§ 8.: Acquisition of voting rights by Plebeians—Assemblies of the Populus and of the Plebs.

When the army was made the basis of the new Comitia Centuriata, the wealthier Plebeians who were members of the army gained a vote; and the Comitia Curiata, originally patrician, must soon have come to admit members of the Plebs. But this voting power did little good to the class as a whole. Its true strength lay in its military organization. The first secession was an incident in a campaign; and it is not surprising that the officers whom the Plebeians appointed to protect their persons against the patrician Edition: current; Page: [xxi] magistrates, bore the military name of Tribuni. The creation of the Tribunate gave the Plebs a political organization, and was the starting-point of that dualism which runs through the whole of the Roman constitution—a dualism expressed in the distinction between the Comitia of the People and the Concilium of the Plebs, between Lex and Plebiscitum, between Magistratus Populi and Magistratus Plebis, between the Imperium of the one and the Sacrosanctitas of the other. The tribunes, however, could offer only personal assistance to outraged individuals, and though they proved a potent channel for the petitions of the Plebs as a whole, they were a very ineffective means of protecting the private rights of individual members of this order. Effective protection was in any case impossible until a fuller light had been thrown on the question what the rights to be protected actually were. Hence the demand for the publication of the principles of the law on which the jurisdiction of the patrician magistrates was based.