 6. 3. 34 Liv., VII. 16. "Primus omnium sua lege punitus est." De tion, App., Bell. Civ., I. 8. Vir. Ill., Cap. XX.

35 Which they who wish may complete from Dion. Hal., Excerpt., XIV. 22. See, in some exculpa

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