The History of Rome - All 5 Volumes in One Edition. Theodor Mommsen

      Chapter VI.

       The Non-Burgesses and the Reformed Constitution

       Table of Contents

      Amalgamation of the Palatine and Quirinal Cities

      The history of every nation, and of Italy more especially, is a —synoikismos— on a great scale. Rome, in the earliest form in which we have any knowledge of it, was already triune, and similar incorporations only ceased when the spirit of Roman vigour had wholly died away. Apart from that primitive process of amalgamation of the Ramnes, Titles, and Luceres, of which hardly anything beyond the bare fact is known, the earliest act of incorporation of this sort was that by which the Hill-burgesses became merged in the Palatine Rome. The organization of the two communities, when they were about to be amalgamated, may be conceived to have been substantially similar; and in solving the problem of union they would have to choose between the alternatives of retaining duplicate institutions or of abolishing one set of these and extending the other to the whole united community. They adopted the former course with respect to all sanctuaries and priesthoods. Thenceforth the Roman community had its two guilds of Salii and two of Luperci, and as it had two forms of Mars, it had also two priests for that divinity—the Palatine priest, who afterwards usually took the designation of priest of Mars, and the Colline, who was termed priest of Quirinus. It is likely, although it can no longer be proved, that all the old Latin priesthoods of Rome—the Augurs, Pontifices, Vestals, and Fetials—originated in the same way from a combination of the priestly colleges of the Palatine and Quirinal communities. In the division into local regions the town on the Quirinal hill was added as a fourth region to the three belonging to the Palatine city, viz. the Suburan, Palatine, and suburban (-Esquiliae-). In the case of the original —synoikismos— the annexed community was recognized after the union as at least a tribe (part) of the new burgess-body, and thus had in some sense a continued political existence; but this course was not followed in the case of the Hill-Romans or in any of the later processes of annexation. After the union the Roman community continued to be divided as formerly into three tribes, each containing ten wardships (-curiae-); and the Hill-Romans—whether they were or were not previously distributed into tribes of their own—must have been inserted into the existing tribes and wardships. This insertion was probably so arranged that, while each tribe and wardship received its assigned proportion of the new burgesses, the new burgesses in these divisions were not amalgamated completely with the old; the tribes henceforth presented two ranks: the Tities, Ramnes, and Luceres being respectively subdivided into first and second (-priores-, -posteriores-). With this division was connected in all probability that arrangement of the organic institutions of the community in pairs, which meets us everywhere. The three pairs of Sacred Virgins are expressly described as representatives of the three tribes with their first and second ranks; and it may be conjectured that the pair of Lares worshipped in each street had a similar origin. This arrangement is especially apparent in the army: after the union each half-tribe of the tripartite community furnished a hundred horsemen, and the Roman burgess cavalry was thus raised to six "hundreds," and the number of its captains probably from three to six. There is no tradition of any corresponding increase to the infantry; but to this origin we may refer the subsequent custom of calling out the legions regularly two by two, and this doubling of the levy probably led to the rule of having not three, as was perhaps originally the case, but six leaders-of-division to command the legion. It is certain that no corresponding increase of seats in the senate took place: on the contrary, the primitive number of three hundred senators remained the normal number down to the seventh century; with which it is quite compatible that a number of the more prominent men of the newly annexed community may have been received into the senate of the Palatine city. The same course was followed with the magistracies: a single king presided over the united community, and there was no change as to his principal deputies, particularly the warden of the city. It thus appears that the ritual institutions of the Hill-city were continued, and that the doubled burgess-body was required to furnish a military force of double the numerical strength; but in other respects the incorporation of the Quirinal city into the Palatine was really a subordination of the former to the latter. If we have rightly assumed that the contrast between the Palatine old and the Quirinal new burgesses was identical with the contrast between the first and second Tities, Ramnes, and Luceres, it was thus the -gentes-of the Quirinal city that formed the "second" or the "lesser." The distinction, however, was certainly more an honorary than a legal precedence. At the taking of the vote in the senate the senators taken from the old clans were asked before those of the "lesser." In like manner the Colline region ranked as inferior even to the suburban (Esquiline) region of the Palatine city; the priest of the Quirinal Mars as inferior to the priest of the Palatine Mars; the Quirinal Salii and Luperci as inferior to those of the Palatine. It thus appears that the —synoikismos—, by which the Palatine community incorporated that of the Quirinal, marked an intermediate stage between the earliest —synoikismos— by which the Tities, Ramnes, and Luceres became blended, and all those that took place afterwards. The annexed community was no longer allowed to form a separate tribe in the new whole, but it was permitted to furnish at least a distinct portion of each tribe; and its ritual institutions were not only allowed to subsist—as was afterwards done in other cases, after the capture of Alba for example—but were elevated into institutions of the united community, a course which was not pursued in any subsequent instance.

      Dependents and Guests

This amalgamation of two substantially similar commonwealths produced rather an increase in the size than a change in the intrinsic character of the existing community. A second process of incorporation, which was carried out far more gradually and had far deeper effects, may be traced back, so far as the first steps in it are concerned, to this epoch; we refer to the amalgamation of the burgesses and the —metoeci—. At all times there existed side by side with the burgesses in the Roman community persons who were protected, the "listeners" (-clientes-), as they were called from their being dependents on the several burgess-households, or the "multitude" (-plebes-, from -pleo-, -plenus-), as they were termed negatively with reference to their want of political rights.1 The elements of this intermediate stage between the freeman and the slave were, as has been shown2 already in existence in the Roman household: but in the community this class necessarily acquired greater importance -de facto- and -de jure-, and that from two reasons. In the first place the community might itself possess half-free clients as well as slaves; especially after the conquest of a town and the breaking up of its commonwealth it might often appear to the conquering community advisable not to sell the mass of the burgesses formally as slaves, but to allow them the continued possession of freedom -de facto-, so that in the capacity as it were of freedmen of the community they entered into relations of clientship whether to the clans, or to the king. In the second place by means of the community and its power over the individual burgesses, there was given the possibility of protecting the clients against an abusive exercise of the -dominium- still subsisting in law. At an immemorially early period there was introduced into Roman law the principle on which rested the whole legal position of the —metoeci—, that, when a master on occasion of a public legal act—such as in the making of a testament, in an action at law, or in the census—expressly or tacitly surrendered his -dominium-, neither he himself nor his lawful successors should ever have power arbitrarily to recall that resignation or reassert a claim to the person of the freedman himself or of his descendants. The clients and their posterity did not by virtue of their position possess either the rights of burgesses or those of guests: for