The Evolution of States. J. M. Robertson
agrees with Mommsen, putting town houses as a development of the second century B.C.
[30] According to Niebuhr (Lectures, xv; Eng. trans. ed. 1870, p. 81) and Mommsen (ch. iv), the Palatine and the Quirinal. (But cp. Greenidge, p. 2.) The Palatine was probably the first occupied by Romans. Schwegler, i, 442. Cp. Merivale, General History of Rome, 5th ed. p. 3, as to its special advantages. The Quirinal was held by the Sabines. Cp. Koch, Roman History, Eng. trans. p. 2.
[31] Ihne, Early Rome, p. 82.
[32] Presumably "Pelasgian." Cp. K.O. Müller, The Dorians, Eng. trans. i, 15; Schwegler, i, 155 sq.
[33] Perhaps the result of a partial conquest. Cp. Mommsen, vol. i, ch. 6, ad init., as to the precedence of the Palatine priests over those of the Quirinal.
[34] So Ihne, Early Rome, p. 5.
[35] Cp. Pelham, ch. iii. Ihne, who argues that the narratives concerning the Etruscan kings are no more trustworthy than those as to their predecessors, recognises that Pliny's record of the humiliating conditions of peace imposed on the Romans by Porsenna "would not have been made if the fact of the subjugation of Rome by an Etruscan king had not been incontestable" (Early Rome, p. 79; cp. pp. 85–86).
[36] Cp. Mérimée, Études sur l'histoire romaine, t. i, Guerre sociale, 1844, p. 352 sq.; Mommsen, B. ii, ch. i (i, 265).
[37] Cicero (De Officiis, ii, 12) and Sallust (cited by Augustine, De Civ. Dei, iii, 16) preserved the belief (accepted by Niebuhr) that the oppression of the poor by the rich had been restrained under the kings. Cp. Mahaffy (Problems in Greek History, pp. 81–83; Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. p. 83) and Wachsmuth (Hist. Antiq. of the Greeks, Eng. tr. i, 416) as to Greek despots. And see Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, ii, 203, as to the weakness of Rome through class-strifes after the expulsion of the kings.
[38] Greenidge, pp. 47–48; Mommsen, i, 72.
[39] Greenidge, pp. 147, 262, 273.
[40] Niebuhr, Lect. xxv, 3rd Eng. ed. p. 134. So Ihne, Early Rome, p. 80; and also Schwegler, ii, 200. Mommsen takes the traditional view. Cp. Shuckburgh (History of Rome, p. 71), who remarks that the battle was at least not a decisive victory. Meyer (Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 812) gives no verdict.
[41] The demand for the admission of plebeians to the consulate was thus met on the patrician plea that religion vetoed it. Only in 367 was it enacted that one of the two consuls should always be a plebeian.
[42] Plebeians first admitted to the Quæstorship, 421 B.C.; to the Military Tribuneship, 400; to the Consulate, 367; to the Dictatorship, 356; to the Censorship, 351; to the Prætorship, 337. This left the patricians in possession of the important privilege of membership of the sacred colleges. But that, in turn, was opened to plebeians in 300 or 296.
[43] De Officiis, i, 22, 30.
[44] Ad Atticum, i, 19.
[45] De Officiis, ii, 21.
[46] See Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, iv, 272–76, for some interesting details; and refs. in Mérimée, Guerre Sociale, p. 22.
[47] Livy, iv, 25.
[48] A writer in many respects instructive (W. Warde Fowler, The City State of the Greeks and Romans, 1893, p. 194), in pursuance of the thesis that "the Romans" had an "innate political wisdom" and an "inborn genius" for accommodation, speaks of the process of democratic self-assertion and aristocratic concession as "leaving no bad blood behind," this when social disease was spreading all round. The theorem of "national genius" will suffice to impair any exposition, however judicious otherwise. And this is the fundamental flaw in the argument of Bagehot in Physics and Politics. Though he notes the possibility of the objection that he is positing "occult qualities" (p. 24), he never eliminates that objection, falling back as he does on an assumed "gift" in "the Romans" (p. 81), instead of asking how an activity was evoked and fostered.
[49] Cp. the Politics, i, 6.
[50] Cp. Professor Pelham's Outline of Roman History, 1893, p. 197; Mérimée, Guerre Sociale, pp. 217, 220.
[51] Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains, et de leur décadence, ch. xi. He refers to the many cases in point in modern European history.
[52] Dio Cassius, xlvii, 14; xlviii, 6; Appian, Bell. Civ. iv, 3; v, 5, 22.
[53] See below, p. 30, as to Carthage.
[54] Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, i, 269.
[55] Idem, i, 272–73.
[56] See Livy, xxxiii, 36, as to the conjuratio servorum throughout Etruria in 557 A.U.C.
[57] Schwegler, i, 270, 275.
[58] Compare the slave wars of Rome in Sicily with the modern disorders (1892) in the same region, and with Aristotle's testimony as to the constant tendency of the slave populations in Greece to conspire against their owners (Politics, ii, 9).
[59] Juvenal, Sat. vi, 368, 593–96; Ovid, Amor. 1. ii, elegg. 13, 14. It is uncertain whether among the ancients any prudential preventive check was thought of. On the whole question see Malthus' fourteenth chapter. Malthus, however, omits to notice that the Romans probably learned the arts of abortion from the Greeks, Egyptians, and Syrians.