XIII. CHAP. for a time the question of the Terentilian law, and to endeavour to obtain at once for their order the secure and exclusive property of the Aventine. New mode of proceeding to procure the passing of the law. The law is passed. 41 A new course was also adopted in the conduct of this measure. Instead of bringing it forward first before the commons, where its consideration might be indefinitely delayed by the violent interruptions of the burghers, L. Icilius called upon the consuls to bring it in the first instance before the senate, and he claimed himself to speak as counsel in its behalf. This was asserting not merely the right of petitioning, but the still higher right, that the petition should not be simply laid on the table, but that counsel should be heard in defence of it, and its prayer immediately taken into consideration. A story is told that the consuls' lictor 2 insolently beat away the tribune's officer who was going to carry to them his message; that immediately Icilius and his colleagues seized the lictor, and dragged him off with their own hands, intending to throw him from the rock for his treason against the sacred laws. They spared his life only at the intercession of some of the oldest of the senators, but they insisted that the consuls should comply with the demands of Icilius; and accordingly the senate was summoned, Icilius laid before them what may be called his petition of right, and they proceeded to vote whether they should accept or reject it 13. 43 The majority voted in its favour, moved, it is said, 41 Dionysius, X. 31. 42 Dionysius, X. 31. 43 Dionysius, X. 32. XIII. by the hope that this concession would be accepted CHAP. by the commons instead of the execution of the agrarian law. Then the measure thus passed by the senate was submitted by the consuls to the comitia of centuries, which, as representing the whole nation, might supersede the necessity of bringing it separately before the curia and the tribes. Introduced in a manner by the government, and supported by the influence of many of the burghers as well as by the strong feeling of the commons, the bill became a law its importance, moreover, led to its being confirmed with unusual solemnities; the pontifices and augurs attended; sacrifices were performed, and solemn oaths were taken to observe it; and as a further security, it was engraved on a pillar of brass, and then set up in the temple of Diana on the Aventine, where it remained till the time of Dionysius. The provisions of the law were, "that so much ** of Its prothe Aventine hill as was public or demesne property, should be allotted out to the commons, to be their freehold for ever. That all occupiers of this land should relinquish their occupation of it; that those who had occupied it forcibly or fraudulently 15, should have no compensation, but that other occupiers should be repaid for the money which they might have laid out in building upon it, at a fair estimate, 45 44 well-known form of the prætor's visions. XIII. CHAP. to be fixed by arbitration." Probably also, as Niebuhr thinks, there was a clause forbidding any burgher to purchase or inherit property on the hill, that it might be kept exclusively for the commons. It is mentioned that the commons began instantly to take possession of their grant, and the space not sufficing to give each man a separate plot of ground, an allotment was given to two, three, or more persons together, who then built upon it a house with as many flats or stories 16 as their number required, each man having one floor for himself and family as his freehold. The work of building sufficiently employed the commons for the rest of the year; the Terentilian law was allowed to rest; and an unusual rainy season which was very fatal to the crops "7, may have helped to suspend the usual hostilities with the Equians and Volscians. Fresh dis putes about 46 47 The same tribunes were re-elected for the year the Teren- following, and the Terentilian law was now again brought forward, but still as formerly before the tilian law. 46 Dionysius, X. 32. Houses 66 nis, circuituque publico aut privato cinguntur," seems to show that the insula was ordinarily built like our colleges, or like the inns of court in London, a complete building in itself, and so large as to occupy the whole space from one street to the next which ran parallel to it. 47 Livy, III. 31. Annonâ propter aquarum intemperiem laboratum est. Such notices of the weather and seasons come from the oldest and simplest annals, whether of the pontifices or of private families, and may safely be looked upon as authentic. assembly of the tribes; its rejection by the senate being supposed to be certain, if it were proposed there in the first instance. The consuls 48 headed the burghers in their opposition, and in their attempts to interrupt the assembly of the commons by violence; the tribunes in return brought some of the offenders to trial for a breach of the sacred laws, and not wishing to press for the severest punishment, enforced, according to Dionysius, only the confiscation of the criminal's property to Ceres, whose temple was under the special control of the ædiles of the commons, and was the treasury of their order. But the burghers, it is said, advanced money out of their own treasury to buy the confiscated estates from those who had purchased them, and then gave them back to their original owners. The consuls of the year 300, Sp. Tarpeius and 48 Dionysius, X. 33-42. The events of this year are given by Dionysius at great length, in fifteen chapters; in Livy they do not occupy as many lines. The story of L. Siccius, under a somewhat different form, is given by the former under this year; although in its common version it occurs again in his history in its usual place under the decemviri. Whoever was the writer from whom Dionysius copied, he must have been one who had no wish to disguise the injustice of the burghers, but rather perhaps to exaggerate it; for they never appear in a more odious light than in the transactions of this year. One statement however is curious ; that the houses most violent against the commons, and CHAP. XIII. CHAP. The Aternian law, "de multæ sacra mento." A. Aternius, appear to have been moderate men; and not only were the two consuls of the preceding year accused before the commons by the tribunes, and fined, without any opposition on the part of the burghers, but the new consuls themselves brought forward a law, which was intended probably to meet some of the objects of the Terentilian law, by limiting the arbitrary jurisdiction of the patrician magistrates. The Aternian law 49, de multæ sacramento, fixed the maximum of the fines which the consuls could impose for a contempt of their authority, at two sheep and thirty oxen; nor could this whole fine be imposed at once 5o, but the magistrate was to begin with one sheep, and if the offender continued obstinate, he might the next day fine him a second sheep, and the third day he might raise the penalty to the value of an ox, and thus go on day by day, till he had reached the utmost extent allowed by the law. It would appear also by the use of the term sacramentum 51, which was applied to money deposited in the judge's hands by two contending parties, to be forfeited or recovered according to the issue of the suit, that this fine was not absolute, but might be recovered by the party who had paid it, either on his subsequent submission, or on his appeal to the 49 Cicero, de Republicâ, II. 35. The reading of the consul's name, as given in this passage of Cicero, Aternius, enables us to account for and to correct the corrupt reading in Dionysius, Τερμήνιος. We find it also correctly given in one of the recently-discovered fragments of the Fasti Capitolini. 50 See Varro, de Ling. Latinâ, V. 177, and Niebuhr, Vol. II. p. 341. 2nd ed. 51 See Varro, de Ling. Lat. V. 180, and Festus in voce. |