The consequences followed as a matter of course.  The first and most essential condition of all aristocratic government is, that the plenary power of the state be vested not in an individual but in a corporation.  Now a preponderantly aristocratic corporation, the senate, had appropriated to itself the government, and at the same time the executive power not only remained in the hands of the nobility, but was also entirely subject to the governing corporation.  It is true that a considerable number of men not belonging to the nobility sat in the senate; but as they were incapable of holding magistracies or even of taking part in the debates, and thus were excluded from all practical share in the government, they necessarily played a subordinate part in the senate, and were moreover kept in pecuniary dependence on the corporation through the economically important privilege of using the public pasture.  The gradually recognized right of the patrician consuls to revise and modify the senatorial list at least every fourth year, ineffective as presumably it was over against the nobility, might very well be employed in their interest, and an obnoxious plebeian might by means of it be kept out of the senate or even be removed from its ranks.

The Plebeian Opposition

It is therefore quite true that the immediate effect of the revolution was to establish the aristocratic government.  It is not, however, the whole truth.  While the majority of contemporaries probably thought that the revolution had brought upon the plebeians only a more rigid despotism, we who come afterwards discern in that very revolution the germs of young liberty.  What the patricians gained was gained at the expense not of the community, but of the magistrate’s power.  It is true that the community gained only a few narrowly restricted rights, which were far less practical and palpable than the acquisitions of the nobility, and which not one in a thousand probably had the wisdom to value; but they formed a pledge and earnest of the future.  Hitherto the —­metoeci—­ had been politically nothing, the old burgesses had been everything; now that the former were embraced in the community, the old burgesses were overcome; for, however much might still be wanting to full civil equality, it is the first breach, not the occupation of the last post, that decides the fall of the fortress.  With justice therefore the Roman community dated its political existence from the beginning of the consulate.

While however the republican revolution may, notwithstanding the aristocratic rule which in the first instance it established, be justly called a victory of the former —­metoeci—­ or the -plebs-, the revolution even in this respect bore by no means the character which we are accustomed in the present day to designate as democratic.  Pure personal merit without the support of birth and wealth could perhaps gain influence and consideration more easily under the regal government than under that of the