It had taken the best part of a century for rich plebeians to find their way to sharing with the patricians the top offices of the Roman state. The struggle of the ordinary plebs in fighting for their political voice also began in the fifth century BC. In order to curb the power of the patrician élite, they used the only leverage they could: an old-fashioned strike. When Rome’s security was being threatened by invading forces in 494 BC, the citizens simply laid down their weapons en masse, took up a position on the Aventine Hill and refused to fight. The plebs’ secession from the republic resulted temporarily in the formation of a state within a state. Instead of asking the rich nobility to provide them with an office in the republic to serve their interests, the Roman citizens, holed up in protest on their hill, simply made up their own. The magistrates they created were called ‘tribunes of the people’. Only when that office became formally recognized by the patricians as part of the state did the struggle, known as ‘the conflict of the orders’, come to an end.
The new office would prove crucial to the history of the republic. It would radically change the balance of power between the political élite of the Senate and the people. Ten tribunes were elected annually by the plebs alone, and it was their responsibility to protect the plebs from abuse of power at the hands of the office holders, especially the consuls and praetors in possession of imperium. If need be, a tribune was empowered to intervene physically to defend a citizen who was being wrongfully punished or oppressed, and to bring help. It is important to stress, however, that whereas today the roles and jobs of figures in a modern state are highly stratified and specialized, in ancient Rome they were entwined in one person. A consul was at once a military commander, a prime minister, a chancellor and a bishop, while a tribune combined the roles of a Member of Parliament or a US senator with defence lawyer, policeman and trade union representative. Although the new office was radical in origin, later in the history of republic it would come to be held by the lackeys of the noble élite. Nonetheless, by the mid-fourth century BC the political voice of the plebs had found its teeth. Now its bark was recognized too.
The second crucial consequence of the plebs’ great strike was the strengthening of their tribal assemblies. Before the secession the dominant assembly of the people was called the Assembly of the Centuries, but it was not very democratic. It was organized around military units known as ‘centuries’, and because military obligations were dictated by a citizen’s wealth, the assembly was dominated by the rich. A relatively small number of citizens from the highest class of soldier controlled over half of the 193 centuries, while the mass of the poorest citizens held only one. Considering that each century had one vote, the political voice of the poorer citizens amounted to a whisper.
After the conflict of the orders, however, the tribal assemblies became more powerful. They were classified according to regional districts, known as ‘tribes’. Each tribe thus contained both rich and poor. Thanks to the electoral college system of ‘one tribe, one vote’, these assemblies were altogether more representative. As Rome increased its rural territory throughout Italy, the city’s original four tribes expanded accordingly to thirty-five. A new assembly, the Assembly of the Tribes, was called by a high-ranking magistrate from the élite (a consul, for example) and could be attended by patricians as well as plebeians. The Plebeian Assembly, however, was convened by a tribune of the people, attended only by plebs and became a standard place for passing laws. At first the votes of these popular assemblies were nothing more than plebiscites – a way for the élite to gauge the majority opinion of the Roman citizens. By 287 BC, however, the decisions of both tribal assemblies, whether expressed in elections or in the passage of bills, had the force of law and were binding on the entire Roman people.
In both the office of tribune and the newly empowered popular assemblies the Roman republic had grown the great paradox of its ‘two heads’: those of the Senate (the collective voice of the aristocratic and moneyed political élite) and the Roman people. A system that mixed an aristocratic élite with the fundamental principle that power also lies in the hands of the people seems puzzling today. In the ancient world, however, the partnership was potent. It was the concept hammered into the initials ‘SPQR’ (Senatus Populusque Romanus – the Senate and Roman People), the logo emblazoned on the Roman military standards and the slogan that would, in time, authorize Rome’s march into the domains of its future empire. That march had begun before the conflict of the orders, in the fifth century BC. It was the start of an extraordinarily aggressive period of expansion. One of the greatest problems of ancient history is explaining exactly why it happened.
WINNING ITALY
Where that expansion was aimed is certainly clear. Between 500 and 275 BC, in piecemeal fashion and through a combination of war and diplomacy, the citizen armies of the Roman republic brought first Latium and then the rest of the Italian peninsula under its control. The original motivation for war was perhaps land. With the peasant holdings of most Roman citizens too small to sustain a large family, the Romans of the early republic were on the lookout for new territory. But the first concerted military campaigns were driven perhaps more by the defence of land rather than its acquisition. In 493 BC Rome joined an alliance of Latin communities, known as the Latin League, to defend their cherished region of Latium. It was being invaded by the hill tribes of central Italy: the Volsci, the Sabines and the Aequi. This war, provoked by aggression from outside Rome, would provide the republic with a very convenient and useful theme for all future wars in Italy and beyond. To ensure the favour of the gods in their military campaigns, the Romans would look for instances to justify taking action in ‘self-defence’. Indeed, the legitimating mythology of the ‘just war’ was fostered by the elaborate religious ceremonies with which Romans declared hostilities. These eccentric demonstrations of their attentiveness to justice were rituals with which Rome’s Italian neighbours would become very familiar.
Once the assaults of the hill tribes had been checked, Rome and its Latin allies turned their attention to the region of Etruria to the north. Perhaps because the family trees of the leading Romans had Etruscan roots, there was no shortage of old friendships and feuds with which to justify both alliances and declarations of war. Some Etruscan cities promptly came to terms with Rome; others were defeated in battle and annexed. Accused of arrogance by its Latin partners for claiming to have carried the lion’s share of the fighting, Rome turned on them next. The increasingly powerful city-state went to war with the Latin League in 340 BC, defeated it, and then dismantled the league two years later. Next in line were the Samnites. Perhaps Rome’s greatest Italian adversaries, the Samnites were a powerful and organized confederation to the south of Latium. They proved so hardy that the name ‘Samnite’ would later be accorded to one of the four types of gladiator in the Roman arena. In three wars that endured until 290 BC, and in which Rome had mixed success, huge swathes of Samnite territory eventually came under its control. The once diminutive city-state was now pushing at the borders of the Greek colonies at the foot of Italy.