Gracchi Marius and Sulla | Page 3

mercy of a town not half as large
as the London of to-day. Almost exactly a century afterwards the
Government under which this gigantic empire had been consolidated
was no more.
Foreign wars will have but secondary importance in the following
pages. [Sidenote: The history will not be one of military events.] The
interest of the narrative centres mainly in home politics; and though the
world did not cease to echo to the tramp of conquering legions, and the
victorious soldier became a more and more important factor in the State,
still military matters no longer, as in the Samnite and Punic wars,
absorb the attention, dwarfed as they are by the great social struggle of
which the metropolis was the arena. In treating of the first half of those
hundred years of revolution, which began with the tribunate of Tiberius
Gracchus and ended with the battle of Actium, it is mainly the fall of
the Republican and the foreshadowing of the Imperial system of
government which have to be described. [Sidenote: In order to
understand the times of the Gracchi it is necessary to understand the
history of the orders at Rome.] But, in order to understand rightly the
events of those fifty years, some survey, however brief, of the previous
history of the Roman orders is indispensable.
[Sidenote: The patres.] When the mists of legend clear away we see a
community which, if we do not take slaves into account, consisted of
two parts--the governing body, or patres, to whom alone the term
Populus Romanus strictly applied, and who constituted the Roman
State, and the governed class, or clientes, who were outside its pale.
The word patrician, more familiar to our ear than the substantive from
which it is formed, came to imply much more than its original meaning.

[Sidenote: The clients.] In its simplest and earliest sense it was applied
to a man who was sprung from a Roman marriage, who stood towards
his client on much the same footing which, in the mildest form of
slavery, a master occupies towards his slave. As the patronus was to the
libertus, when it became customary to liberate slaves, so in some
measure were the Fathers to their retainers, the Clients. That the
community was originally divided into these two sections is known.
What is not known is how, besides this primary division of patres and
clientes, there arose a second political class in the State, namely the
plebs. The client as client had no political existence. [Sidenote: The
plebeians.] But as a plebeian he had. Whether the plebs was formed of
clients who had been released from their clientship, just as slaves might
be manumitted; or of foreigners, as soldiers, traders, or artisans were
admitted into the community; or partly of foreigners and partly of
clients, the latter being equalised by the patres with the former in
self-defence; and whether as a name it dated from or was antecedent to
the so-called Tullian organization is uncertain. But we know that in one
way or other a second political division in the State arose and that the
constitution, of which Servius Tullius was the reputed author, made
every freeman in Rome a citizen by giving him a vote in the Comitia
Centuriata. Yet though the plebeian was a citizen, and as such acquired
'commercium,' or the right to hold and devise property, it was only after
a prolonged struggle that he achieved political equality with the patres.
[Sidenote: Gradual acquisition by the plebs of political equality with
the patres.] Step by step he wrung from them the rights of intermarriage
and of filling offices of state; and the great engine by which this was
brought about was the tribunate, the historical importance of which
dates from, even though as a plebeian magistracy it may have existed
before, the first secession of the plebs in 494 B.C. [Sidenote: Character
of the tribunate.] The tribunate stood towards the freedom of the
Roman people in something of the same relation which the press of our
time occupies towards modern liberty: for its existence implied free
criticism of the executive, and out of free speech grew free action.
[Sidenote: The Roman government transformed from oligarchy into a
plutocracy.]
Side by side with those external events which made Rome mistress first

of her neighbours, then, of Italy, and lastly of the world, there went on
a succession of internal changes, which first transformed a pure
oligarchy into a plutocracy, and secondly overthrew this modified form
of oligarchy, and substituted Caesarism. With the earlier of these
changes we are concerned here but little. The political revolution was
over when the social revolution which we have to record began. But the
roots of the social revolution were of deep growth, and were in fact
sometimes identical with those