Lecture 23: DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROMAN CONSTITUTION
Etruscan Kings
(619-510 BC) were responsible for a number of developments including the Roman
constitution. King Servius Tullius (c 550 BC) introduced census reforms similar
to those of Solon in Athens. He reorganized the military assembly into five
classes based on property qualifications. Within each class, soldiers were
organized according to centuries of 100 soldiers, and for each level of wealth
a century of older and a century of younger citizens existed. Hence the
Military Assembly was also known as the Centuriate
Assembly.
The Military (Centuriate)
Assembly was organized into some 193 centuries in all, 18 in the
"equestrian" or Knights' class (i.e., those whose worth enabled them
to own horses), 80 in the First Class. "Votes" would be cast
according to centuries (the majority vote within a century carried that century
as one vote). The top centuries voted first, and their votes counted most. As
soon as the vote of a majority of centuries (97) was secured, the election was
over. Since the wealthier citizens tended to see things in common, centuries of
the Equites (the Knights) and the
First Class typically voted alike. This gave a candidate or a legislative
measure 98 centuries, sufficient to determine the outcome. Even if we assume
that voting continued into the highest-ranking centuries of the Second Class,
once a total of 97 centuries was secured, the voting would cease and the
assembly disbanded. Typically, the lower classes would never be called on to
vote. In short, this was a conservatively organized assembly in which the votes
of the wealthiest citizens came first and counted most. Rarely were the centuries
of the poorest citizens called to vote.
Servius Tullius' logic in organizing such an assembly was to enable wealthy plebeians, (citizens not related to any of the
senatorial families of the kings) to be enrolled in the highest class on the
basis of wealth, as opposed to birth, a reflection of the growing importance of
the hoplite phalanx at Rome (like Greece, because those with the most worth
furnished the most armor) and the need of the king to draw on greater manpower
than otherwise available within the aristocracy. As in Sparta, Roman kings
appear to have enjoyed strong support among the element of small soldier
citizen soldiers and animosity among the aristocracy.
In 510 BC the aristocracy rebelled and expelled the last Etruscan king of Rome,
Tarquin the Proud. Patrician aristocrats declared themselves a republic and
carefully transferred the power of the king to new annually elected magistrates
eventually known as consuls (2
consuls elected annually). These annually elected chief executive officers were
elected by the Centuriate Assembly. The religious
power of the king they transferred to a chief priest known as the Pontifex Maximus. The members of the Senate,
the patres, or patricians
(all those who claimed descent from members of the Senate of the kings)
informed the citizenry that since they were descended from the gods, it was
necessary that "patricians" alone be allowed to hold this high
office. The power of the consuls, their imperium,
was ultimately based on the consul's authority to consult the auspices, that
is, to consult with the gods about the appropriateness of conducting public
business. This religious authority gave the consuls the right to command
armies, the power to hold assemblies, and to convene the Senate, and more
broadly the royal power of life and death over everyone and everything in the
army's path. This power was designated by the presence of 12 bodyguards or
crowd-control attendants known as lictors. The lictors
accompanied the consul everywhere he went in public to clear a path for him.
They carried bundles of rods known as the fasces to beat people
who failed to respect the authority of the consul. When the consul left the
city at the command of the army the lictors places an axe in their bundle of
rods to signify the consul's authority to conduct sacrifice, i.e., his power of
life and death in order to preserve the authority of the republic over everyone
and every thing in his path. He could execute
captured enemies and his own mutineers with impunity once entrusted with imperium
outside the walls of Rome. An actual religious ceremony led by the priests
known as the augurs would deliver the imperium into his hands as he
prepared to leave the city. There was a clear notion here that an aura of
religious magic, the power to consult with the gods through augury, lay at the
foundation of imperium. Roman officials entrusted with this power
(consuls, dictators, and praetors) had the power to consult with the gods
before conducting any public action, be it a battle or an electoral assembly.
The gods would speak to them through augury. Patricians insisted that this
power would evaporate if the authority were entrusted to someone who was not,
like themselves, descended from the gods. They used religious taboo to insist
on their supremacy in political society. Plebeians could vote in the assembly,
but only patricians could hold office and therefore enter the Senate for life.
Since by now as a result of the urban development of the Etruscan kings Rome
was the largest city in all Italy, it had developed a complex society with
numerous wealthy plebeian (non senatorial)
families. The latter were unwilling to accept such logic particularly since the
kings had recently encouraged their participation in leadership by adlecting
many leading plebeians into their Senate. Plebeian leaders used general citizen
discontent based on crises concerning land and debts (recall Israel and Greece)
to mount protests against the patrician leadership. These culminated in 494 BC
in the great secession on the Sacred Mount. The hoplite army of the Romans
withdrew from the army of the consuls just prior to a battle with the army of
the expelled former King and refused to fight. They staged a
"sit-down" strike on what became known afterward as the Sacred Mount,
while dressed in their full panoplies of armor. Cognizant of the consuls'
authority of imperium and the risk they ran by mutinying, the plebeian
soldiers bound themselves together religiously by swearing a most fearsome oath
to protect the persons of the representatives they chose to speak for them at
that moment. These annually elected representatives of the "plebeian
assembly" became known as the 10 Plebeian
Tribunes. Because of the oaths sworn on the Sacred Mount, their
persons were sacrosanct, or "inviolable", that is, they could not be
touched without inciting all plebeians to come to their protection. Sacrosanctitas
suddenly gave the plebeian tribunes religious authority that was equal in some
sense to the imperium of the consuls and brought the state to a
constitutional crisis requiring negotiations on the level of equals between the
Senate and its magistrates, the 2 consuls, and the plebeian assembly and its
duly appointed "civil liberties protectors," the 10 tribunes. Through
personal inviolability, tribunes could extend their protection to ordinary
Roman citizens merely by placing their hand on them and asserting their auxilium or help. No Roman magistrate could
impose his authority on a citizen when a tribune's auxilium had been extended.
Tribunes learned to veto the work of all other magistrates simply by appearing
in a convened assembly or Senate meeting and using their sacrosanctitas
to block any and all public activity (intercessio). They also obtained the
right to pass legislation in the Plebeian Assembly that was binding on all
Roman citizens and the state. All these powers evolved from the intrinsic
religious authority offered by their sacrosanctitas.
Over time, ambitious tribunes learned to explore the full sense of their
religious power to effect political reform and innovation on the Republic.
As the plebeian assembly became permanent it evolved into a Tribal (Popular, Plebeian) Assembly of 35
voting tribes, arranged geographically according to one's residence. In an
election (to elect plebeian magistrates such as the tribunes) votes would be
conducted within each tribe in an order determined by lot. The votes of the
majority of voters in a tribe determined the one vote of that tribe. Out of 35
tribes, a majority of 18 would carry the election. Although the Tribal Assembly
was regarded as more democratically organized, evidence shows that it was
blatantly "jerry-rigged" to ensure that even this assembly was
weighted toward the property-holding classes. In fact, all manumitted slaves
when enrolled in the roman census were placed in the four urban tribes of Rome
rather than in the 31 rural tribes of their former owners. This ensured that
the vote of the emerging urban population was diluted by the fewer votes of the
population of rural farmers in the outskirts of the city. In short, Rome
remained a conservative society through and through; at the outset the work of
the plebeian tribunes was really to ensure the political rights of wealthy
non-patrician citizen soldiers, and until the era of the Late Republic the main
purpose of the plebeian assembly was to address the concerns of citizen
soldiers.
Ultimately what plebeian leaders wanted was access to the magistracies and
membership in the Senate. For centuries this conflict raged domestically even
as Rome conducted sustained wars with the expelled king and his sons and with
neighboring peoples in its effort to survive. Every time the plebeians appeared
to be on the verge of gaining full political equality with the patricians, the
latter would change the rules, largely by creating some new electoral office
and by relegating an essential component of the former royal power to that
office and restricting its eligibility exclusively to patricians. In this
manner, other magistracies came into being --
8 praetors -- chief judicial officers responsible for organizing
Roman legal business and courts. These magistrates also held imperium,
eventually served as provincial governors, and as such tended to conduct
military operations in "pacified" regions of the empire.
2 curule aediles -- responsible for public safety, maintenance of
public monuments, and performing celebrations in honor of the Roman gods. This
last task enabled them to gain great notoriety in Rome by throwing the annual
Roman festivals, oftentimes going deeply into personal debt in order to put on
outlandish games.
10 quaestors -- chief financial officers, their number equaled
those of magistrates holding imperium (consuls and praetors combined).
Their main job was to carry the war chest of any Roman magistrate entrusted
with imperium and to dispense funds as required. If anything happened to the
consuls they constitutionally assumed command of the army until an new commander could be appointed and dispatched by the
Senate. Otherwise they managed the state treasury, the money supply, and the
provincial governor's financial administration in the provinces (eventually).
2 Censors-- elected every 5 years for a term of not more than 18
months. They drew up a list of citizens; determined the membership of the
Senate; and let out public contracts for auction to public contractors known as
publicani. Religiously their job was to
"cleanse" the Roman body politic and its institutions (that is, to
perform the lustrum) to ensure that all was right with the gods so that
Rome could continue to receive their blessing as elicited through state augury.
All of these offices were outgrowth to the Struggle
of the Orders at Rome (494-287 BC), the conflict resulting from
the efforts of the plebeians to gain full political status at Rome.
Another very important office resulted from this conflict, that of the Roman Dictatorship. The dictator represented the
temporary restoration of royal absolute authority. A dictator was appointed by
the Roman Senate and People in the event that the consuls became incapacitated
through death on the battlefield, for example. The Dictator enjoyed imperium
inside the city, not just outside, and was designated by appointment of 24
lictors rather than 12. The lictors bore their axes in the fasces inside the
city because the dictator enjoyed the power of life and death inside the city
as well. However, the appointment only lasted 6 months, at which time it was
expected that the political crisis would be resolved and normal governing procedures
could resume. In essence, the dictatorship was the temporary institution of
martial law, with Rome placed on an emergency war footing. All other curule
magistracies ceased to function and the dictator ruled Rome using archaic,
formerly royal subordinates known as the Master of the Horse (magister equitum) and the Prefect of the city (praefectus urbanus).
The appointment of the dictator was therefore an extreme measure rarely
resorted to because the freedom of all Romans, including patricians, became subordinate
to the "whimsy" of a single individual. Dictators were common during
the struggle of the orders, used to combat the increasingly recognized sacrosanctitas of the plebeian tribunes, and later
during the Hannibalic War they were common because so many Roman consuls were
killed or injured in the field, leaving a temporary power vacuum at Rome.
Ultimately, in 287 BC the Plebeian Assembly passed a law known as the Lex
Hortensia that recognized the legally binding character of all
legislation passed by the plebeian or tribal assembly. By this point it was
secured that at least one consul and one censor every time be plebeian.
Plebeians attained full and equal status in political life, assumed the highest
magistracies, and entered the Senate for life. The Roman aristocracy became a
mixed patricio-plebeian aristocracy and in fact,
majority plebeian. Since patricians could only survive by blood (both parents
had to be patrician), by the end of the Republic fewer than 20 patrician
families survived. The conflict between plebeians and patricians essentially
disappeared by the time of the Middle Republic, but it left the Roman Senate
and People with a working constitutional structure, sufficiently flexible yet
enjoying clear recognition of rank and responsibility that enabled this society
to meet any and all challenges in the Mediterranean world.
Constitutionally, this left the Roman Republic in the unique position of
operating two governments at the same time. The Centuriate
Assembly elected those magistracies concerned with imperium, the
military, the judiciary, and the treasury (the curule magistracies); its
elections were conducted in a way that favored the wealthiest citizens and its
acts were binding on the Roman state. However, the Plebeian or Tribal Assembly
used the more democratically organized assembly of 35 tribes to elect the
plebeian magistrates (tribunes and aediles) and to pass any legislation that
assembly deemed necessary. Such legislation was also binding on the state. The
point that needs to be kept in mind is that the same body politic was voting in
either assembly, the difference was how voting was organized and its results.
In essence, Rome enjoyed the function of two governments operating at the same
time and place. Such a constitutional development is referred to as Dual Polity. What held these governments
together and prevented the obvious risk of political "gridlock" was
the intermediating influence of the Senate.