The plebeians massed on the Aventine Hill south-west of the city, which, being close to the river, had become the main centre for Rome’s artisans and traders. They met on consecrated ground, at a place where a new temple was being constructed for Ceres, Bacchus and Proserpina (the deities respectively of grain, wine and the bountiful earth), and it was the temple officials, known as ‘aediles’ (aediles), who were their first convenors. They declared themselves in a state of secession (secessio), which involved refusing military service until grievances had been met: in effect, on strike. (The plebeians would employ this form of protest at least five times in the 150 years that the Struggle of the Orders lasted.) But the patricians proved obdurate, for their powers of patronage were sufficient to prevent their clients deserting wholesale to the plebeian movement. Patrician retinues and plebeian crowds confronted one another on the streets. There was a rough balance between the two sides, producing political stalemate and a permanent division of the state into rival camps. For decades, the conduct of public affairs was frequently log-jammed – a condition readily recognized by contemporary Greeks, many of whose cities were consumed by similar conflicts between oligarchs and democrats, resulting in what they called stasis: paralysis of the state due to civil strife.
The stalemate turned plebeian protest into an organized movement with its own assemblies, officers and procedures – a permanent opposition to the patricians and the networks of clansmen and clients they controlled. The early mass rallies evolved into the Assembly of the Plebs (Concilium Plebis). The aediles were joined by ten annually elected ‘tribunes of the plebs’. Voting en masse gave way to voting by tribe (to ensure that rural plebeians who could not attend meetings in the city would not be under-represented). Somehow, despite the conflict, Rome continued to function, but the unresolved issues in dispute ensured that the Struggle of the Orders flared up repeatedly in renewed agitation over food shortages, military service, and the debt question. Not until the middle of the century was some sort of settlement achieved.
Both patrician consuls and plebeian tribunes stepped down in c. 451 BC to make way for a ‘Decemvirate’, a provisional ruling committee of ten, charged with the task of establishing the constitution, codifying the law, and committing matters to writing so that every citizen should know his rights. Writing was not new – Latin texts go back to the 8th century BC – but its uses had been largely ritual and administrative. Now writing was to be used to record laws. Too much law had been based on memory, precedent, and the tendentious ‘interpretations’ of upper-class judges. Writing promised fairness. ‘When the laws are written down,’ wrote the Greek playwright Euripides around this time, ‘weak and rich men get equal justice; the weaker, when abused, can respond to the prosperous in kind, and the small man with justice on his side defeats the strong.’
But when the Decemvirate published their laws – the Twelve Tables – there was dismay. Much, for sure, was uncontroversial, and it was convenient to have it summarized in plain and simple Latin; there were laws here that would endure as long as Rome. The centrality of the family was affirmed, and the powers of fathers in relation to wives, sons and daughters defined. Property rights were protected, infringements classified, and procedures for obtaining redress set out. Ostentatious display at funerals was discouraged. Secret meetings were banned. There was much about the laws that seemed public-spirited. But the laws of property in the Twelve Tables knew no limits, and the rights of the creditor in relation to the debtor were absolute. ‘Unless they make a settlement,’ boomed the law, ‘debtors shall be held in bonds for 60 days. During that time, they shall be brought before the praetor’s court in the meeting place on three successive market days, and the amount for which they are judged liable shall be announced. On the third market day, they shall suffer capital punishment or be delivered up for sale across the Tiber.’ Just as shocking was the laconic injunction inscribed on Table XI: ‘Intermarriage shall not take place between plebeians and patricians.’ A closed caste society dominated by landlords and debt-collectors: this, it seemed, was the model city of the Decemvirate.
Plebeian Rome again rose in revolt. The Aventine was reoccupied for a great meeting of the Assembly of the Plebs, and the commons declared a renewed state of secession against the patricians. The Decemvirate, shedding its mask of propriety and impartiality, then announced it would remain in office to restore order and save the Republic. Its members brought their retinues on to the street to battle it out with the plebeian crowd. The state, whose frontiers were currently under attack, was in turmoil.
Now the real power of the plebeian movement revealed itself. Had the junta commanded sufficient physical force to suppress the protests, they would doubtless have done so and thereby earned the plaudits of the rest of the aristocracy. But it did not. Faced by what was, in effect, a revolt of the hoplite class, the decemvirs’ street fighters could make little headway. It was the Roman army itself that was in secession, and against it the junta could not win. Once this was clear, the Decemvirate’s support inside the wider ruling class collapsed. The decemvirs lost the confidence of the Senate and were promptly forced to resign their positions and retire to the backbenches. The victory sent a surge of radical expectation through the plebeian masses that the Senate dared not disappoint. New consuls, Lucius Valerius and Marcus Horatius, elected on a reform platform, introduced sweeping laws to recognize plebeian institutions and formalize the rights of commoners (c. 449 BC). First, tribunes of the plebs were recognized as Roman magistrates, their persons protected from harm by religious sanction, with a special right of veto over any measure they deemed to be against the interests of the commons. Second, the Assembly of the Plebs gained formal recognition, its decisions (plebiscita) henceforward having constitutional authority. Third, the common citizens earned a right of appeal to the popular assembly against any decision by a patrician magistrate. In combination, these measures signalled the end not just of the Decemvirate but of the patrician regime which had governed the Republic for 60 years. Rome remained an oligarchy: its executive (the consuls), its primary assembly (the Senate) and its leading priesthoods (pontifex maximus and rex sacrorum) remained patrician preserves. But, constitutionally, these could not rule alone; indeed, in the face of determined opposition, they could not rule at all, for the levers of power now in the hands of the tribunes were sufficient to halt government business. The patricians continued to govern, but subject to approval by plebeian officers and plebeian mass meetings. The Struggle of the Orders was not yet over; there were bitter battles yet to come; but a giant step had been taken towards a more inclusive and broad-based polity.
The compromise which ended the first stage in the Struggle of the Orders was pregnant with great events. Had the junta crushed the popular movement, Rome would have become a society of landlords and serfs. Instead, the popular victory launched it on quite another trajectory. By empowering, to a degree, the common citizen, the reformed constitution limited exploitation and preserved the small-farmer class from which Rome’s armies were raised. More than that: not only did the middling sort survive, they became stakeholders with a positive interest in fighting for a Republic that safeguarded their land and granted them a share in the spoils of war. It is no exaggeration to say that, without the plebeian movement, the Struggle of the Orders, and the Valerio-Horatian laws of c. 449 BC, the legions of the Roman Republic could never have embarked on world conquest.
Hubris and Nemesis: the divided Republic, c. 449–367 BC
In the 60 years of patrician rule after the overthrow of the kings, Roman territory had hardly increased at all. Lars Porsenna had been defeated and Tarquin restoration prevented. Roman hegemony over the Latin cities had been restored. The Sabines, Aequi and Volsci had been repulsed and Latin territory safeguarded. But these had been defensive wars, and the cost of victory had been high. Nothing yet gave any clue that the divided and embattled city-state beside the Tiber would, within two centuries, control the whole of Italy, and two centuries after
that, most of the Mediterranean. However, the plebeian triumph of c. 449 BC had given Rome’s latent imperialism a new cutting edge. Loans, evictions and land-seizures – traditional methods for building up large holdings – were unpopular and now open to legal challenge. The booty, slaves and new land to be had through war therefore loomed larger in the ambition of Roman patricians. The Assembly of the Centuries, moreover, was more likely to vote for war, even foreign war, now that the common soldier could expect a decent share of the spoils. Mid-5th century Rome was a state whose inner tensions were being transformed into an outward-thrusting energy; a state where aspirations that might collide and produce stasis at home were about to be redirected into foreign conquest.
There was, at the time, a long-running dispute with the Etruscan city-state of Veii, which lay about 20 km due north of Rome. A short distance up the Tiber, Veientine territory extended on to the south bank of the river and included the strategically important town of Fidenae. This Veientine foothold on the Latin side of the Tiber posed a direct threat to Roman territory and to the city’s control of the lucrative trade in salt and luxury goods in the valley. Veii itself occupied a rocky plateau completely surrounded by cliffs and waterways except for a narrow neck of land on one side: a natural fortress of great strength. It was enclosed by a defensive wall several kilometres in circumference running along the top of the cliffs. Temples towered over the city. Artists’ workshops lined the streets. Roads radiated from the metropolis to the sea, to other Etruscan cities, and to Veii’s own rich agricultural hinterland. Heavily populated and wealthy, one of the great cities of Etruria, Veii was defended by a hoplite phalanx thousands-strong. This was a very different sort of enemy from a Sabine war-band; Veii was fully the equal of Rome.
War first broke out between the two cities in c. 483 BC. It then lasted, on and off, for almost a century. In the First Veientine War (c. 483– 474 BC), the Romans were defeated (the Fabii clan almost annihilated), and Veii retained control of Fidenae, the object of the struggle. In the Second Veientine War (c. 437–435 BC), a reinvigorated Rome went on to the offensive, captured Fidenae by siege, and drove the enemy off the south bank. Both these wars were, in a sense, defensive responses to the threat posed by Veientine control of Fidenae. Not so the Third Veientine War (c. 406–396 BC), the first unequivocally aggressive war in Roman history, where the aim was total conquest.
Veii itself was put under siege, an operation that strained Roman resources to the limit. The logistics of maintaining siege lines; the numbers and resourcefulness of the defenders; the threat posed by Etruscan relief-columns; and attacks on Latin territory by Veii’s barbarian allies: these in combination brought Rome close to defeat. In the crisis, the state declared martial law and appointed its leading citizen, Marcus Furius Camillus, dictator. Camillus reorganized the army, introduced pay so that men could afford to remain in the field outside the usual summer campaigning season, and began a more aggressive siege of Veii. The defences were penetrated along one of the main drainage tunnels beneath the city, some of which, it seems, had not been blocked. The Romans stormed in, and Veii was put to the sack. It is worth stressing what this implied: first, the soldiers ran amok, killing men, raping women; then, the survivors were rounded up and sold into slavery; finally, all movable property was systematically and comprehensively looted. The sack of Veii in 396 BC meant that the city and its people – according to some the wealthiest in Etruria – ceased to exist. The territory of the city was annexed, doubling the size of the ager Romanus, and this was later settled by Roman farmers, enrolled in four new tribes.
Veii had been destroyed in a new and terrible kind of war. Not a war for limited objectives to be ended by treaty when one of the protagonists sued for peace, but a total war whose aim was the annihilation of the enemy. And even as they fought this war, the Romans were active on other fronts, driving the Aequi and Volsci from parts of eastern and southern Latium. Rome had become something more than the leading city in a defensive alliance of Latins; she had become a predator state threatening the whole of west-central Italy. This was part of a wider change. The old international system – based on patchworks of small cities and tribes – was disintegrating. A new system dominated by great powers was emerging across the Mediterranean. For now, and for the next 200 years, it would remain uncertain which of the rising powers would win the contest for global supremacy. Rome’s imperial future was not predestined; many times history might have taken a different course; even now, at the moment of the fall of Veii, her greatest victory so far, danger threatened. In the far north, another warlike people was on the move; and one strong branch of that people had just lunged southwards into the Italian peninsula. A great Celtic battle-host was heading for Rome.
In the 6th century BC, when Rome was a small city-state ruled by Etruscan kings, a distinctive warrior aristocracy – members of what archaeologists now call the ‘Hallstatt culture’ – controlled a group of territories in Central Europe north of the Alps. The Hallstatt lords spoke Celtic, lived in hill-forts, and were buried with funerary carts, bronze cauldrons and drinking horns. At first their numbers were few and the territories they controlled small and scattered, but during the 5th century Celtic influence spread. A new style – the ‘La Tène culture’ – was adopted by an increasingly numerous aristocracy. Drinking sets and fire-dogs, gold and silver torcs, elaborate horse fittings, and weaponry, especially iron swords in decorated scabbards, became essential status-symbols in much of Central Europe. The aristocracy was formed of chieftains and small retinues of warriors, who wore helmets and sometimes body-armour, fought on horseback or in chariots, and were expert in the use of long slashing swords. Though the military ethos affected the whole of Celtic society, such that military service with spear and shield was an obligation on all free men, military achievement was a particular mark of noble status. The standing of a chief was measured by the size of the retinue of followers he attracted through success in war and raiding. In the late 5th century, this Celtic warrior culture burst the bounds of its homeland and flooded across Europe in a succession of violent waves. In the age of migrations (c. 400–200 BC), the Celts reached the furthest fringes of the Continent and beyond: across France and into southern Britain and eastern Spain; eastwards to the lower Danube and the shores of the Black Sea; from there into Greece and across the Aegean to Turkey; and over the Alps into the Po Valley, where they clashed with Ligurians, Etruscans and Veneti. Thus the Celts entered the history of the Greeks, who called them Keltoi, and of the Romans, who called them Galli.
One of the first to set out, in 390 BC, was Brennus. Seeking whatever chance might offer – mercenary service, war booty, land on which to settle, at any rate something honourable – Brennus led his host south into the heart of Italy. Alerted to the danger, the Roman army mobilized and met the Gauls in the steep valley of the River Allia, a small tributary of the Tiber on Rome’s north-east frontier. Here, for the first time, Roman soldiers faced a Celtic battle-array. A great mass of spearmen shouted war-cries and beat weapons against shields, many of them naked to the waist save for torcs, bracelets, painted tattoos and patterned cloaks. Trumpet blasts could be heard above the din, animal totems were waved aloft, and priests in the ranks called on the Celtic gods for assistance. In front were young warriors brandishing swords and shouting challenges to single combat. The battle was soon over. The Celtic charge was shattering. The whole line surged forwards at tremendous speed, its loose order and light equipment allowing the Gauls to sweep round the Romans’ flanks and threaten their rear. The ponderous phalanx of the city-state – a tight-packed block of slow-moving heavy infantry – was defenceless against such tactics. The Romans broke and ran. Thousands were cut down in the rout. A remnant retreated to the ruins of Veii and entrenched themselves. Nothing then stood between Brennus and Rome.
The city was effectively undefended. The 6th century wall was dilapidated, and new suburbs had been built outside its protection. Besides, the circuit was too long to be held b
y the depleted forces left in the city. As the Gallic host approached, the citizens retreated to the Capitoline Hill, where they improvised a breastwork at the top of the cliffs. There they held out for months – while the Gauls occupied and plundered the city – until hunger compelled them to seek terms. The fate of Veii a few years earlier cast a black shadow over these days. Was Rome, so recently and so completely victorious, now in its turn to be ethnically cleansed? Brennus, though, was a Gaul: his motives were mercenary, but his ambition modest; he was content to be bought off for a ransom in gold. Long afterwards, the Romans told each other stories about the Gallic invasion – how the sacred geese of Juno had alerted the defenders to a night attack; how Camillus, the victor of Veii, twice defeated the retreating Gauls with a scratch force; and how Camillus also, when the Romans saw the devastation in their city and debated moving to Veii, persuaded them to stay and rebuild. But these edifying tales cannot alter the fact that the Gauls had had Rome at their mercy, and that, had they been a more ruthless enemy, they might have destroyed it as utterly as the Romans had destroyed Veii.
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