The Rise of the Roman Republic69divided again by inheritance until many citizens were
virtually landless. Roman law insisted on partible inher-
itance, the more-or-less equal division of property
among heirs. The practice persists today wherever the
Roman legal tradition remains. It is a major obstacle to
the preservation of a family’s wealth. The only solution
to the problems it created, apart from demographic ca-
tastrophe, was territorial growth. New lands acquired
through conquest were distributed to Roman citizens,
with those who commanded the legions taking the
lion’s share. Poor plebeians, faced with imminent bank-
ruptcy, wanted a fairer division of this public land and
an end to debt slavery.
These aims were not incompatible. Rich and poor
knew that both could be achieved by combining forces
against the patriciate. As a result, plebeian efforts to de-
velop institutions and win for themselves a place in
government were the dominant theme of Roman poli-
tics from the beginnings of the republic until the third
century B.C. This Struggle of the Orders forged the ba-
sic institutions of the Roman state.The Evolution of Roman Government
The power of the patricians was deeply rooted in law
and custom, but even before the fall of the monarchy it
was in one sense an anachronism. The heart of the Ro-
man army was infantry, and Roman survival depended
upon the swords and spears of plebeians, not horse-
mounted aristocrats. In Rome, as in the Greek polis, po-
litical rights would grow from military service.
The plebeians began their struggle in 494 B.C.
when they answered a senatorial call to arms by leaving
the city and refusing to fight against the Volscians, a
neighboring people who threatened to invade Roman
territory. This dramatic gesture won them the right to
elect tribunes,who could represent their interests and de-
fend them against unjust decrees by the magistrates. In
the following year they erected a temple on the Aven-
tine to Ceres, the Roman variant of the Earth Mother.
Ceres, unlike the sky-gods favored by the patricians,
had long been associated with peasants and artisans.
The temple, along with its aediles,or wardens, gave sa-
cred status to the plebeian cause and placed its tribunes
under divine protection. It also provided the basis for a
political organization. The meetings of the cult, which
were open only to plebeians, issued decrees or plebiscites
in opposition to the public assembly. This body soon
evolved into an assembly that was regarded by ple-
beians as a kind of alternative government.
Pressure from the plebeian assembly bore fruit more
than a generation later in the publication of the Twelve
Tables (c. 451–450 B.C.). They were the first body of
written law in Roman history, and Livy called them,
with some exaggeration, “the fountainhead of all public
and private laws.” The codified laws reinforced the privi-
leges of the patricians, recognized the plebeians as a dis-
tinct order, and indirectly offered them a measure of
legal protection. Laws that were written down could not
be altered at will by patrician judges who often acted
out of self-interest or class prejudice. The tables also in-
troduced the principle of equality before the law (aequa-
tio iuris) because these laws applied to patricians and
plebeians alike. The Twelve Tables themselves were de-
stroyed during the Gallic sack of Rome in 387 B.C., and
their provisions are known today primarily through the
commentaries of later jurists (see document 4.4). Seen
through the eyes of these commentators, the tables
seem harsh and regressive. The principle of patria potestas,
for example, gave the husband the powers of “head of
the family” and instructed him to kill a deformed baby.
Another table stated that women were perpetual minors
under the guardianship of their fathers or husbands, a le-
gal principle that persisted in European law for more
than two thousand years. But if the Twelve Tables seem
conservative in many respects, they were also an impor-
tant step in the establishment of plebeian rights and the
rule of law.
Among the more revolutionary features of the
Twelve Tables was their recognition of wealth, in addi-
tion to birth, as a measure of social stratification. This
may not seem like an advance, but it reflected an im-
portant part of the plebeian agenda. By 443 B.C. all citi-
zens were ranked by property qualifications, which
determined not only their military role but also their
right to participate in the public or centuriate assembly
that elected the magistrates. A new official, the censor,
was elected to determine the rankings on an ongoing
basis, and the census became an important civic and re-
ligious ritual (see illustration 4.4).
The entire body of male citizens was divided into
centuries, roughly corresponding to the size of a mani-
ple, the military unit that, in its original form, had
probably contained about one hundred troops (see
table 4.1). The centuries were in turn divided into
classes ranging from the first class of heavily armed ho-
plites to a fifth class armed only with slings. The patri-
cian equites,or cavalry, and the proletarii,who owned only
their children and could afford no weapons, were tech-
nically outside the class system, but this was little more
than a convenient social fiction. The important point