V. CHAP. crushed the liberties of the commons, doing away with the laws 39 of Servius, and, as we are told, destroying the tables on which they were written; abolishing the whole system of the census, and consequently the arrangement of the classes, and with them the organization of the phalanx; and forbidding even the religious meetings of the Paganalia and Compitalia, in order to undo all that had been done to give the commons strength and union. Further it is expressly said 40, that he formed his military force out of a small portion of the people, and employed the great bulk of them in servile works, in the building of the circus and the capitoline temple, and the completion of the great drain or cloaca; so that in his wars, his army consisted of his allies, the Latins and Hernicans, in much greater proportion than of Romans. His enmity to the commons was all in the spirit of Sylla; and the members of the aristocratical societies, who were his ready tools in every act of confiscation, or legal murder, or mere assassination, were faithfully represented by the agents of Sylla's proscription, by L. Catilina and his patrician associates. But in what followed, Tarquinius showed himself, like Critias or Appius Claudius, a mere vulgar tyrant, who preferred himself to his order, when the two came into competition, and far inferior to Sylla, the most sincere of aristocrats, who having secured the ascendancy of his order, was content to resign his own personal power, who was followed therefore by the noblest as well as by the vilest of his countrymen, by Pompeius and Catulus no less than by Catilina. Thus Tarquinius became hated by all that was good and noble amongst the houses, as well as by the commons; and both orders cordially joined to effect his overthrow. But the evil of his tyranny survived him; 39 Dionysius, IV. 43. 40 Dionysius, IV. 44. V. it was not so easy to restore what he had destroyed, CHAP. as to expel him and his family: the commons no longer stood beside the patricians as an equal order, free, wealthy, well armed, and well organized; they were now poor, ill armed, and with no bonds of union; they therefore naturally sank beneath the power of the nobility, and the revolution which drove out the Tarquins established at Rome not a free commonwealth, but an exclusive and tyrannical aristocracy. CHAPTER VI. MISCELLANEOUS NOTICES OF THE STATE OF THE Ad nos vix tenuis famæ perlabitur aura. VIRGIL, En. VII. VI. CHAP. THE last chapter was long, yet the view which can be derived from it is imperfect. Questions must suggest themselves, as I said before, to which it contains no answers. Yet it seemed better to draw the attention first to one main point, and to state that point as fully as possible, reserving to another place much that was needed to complete the picture. For instance, the account of the classes of Servius leads naturally to questions as to the wealth of the Romans, its sources, its distribution, and its amount: the division of the people into centuries excites a curiosity as to their numbers: the mention of the change of the Roman worship, and the introduction of Etruscan rites, dispose us to ask, how these rites affected the moral character of the people; what that character was, and from whence derived. Again, when we read of the great works of the later kings, we think what advance or what style of the arts was displayed in them; and the laws of king Servius written on tables, with the poetical and uncertain nature of the story of his reign, make us consider what was the state of the human mind, and what use had as yet been made of the great invention of letters. It is to these points, so far as I am able, that CHAP. the following chapter will be devoted. 1 VI. wealth of under the Their copper I. Niebuhr has almost exhausted the subject of the of the Roman copper money. He has shown its original low the Romans value, owing to the great abundance of the metal; that later kings. as it afterwards became scarce, a reduction in the weight money. of the coin followed naturally, not as a fraudulent depreciation of it, but because a small portion of it was now as valuable as a large mass had been before. The plenty of copper in early times is owing to this, that where it is found it exists often in immense quantities, and even in large masses of pure metal on the surface of the soil. Thus the Copper Indians of North America found it in such abundance on their hills that they used it for all domestic purposes; but the supply thus easily obtained soon became exhausted; and as the Indians have no knowledge of mining, the metal is now comparatively scarce. The small value of copper at Rome is shown not only by the size of the coins, the as having been at first a full pound in weight, but also by the price of the war-horse, according to the regulation of Servius Tullius, namely, ten thousand pounds 1 Vol. I. p. 474, et seqq. Ed. 2. See also Müller, Etrusker, Ï. 4, § 13. 2 "Ad equos emendos dena millia æris ex publico data." Livy, I. 43. It has been doubted whether this sum be meant as the price of one horse or two: Niebuhr supposes that it includes the purchase of a slave to act as groom, and also of a horse for him. And this seems confirmed in some degree by Festus, who says that the Romans used two horses in battle, to have a fresh one to mount when the first one was tired; and that the money given to furnish these two horses was called Pararium. Festus in "Pararium," and "Paribus equis." Yet I find in Von Raumer's Account of the Prices of Things in the Middleages, (Geschichte der Hohenstaufen, V. p. 436, et seqq.) that in the year VI. Their prin CHAP. of copper. of copper. This statement, connected as it is with the other details of the census, seems original and authentic; nor considering the great abundance of cattle and other circumstances, is it inconsistent with the account in Plutarch's life of Publicola, that an ox in the beginning of the Commonwealth was worth one hundred oboli, and a sheep worth ten; nor with the provisions of the Aternian law, which fixed the price of the one at one hundred ases and the other at ten. The sources of wealth amongst the Romans, under cipal sources of wealth. their later kings, were agriculture, and also, in a large proportion, foreign commerce. Agriculture, indeed, strictly speaking, could scarcely be called a source of wealth; for the portions of land assigned to each man, even if from the beginning they were as much as seven jugera, were not large enough to allow of the growth of much superfluous produce. The ager publicus, or undivided public land, was indeed of considerable extent, and this as being enjoyed exclusively by the patricians might have been a source of great profit. But in the earliest times it seems probable that the greatest part of this land was kept as pasture; and only the small portions of two jugera, allotted by the houses to their clients, to be held during pleasure, were appropriated to tillage. The low prices of sheep and oxen show a Polybius reckoned the light as of value of twelve hundred per cent. 66 3 "Diu," says Pliny, XVIII. 3, pascua solum vectigal fuerant." Varro says, “Quos agros non colebant propter silvas, aut id genus ubi pecus posset pasci, et possidebant, ab usu suo Saltus nominarunt. De L. L. V. § 36. "Possidere," as Niebunr's readers well know, is the proper term for the occupation of the public land. And the Scholiast on Thucydides, I. 139, rightly considers yns dopíorov to be equivalent to où σTelpoμévns, because undivided land was commonly left in pasture. |