The History of Rome, vol 2 | Page 9

those who were
proximately designated for the supreme magistracy, or who had already
administered it, were entered on the list and were called upon to vote
before the rest; and the position of the first of them, the foreman of the
senate (-princeps senatus-) soon became a highly coveted place of
honour. The consul in office, on the other hand, no more ranked as a
member of senate than did the king, and therefore in taking the votes
did not include his own. The selection of the members--both of the
narrower patrician senate and of those merely added to the roll--fell to
be made by the consuls just as formerly by the kings; but the nature of
the case implied that, while the king had still perhaps some measure of
regard to the representation of the several clans in the senate, this
consideration was of no account so far as concerned the plebeians,
among whom the clan-organization was but imperfectly developed, and
consequently the relation of the senate to that organization in general
fell more and more into abeyance. We have no information that the
electing consuls were restricted from admitting more than a definite
number of plebeians to the senate; nor was there need for such a
regulation, because the consuls themselves belonged to the nobility. On
the other hand probably from the outset the consul was in virtue of his
very position practically far less free, and far more bound by the
opinions of his order and by custom, in the appointment of senators
than the king. The rule in particular, that the holding of the consulship
should necessarily be followed by admission to the senate for life, if, as
was probably the case at this time, the consul was not yet a member of
it at the time of his election, must have in all probability very early
acquired consuetudinary force. In like manner it seems to have become
early the custom not to fill up the senators' places immediately on their
falling vacant, but to revise and complete the roll of the senate on

occasion of the census, consequently, as a rule, every fourth year;
which also involved a not unimportant restriction on the authority
entrusted with the selection. The whole number of the senators
remained as before, and in this the -conscripti- were also included;
from which fact we are probably entitled to infer the numerical falling
off of the patriciate.(14)
Conservative Character Of The Revolution
We thus see that in the Roman commonwealth, even on the conversion
of the monarchy into a republic, the old was as far as possible retained.
So far as a revolution in a state can be conservative at all, this one was
so; not one of the constituent elements of the commonwealth was really
overthrown by it. This circumstance indicates the character of the
whole movement. The expulsion of the Tarquins was not, as the pitiful
and deeply falsified accounts of it represent, the work of a people
carried away by sympathy and enthusiasm for liberty, but the work of
two great political parties already engaged in conflict, and clearly
aware that their conflict would steadily continue--the old burgesses and
the --metoeci-- --who, like the English Whigs and Tories in 1688, were
for a moment united by the common danger which threatened to
convert the commonwealth into the arbitrary government of a despot,
and differed again as soon as the danger was over. The old burgesses
could not get rid of the monarchy without the cooperation of the new
burgesses; but the new burgesses were far from being sufficiently
strong to wrest the power out of the hands of the former at one blow.
Compromises of this sort are necessarily limited to the smallest
measure of mutual concessions obtained by tedious bargaining; and
they leave the future to decide which of the constituent elements shall
eventually preponderate, and whether they will work harmoniously
together or counteract one another. To look therefore merely to the
direct innovations, possibly to the mere change in the duration of the
supreme magistracy, is altogether to mistake the broad import of the
first Roman revolution: its indirect effects were by far the most
important, and vaster doubtless than even its authors anticipated.
The New Community

This, in short, was the time when the Roman burgess-body in the later
sense of the term originated. The plebeians had hitherto been
--metoeci-- who were subjected to their share of taxes and burdens, but
who were nevertheless in the eye of the law really nothing but tolerated
aliens, between whose position and that of foreigners proper it may
have seemed hardly necessary to draw a definite line of distinction.
They were now enrolled in the lists as burgesses liable to military
service, and, although they were still far from being