consulate under this singular form?(3) But, in the
first place, there were associated with the holding
of the supreme magistracy various honorary rights,
partly personal, partly hereditary; thus the honour
of a triumph was regarded as legally dependent on
the occupancy of the supreme magistracy, and was never
given to an officer who had not administered the latter
office in person; and the descendants of a curule
magistrate were at liberty to set up the image of
such an ancestor in the family hall and to exhibit
it in public on fitting occasions, while this was not
allowed in the case of other ancestors.(4) It is
as easy to be explained as it is difficult to be vindicated,
that the governing aristocratic order should have
allowed the government itself to be wrested from their
hands far sooner than the honorary rights associated
with it, especially such as were hereditary; and therefore,
when it was obliged to share the former with the plebeians,
it gave to the actual supreme magistrate the legal
standing not of the holder of a curule chair, but
of a simple staff-officer, whose distinction was one
purely personal. Of greater political importance,
however, than the refusal of the -ius imaginum- and
of the honour of a triumph was the circumstance, that
the exclusion of the plebeians sitting in the senate
from debate necessarily ceased in respect to those
of their number who, as designated or former consuls,
ranked among the senators whose opinion had to be
asked before the rest; so far it was certainly of
great importance for the nobility to admit the plebeian
only to a consular office, and not to the consulate
itself.
Opposition of the Patriciate
But notwithstanding these vexatious disabilities the
privileges of the clans, so far as they had a political
value, were legally superseded by the new institution;
and, had the Roman nobility been worthy of its name,
it must now have given up the struggle. But it
did not. Though a rational and legal resistance
was thenceforth impossible, spiteful opposition still
found a wide field of petty expedients, of chicanery
and intrigue; and, far from honourable or politically
prudent as such resistance was, it was still in a
certain sense fruitful of results. It certainly
procured at length for the commons concessions which
could not easily have been wrung from the united Roman
aristocracy; but it also prolonged civil war for another
century and enabled the nobility, in defiance of those
laws, practically to retain the government in their
exclusive possession for several generations longer.
Their Expedients
The expedients of which the nobility availed themselves
were as various as political paltriness could suggest.
Instead of deciding at once the question as to the
admission or exclusion of the plebeians at the elections,
they conceded what they were compelled to concede
only with reference to the elections immediately impending.
The vain struggle was thus annually renewed whether
patrician consuls or military tribunes from both orders
with consular powers should be nominated; and among
the weapons of the aristocracy this mode of conquering
an opponent by wearying and annoying him proved by
no means the least effective.