The Evolution of States. J. M. Robertson

The Evolution of States - J. M. Robertson


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fruitfulness of Italy, and, further, of the circumstance that "the free burghers had also the use of the common land" (for pasture). We are to remember that Italian land could yield two crops in a year. (Niebuhr, Lebensnachrichten, ii, 245, cited by Schwegler.)

      On the general problem as to why or how the land once communally tilled ceased to be so, we have still no better light than the old generalisation of Hobbes in reply to his own question: "Upon what impulsives, when all was equally every man's in common, men did rather think it fitting that every man should have his inclosure?" "I found," he puts it, "that from a community of goods there must needs arise contention whose enjoyment should be greatest, and from that contention all kind of calamities must unavoidably ensue." [Epistle Dedicatory to Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Civil Society (translation of De Cive), 1651. Cp. Goldwin Smith, The United States, 1893, p. 23.]

      This was already inferred in the eighteenth century by Ferguson (History of the Roman Republic, 1783, ch. i, note; perhaps following Maffei [1727], cited by Schwegler, i, 807), from the nature of the remains of the great cloacæ, which he held could not have been built by any of the early Roman kings. That view is since adopted by various authorities; see Middleton's Remains of Ancient Rome, 1892, i, 104–107; and Robiou et Delaunay, Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome, 1884, vol. ii, ch. i, § 1. Cp. Merivale, General History of Rome, pp. 9–11; Burton, Etruscan Bologna, 1876, pp. 170–74. Livy (i, 38) ascribes great cloacæ to the legendary Tarquin the elder. Professor Ettore Pais, on the other hand, confidently decides that the cloaca maxima belongs to the republican period, and dates it about 170 B.C. In any case, we know that an ante-Roman civilisation underlies the historic, and may now decide with Mr. Mahaffy that "as civilisation of some kind was vastly older on the Hill of Troy than any of us had imagined, so the site of every historic city is likely to have been the habitation of countless generations" (Survey of Greek Civ. 1897, p. 28).

      § 2

      Whatever were the part played by individual leaders, Roman or Etruscan, there clearly came into play in early Rome as in Athens the important factor of mixture of stocks. Romans and Sabines united to begin with; and the conquered plebs, destined later to enter the constitution and share in all the civic offices, represented some such source of recuperation to the Roman aristocracy as did the Saxons to that of England after the Norman Conquest. If we add the probable factor of an Etruscan element, Rome is to be conceived as standing for a ruling class of more various faculty than was to be found in any of the rival communities singly. The progressive absorption of the most enterprising of the plebeians was again, probably, an exception to the rule of Italic life as to that of other races, so that in following the class struggles of Rome we are to note not so much the violence of the process as the fact that, so far as it went, it was relatively fortunate. And its success, again, is conceivably due to the fact, among others, that from an early period the region of the seven defensible hills was a refuge or centre for men breaking away from the other Italian communities, where conservatism held firm.

      The most plausible theory of the constitution ascribed to Servius Tullius is that it was imposed by Etruscan


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