Internal developments

When the monarchy came to an end, executive power in the Roman state was entrusted to two magistrates, chosen for a period of one year, who came to be called the consuls (they were probably called something else in the 5th century BC). Because the consuls’ term of office was limited, the Senate, in which ex-consuls took a seat of honor, remained the most important body of the government. The Senate had a few hundred members: 300 was the number usually given as its traditional size. The popular assembly had only a minor role to play.

The 5th and 4th centuries BC were dominated by the so-called Struggle of the Orders, a conflict between patricians and plebeians. The word “patricians,” patricii, is derived from patres, “fathers,” that is, the heads of families. Patricians were family heads that had a seat in the Senate, together with their relatives. It is possible that under the last kings of Rome, the heads of some non-patrician families were admitted to the Senate, and maybe the 5th century BC saw non-patricians in the Senate as well. But by that time, patricians completely dominated the Senate, and also the consulate. They separated themselves from the rest of Roman society by turning the patricians into nobles, a closed caste that one could only belong to by birth. Plebs was the designation for all the others. This implies that, other than the patricians, the plebeians were not a homogenous group. Plebeians could be found at any level of Roman society. In the Struggle of the Orders, the plebeians rose against patrician rule, but not every plebeian pursued the same goals. Rich plebeians wanted to access to the Senate and to the consulate and the lesser appointment of quaestor, who dealt with public finance and food supply, a function instituted in around 450 BC. Poor plebeians wanted to be relieved of their debts and asked for a redistribution of land. For both parties to succeed, they had to break the power of the patricians. They succeeded in doing so by banding together. They instituted their own assembly, the concilium plebis, and chose their own leaders, the ten tribuni plebis, tribunes of the people.

By threatening to strike work and refuse military service, the plebeians first managed to have their tribunes recognized as the representatives of the people, who could veto any decision by the magistrates or the Senate, and were themselves inviolable. Next, the patricians were forced to make many further concessions. Over a period of 200 years, the patrician society was slowly dismantled. The recognition of the tribunes was followed by the codification, in 450 BC, of the hitherto unwritten laws of Rome in the Law of the Twelve Tables. Next, the marriage prohibition between patricians and plebeians was removed. At around 420 BC, plebeians became eligible for the function of quaestor, and sometime after that for the function of military tribune (around 400 such tribunes often replaced the consuls as the state’s leading magistrates), and in 367 BC, plebeians gained access to the consulate itself. In the half century after 367 BC, a new ruling elite came into being, the So-called nobilitas, composed of the members of the patrician and the rich and powerful plebeian families. These nobiles could, as we have just seen, intermarry; so the elite got bigger. All in all, nothing like democratization occurred in Rome. Early in the 3rd century BC, the Struggle of the Orders was officially ended by the recognition that plebiscita, the decisions of the concilium plebis, had the force of law, without the Senate having had a say in the matter. However, by that time the nobiles could manipulate this plebeian assembly in any direction they wanted.

The poor plebeians got something out of the whole affair as well: their debts were restructured, debt slavery was abolished, their legal rights were guaranteed, and they got land in newly annexed territories. The expansion of Rome provided the funds and the land to give the poor a chance of a better life—as long as it lasted.