Notes for Book II Chapter II

1.  II.  I. Right of Appeal

2.  I. XIII.  Landed proprietors

3.  I. VI.  Character of the Roman Law

4.  II.  I. Collegiate Arrangement

5.  I. XI.  Property

6.  I. XI.  Punishment of Offenses against Order

7.  That the plebeian aediles were formed after the model of the patrician quaestors in the same way as the plebeian tribunes after the model of the patrician consuls, is evident both as regards their criminal functions (in which the distinction between the two magistracies seems to have lain in their tendencies only, not in their powers) and as regards their charge of the archives.  The temple of Ceres was to the aediles what the temple of Saturn was to the quaestors, and from the former they derived their name.  Significant in this respect is the enactment of the law of 305 (Liv. iii. 55), that the decrees of the senate should be delivered over to the aediles there (p. 369), whereas, as is well known, according to the ancient —­and subsequently after the settlement of the struggles between the orders, again preponderant—­practice those decrees were committed to the quaestors for preservation in the temple of Saturn.

8.  I. VI.  Levy Districts

9.  I. III.  Clan-Villages

10.  II.  II.  Secession to the Sacred mount

11.  II.  II.  Intercession

12.  II.  II.  Legislation

CHAPTER III

The Equalization of the Orders, and the New Aristocracy

Union of the Plebians

The tribunician movements appear to have mainly originated in social rather than political discontent, and there is good reason to suppose that some of the wealthy plebeians admitted to the senate were no less opposed to these movements than the patricians.  For they too benefited by the privileges against which the agitation was mainly directed; and although in other respects they found themselves treated as inferior, it probably seemed to them by no means an appropriate time for asserting their claim to participate in the magistracies, when the exclusive financial power of the whole senate was assailed.  This explains why during the first fifty years of the republic no step was taken aiming directly at the political equalization of the orders.

But this league between the patricians and the wealthy plebeians by no means bore within itself any guarantee of permanence.  Beyond doubt from the very first a portion of the leading plebeian families had attached themselves to the movement-party, partly from a sense of what was due to the fellow-members of their order, partly in consequence of the natural bond which unites all who are treated as inferior, and partly because they perceived that concessions to the multitude were