the

way is open to their Sacred Hill, or to any hill they please!" 27

Such words, uncertain though they be, are the best description of the feelings which long excited the Patricians, from father to son, through many generations, against the growth of freedom in the Commonwealth of Rome. In the present instance, they were met as they deserved. The Tribunes called the Plebeians to hear the outrage which Coriolanus was urging in the Senate-house, and when he came forth with the other Senators, he would have been assailed by the multitude, infuriated by want of food as well as by wish for freedom, had not their Tribunes interposed to summon him to trial before the Tribes. Coriolanus retorted, that they had no right to sit in judgment upon such as he; but the Tribunes were resolute, and even the Senate warned him he must yield. All that the Patricians, or the party of which he was the leader, could do for him was done; menace, surely, and violence were not spared; but the

Plebeians, not, perhaps, without the aid of their supporters amongst the Patricians, were nerved, for once, to use their faculties of self-defence, and Coriolanus departed into banishment. The story of his return with the Volscians is not otherwise a fabrication except that he must rather have been a follower or an officer than the general in command. It is no greater fiction, that he should have been besought by messages and embassies to leave the invaders, or that he who came in arms against his country to purge it from the class he hated should have submitted to his mother's expostulations and his wife's tears, entreating him to begone.

The next step of the Tribunes, after thus prevailing against a Patrician who had endeavoured to violate the charter, as it may be called, of the Plebeians, was to use their authority in calling others to account for injuries to the Commonwealth at large. In the year after the trial of Menenius, one of his successors in the consulship, Spurius Servilius, was impeached by two Tribunes for having sustained a defeat by the Etruscan forces in the very sight of Rome, under the Janiculan hill; but so manly was his denial of treachery or incapacity, that he was readily acquitted.30 The old disputes concerning the Agrarian law recurring within a year or two, more warmly than ever since the death of Cassius,31 the Consuls at the time, Lucius Furius and Caius Manlius, opposed

30 Dion. Hal., IX. 28, 33. Liv., conjectures, of victories lately gained II. 52. over the Etruscans. See Dion. 31 In consequence, as Niebuhr Hal., IX. 37.

it, like their predecessors, with all the weight of their authority. As soon as they returned to the condition of private citizens, they were both accused before the Tribes by Cneius Genucius, a Tribune. Belonging, apparently, to the extreme party of their order, and with the fate of Coriolanus before their eyes, Manlius and Furius gave way to great alarm; assuming the mean attire in which the accused were often wont to implore the votes of their judges in their behalf, and taking every precaution that could secure them against condemnation, to the extent even of soliciting the younger men of their own order to assist them in face of the Plebeians. The Patricians, says the historian, were fired by these entreaties; and if the Patricians be understood to mean the younger men, as above, or the partisans generally of the ex-Consuls, the statement is perfectly natural. On the morning of the trial, Genucius was found dead in his bed; and the friends of those he had accused rejoiced aloud that there were foul means as well as fair, to curb the insolence, as they styled it, of the Tribunes. The murder of one man was not the only instance of the same unblushing principle being put into execution; 34 but the history of these years grows darker, and closes in the midst of horrors.

32

33

Zonaras, one of the Byzantine historians, lived as late as the 12th century of our era. He supplies, now and then, the gaps in Dion Cassius, whose history he followed in relation to Rome.

35

It had already cost the Plebeians or their champions many a struggle to keep the power of their Tribunes in the place it was intended to occupy among the institutions of the Commonwealth; but the murder of Genucius proved an incentive to energy rather than a motive to despair. The very same year, an enlistment, in itself an occurrence of every day, was held; in the course of which a Plebeian named Volero Publilius, formerly a Centurion, was summoned as a common soldier. He refused to obey the orders of the Consuls, and appealed to the Tribunes for assistance. None answering his call, he beat back, with the aid of some who stood near, the lictor sent to seize and scourge him, and shouted loudly, that he appealed to the Plebeians themselves. "Help, fellow-citizens! Help, fellow-soldiers! Wait no longer for your Tribunes, who need your support more than you need theirs!" The cry was heard; and lictors and Consuls were soon flying from the Forum.36 Escaping punishment himself, perhaps by boldness, perhaps by concealment, Publilius was shortly after elected Tribune, and entered upon his office with the same resolution to maintain the rights of his order that he had already shown in his own behalf.

There were proofs to stare such a man in the eyes, besides his own experience just related, that the Tribunes were too often Tribunes of the Patricians rather than of the Plebeians. It could scarcely have

35 A. C. 473, according to the chronology we have hitherto followed.

36 Liv., II. 55.

38

been otherwise. Apart from the fact that the tribuneship was inferior, in every respect, to the higher magistracies, and that the individuals appointed to it were very likely to be too old or too down-hearted to use even the powers that it had, it was an office in the gift of the Centuries and the Curies," the latter positively, and the former virtually, a Patrician assembly. Volero Publilius, bold enough to do what others had undoubtedly been wise enough to see should be done, prepared a bill providing for the election of the Tribunes by the Tribes, and laid it, apparently, before the Centuries; before that, rather than the assembly of the Tribes, which had not as yet assumed even the initiative in acts of legislation.39 Be this, however, as it may, the advantage of the proposed reform was instantly made manifest; for, of the four colleagues whom Publilius had, two were so much under Patrician influence as to oppose him with all the earnestness his adversaries could have desired.40 He, however, undaunted by the resistance offered him, succeeded in bringing his project forward; but bravery and resolution like his could not be universal; and the year wore away in disturbances, re

37 By reason of their right of confirmation, which Niebuhr supposes to have been surrendered before the election of Publilius. Hist. Rome, Vol. II. pp. 91, 100.

38Ut plebeii magistratus tributis comitiis fierent." Liv., II. 56. It will directly be observed, that this at first concerned only the Trib

unes.

39 Here, however, it cannot be too openly confessed that our narrative is resting upon conjectures. Livy (loc. cit.) says, “Tulit ad populum." Dionysius (IX. 41) very evidently believes the bill to have been brought before the Tribes.

40 This is the more probable account of Dionysius. Livy says the contrary.