§ 7.: Patricians and Plebeians.

Had Rome been a homogeneous community, there would perhaps have been no agitation for the revelation of the principles of law which underlay the forms of procedure, and there would therefore have been no tendency towards an early codification. But Rome was composed of two communes, not of one. There was a Plebs within the Populus; and this Plebs possessed a solidarity which gave it the means of lifting up its voice in a demand, not for power, but for the protection of legal rights, and for the knowledge which was essential to that protection. The origin of the Plebs is wholly unknown. The favourite assertion of modern writers, that the Plebeians were a class which had emerged from a condition of clientship to the Patricians, does very little to solve the problem of the origin of the former class, except in so far as it suggests that some of the Plebeians were inhabitants of conquered cities that had been deported to Rome, and that others were voluntary sojourners from Edition: current; Page: [xix] distant cities who were protected by the government and the patrician clans. But it seems impossible that causes such as these could have led to the creation of a mass of men that appears in early Roman history as forming the bulk of the community; and it is possible that further evidence (archaeological and ethnological) may show that the distinction between Patricians and Plebeians is one based on race, and that the existence of the Patricians as a governing class is the result of the conquest of a native race by bands of immigrant wanderers. Throughout Roman law there is a curious persistence of dual forms for the attainment of the same end which may be a survival of two distinct systems of customary law possessed by different peoples, the conquerors and the conquered. Thus we have the Sponsio side by side with the Nexum, marriage by Confarreatio side by side with marriage by Usus or Coemptio, the testament in the Comitia Calata side by side with the testament ‘per aes et libram.’ The procedure ‘by the copper and the scales,’ in the manifold forms which it assumes, seems to be especially a characteristic of the popular law of the commons. The exclusion of the Plebeians from the magistracy and the priesthood, and the denial to them of the right of Conubium with Patricians, may also point in the direction of a fundamental racial distinction between the two classes. But the disabilities consequent on this racial distinction, if we suppose it to have existed, were by no means limited to the domain of public rights. They pervaded the whole of Roman life to such an extent that there is considerable justification for the view that the early condition of the Plebeian was very like that of the client. In the first place, the Patricians maintained that they alone formed Gentes, and the condition of being a member of a Gens, or Gentilis, was that the man who made the claim should be able to point to a perfectly free ancestry. In this claim of the Patricians we therefore have the implication that the ancestors of the Plebeians were not free. In all respects but this, the Plebeians formed Clans just like the Patricians. A group of Plebeians who bore a common name formed a Stirps, but this Stirps was supposed to be a mere offshoot of some patrician Gens on which it was held to be dependent. It possessed no independent rights of its own. A group of Plebeians who could trace their ancestry back to a common Edition: current; Page: [xx] head were called Agnati; but these Agnati had not the rights of inheritance, or perhaps the other family rights, possessed by the Gentiles. The rights of plebeian Agnati were recognized by the Twelve Tables; but this was perhaps the first recognition that they gained. In the second place, of the two rights which were subsequently considered as forming the minimum conditions of citizenship, the Jus Conubii was, we know, not possessed at all by Plebeians, and it is probable that they possessed the Jus Commercii in a very imperfect form. We cannot, it is true, point to a time when no Plebeian could conclude a contract, or bring an action, unless, like a client, he acted through a patron. But it is probable that in early times he had a very limited capacity for controlling land; that he held the ground, which he worked for himself, merely on sufferance (Precario), and not in virtue of his civic right (ex Jure Quiritium). This seems proved by the fact that he was not originally liable to service in the legions: for there can be little doubt that such service was a burden imposed on landowners. It seems that the one great condition which led to the rise of the Plebeians as a power in the State was the recognition of their rights as independent holders of land. This recognition was accorded because their services were required as soldiers in the legions and as tax-payers. They could now hold and dispose of Res Mancipi; that is, those kinds of property which were assessed at the Census (Res Censui Censendo) and which, as being liable to such assessment, required peculiar methods of transfer as evidence of ownership. This change must have preceded or accompanied the great epoch of reform which is associated with the name of Servius Tullius.