008 - Decades of Gloom

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome. The years after the expulsion of the Decemvirate were hard. Old problems remained unsolved while new ones threatened to tear the city apart. Patrician and Plebe were at each other's throats over wealth, power, and land. The population of the city was growing and there was not enough land to give them and not enough food to feed them. Pop failures exasperated the problem and famine became a persistent killer. Bitter tensions led to a breakdown of military resolve and old enemies long contained now returned a match for their former bettors. The Volscians and Aequians both peeled off Roman territory to the east and south, and there was little the legions could do about it. This is how the Romans limped through the second half of the 400s BC, hungry, tired, weak and demoralized. At the turn of the century, a final victory over a VA would lift the hopes, albeit briefly, of the city, but for now, life was a dreary war of attrition.

In the aftermath of the publication of the Twelve Tables, the Plebes immediately became aware of an institutionalized bias against them. They were incensed to see a codification of the ban against Patrician-Plebe marriage and immediately opened a new front in their war for equality. The issue of greatest concern was access to the high offices of state. This meant the consulship and the religious offices of Pontifex Maximus and its subordinate priesthoods. Only patricians, by law, could hold these offices, and if Plebes could not intermarry with patricians, then they would never gain access to the highest positions of authority or have the final say in law and religion. The Plebes attacked this imbalance from two angles. First they sought to legalize Patrician-Plebe intermarriage, and second, they demanded that the consulship be open to Plebe candidates. The former would be won quickly, and as to the latter, it would be just under a hundred years before the first Plebe was finally named consul in 366 B.C.

In 445, a tribune named Cornelius introduced a bill legalizing Patrician-Plebe marriage. The measure was fought by the patricians who fretted about the dilution of pure patrician blood, but their resistance was only half-hearted. For one thing, their arguments really had no leg to stand on. When it came to officiating the necessary religious sacrifices, the Romans, all of them, believed that a patrician must be the official in charge, or the gods would be offended. Some patrician families claimed that mixing the two classes would inevitably offend the gods, but in Roman law legal status followed the father's position alone, without any concept of genetic makeup. Incest, for example, did not even cover relations between maternal cousins, they were simply not considered part of the same family. So claims about blood dilution came off as absurd. Any child born to a patrician father was a patrician, period. Flimsy racial arguments aside, the matter basically came down to not wanting to share with the other children, and patrician solidarity soon cracked. There were a number of noble families who eyed the fortunes of the wealthy Plebe families, and the measure was soon passed.

As to admission into the consulship, the patricians fought much harder to prevent it, and far dirtier. This was not a toy that they were going to share with the other children. And so in 444 BC, right on the hills of Plebes gaining at least nominal access to power, the consulship was suspended and the third manifestation of executive power was inaugurated, military tribunes with consular power. The switch was not permanent though, and for the next 80 odd years the executive leadership of Rome alternated between the new military tribunes and the traditional dual consulship, depending on the circumstances of a given year. Initially three military tribunes would be elected by the centuriata and granted executive authority over the state, though over the years that number rose to four and then to six.

The introduction of the new executive form can be seen as a move by the patricians to protect the consulship from Plebe taint. No plebe could be consul if no consuls were elected. The military tribunes were elected democratically by the army, and plebes as well as patricians stood for in one election. This was fine with the patricians as long as the sanctity of the consulship itself was guarded. Further, by increasing the number of executives, plebe ambition was mollified and at the same time power was watered down so that the elected plebes were not as singularly powerful as they would be if they had been consuls. Plus the entire exercise kept plebes from agitating too hard for admission to the consulship.

For the years between 444 and 367 BC military tribunes were elected roughly half the time, the other years being governed by the traditional dual consuls. Much has gone into analyzing what factors determined whether consuls or tribunes would be elected for a given year, but by cross-referencing executive form with military activity a possible answer emerges. Consuls were generally in charge during the major conflicts of the era, so it would seem that military tribunes were elected when no major military action was planned, whereas consuls were elected when engagement was imminent. This seems counterintuitive given the name military tribune, but it makes sense. Plebes with consular power were acceptable to the patricians as long as they were destined for little more than off-year administrative duties. When real action was required, the patrician-controlled consulship was returned. The patricians wanted to make sure that they alone determined the course of state in times of crisis. If this is true, then the creation of military tribunes with consular power was little more than a stall tactic formulated by the patricians to put off full political equality with the plebes, which it did for the better part of 80 years.

A second action by the patricians further removed the plebes from access to real power. One of the most important duties of the consuls was administering the census once every five years. The census determined citizen status as well as classification within the five-tiered system of the Commodus Centuriata. The consuls charged with taking the census had enormous latitude at the edges of the dividing lines to move citizens up or down, granting a degree of control over the end voting blocks of the Centuriata. More than that even, it was during the census that citizen status was granted or revoked. Obviously, the patricians had a keen interest in maintaining control of the census, and when military tribunes were introduced, the administration of the census was peeled off from the other consular powers and invested into a new office that was destined to become one of the most coveted of all the magistries, the censor. In time, the censor would acquire other duties, most famously the vague directive to protect public morals, but for now the single role of administering the census was important enough. By senatorial decree, the censor had to be a patrician, ostensibly because of the religious ceremonies of the census that needed attending to, but most likely it was to make sure that plebes could never engineer more favorable voting blocks for themselves in the Centuriata.

These political reforms closed out the cycle initiated by Tarantullus in 462 BC when he first proposed the creation of the Twelve Table. The political and economic structure of Rome would not see significant alteration until the opening of the Samnite Wars in the mid-300s BC, not for lack of plebe agitation, but because the patricians seemed to have closed ranks and resisted any further reforms. As I said at the beginning, the years ahead were long and hard for Rome. Grain shortages were reported in a dozen of the next fifty years, with devastating famines following. The lack of nourishment inevitably led to plagues which further decimated the population. Rome was forced to seek help from surrounding communities north in Etruria and south in Magna Graecia in Sicily. Their requests, though, were denied as often as they were approved, and many of their neighbors reveled in Rome's misery after so many years of dominance. Just about every one of their enemies took advantage of Rome's depleted and malnourished army, and Rome's sphere of influence gradually began to erode. The Volscians and Aequians, once easily dispatched, now let their flocks graze in Roman fields uncontested.

In the midst of this desperation, some men allowed their scruples to take a backseat to ambition, and one man in particular would pay the ultimate price for his hubris. A wealthy merchant named Manlius, who had never served in any important office but was of equestrian rank, began to dream bigger than his prudence should have allowed. In 439 BC, during a typical grain famine, official Roman envoys in Etruria rejected the Etruscan price for grain as gouging and returned to the city empty-handed. Manlius then went himself and agreed to pay the exorbitant cost, bringing home the grain the people needed and handing it out for free. Manlius was an overnight sensation, a newly minted political rock star. Everywhere he went he was greeted by large ovations acclaiming his generosity. Manlius looked at the adoring masses, and at his own personal fortune, and let his imagination get away from him. He moved quickly from dream to action and began to actively conspire against the state with the intention of making himself king. The republican government, he rationalized, had failed to protect and feed the people where he, Manlius, had succeeded. It was only right that he should rule. He began cashing weapons and bribing the plebe leadership to rise with him when he made his move against the senate, but alas, it was not to be.

The state controller of supplies, a man named Minucius, dealt daily with the same grain merchants who dealt with Manlius and soon learned about the plot. He went straight away to the senate, who flew into a panic, recognizing their own unpopularity coupled with the people's desperate state might be enough to slip tyranny in the back door. The senate needed a man whose fame and popularity outshone that of Manlius's to put a stop to the conspiracy. As I mentioned last week, they went back to Cincinnati, now well over eighty, and appointed him dictator once again. All of Manlius's careful planning was undone in a moment. Cincinnati sent his master of horse to fetch Manlius and bring him forward for a trial. Manlius, knowing that he was in deep trouble, attempted to resist the summons, and when he did, the master of horse cut him down where he stood. There was a brief popular uproar over the murder, but Cincinnati legitimized the act, saying that Manlius was being summoned merely for trial, and that it was his refusal to appear, not his alleged criminal activity, that sealed his fate. Political order was restored and Cincinnati again resigned.

Soon after the death of Manlius, an external threat emerged that would eventually lead Rome into its final definitive clash with Vie. The city of Fidene, an Etruscan outpost on the Roman side of the Tiber, which had been under Roman control for some time, decided to revolt and called for Vie's help. They figured that Rome, weak internally and caught up in the south with intrusive tribes, would be forced to let the city go, but Rome was determined to maintain control. Things began with Fidene hoping to goad Rome into a battle she would lose, murdered four visiting Roman envoys. This treacherous act did lead to an immediate Roman response, but no conclusive action was achieved on either side. The war with Vie-backed Fidene dragged on for years. To the Romans, victory was a necessity. If they lost control of Fidene, trade up the Tiber River would be severely hampered, but despite the Romans' best efforts, Fidene held out and trade suffered accordingly. Through the 430s and 420s BC, Rome found itself militarily engaged on three fronts in the north, east, and south, economically isolated and politically divided. It was not a good time to be a Roman.

Some relief came around 425 BC when the Romans finally won back control over Fidene, but Vie itself still loomed on the horizon. The Romans, for the moment, dreaded a fight with their rival and did not follow up their recovery of Fidene with action into Vie territory. A confrontation was brewing between the two powers. Their political and economic destinies were on a collision course, but for now a tense truce prevailed. Vie seemed to have been dealing with its own internal problems at the time, and so did not strike when the iron was hot, immediately at the end of a war which had drained Rome physically and emotionally. This gave the Romans a chance to catch their breath and consolidate their power. When the final clash with Vie finally erupted, the Romans were in a position to challenge their Etruscan rival on equal footing.

The years leading up to the war with Vie were hard, but these decades would highlight the characteristic Roman obstinance that would win them an empire. The Romans simply did not give up. Beaten, harassed, tired and divided, the Romans soldiered on. The Roman unwillingness to quit in the face of adversity bordered on the edge of insanity. They would accept catastrophic losses but would never surrender. In the centuries that followed, Rome was many times beaten so badly that they should have relinquished their dreams of empire and retired to the dustbin of history, but instead they buried the dead and raised a fresh army, never suing for peace and never retreating. It was this unwavering advance that so frightened Rome's enemies. In battle, legionaries would fall but the line would keep marching incessantly forward, dispassionate, calm and mechanical. There was no psyching out the legions or driving them to flight, they just kept coming. And if you decisively beat one Roman army, rather than surrendering like a civilized nation, the Romans raised another and set it against you, until more from exhaustion than anything else you were beaten and inexplicably found yourself under the yoke of a foe you thought you had beaten. This was the Roman way, and during these hard years it was on full display.

It has often been said that of some generations much is asked, and of others much is given. Of this generation much was asked, and without even the promise of glory to soothe them. Their fights were not the great wars that made men famous, they were forced to deal with persistent skirmishes of attrition which cost lives and profited no one. The Romans of the Middle Imperium, which Gibbon famously called the safest, most civilized and most comfortable generation in history, bears no resemblance to the thin, desperate Romans of the late 400s BC, but that future was secured by the sacrifice of these early suffering generations, of whom much was asked, and nothing was given.

I'll close tonight with a rare programming note. I am going on vacation, so there will be no new episode next week. But fear not, we will return in two weeks and trace the final conflict with Vea, Rome's very own Trojan War, complete with victory secured by sneak attack, and introduce a giant of the early republic, Marcus Furius Camillus, known as the second founder of Rome. Until then, I want to thank all of you who have subscribed and supported the history of Rome since it began. It has been an immensely gratifying experience, and all of you out there listening have made it possible. Thank you, and I will see you in two weeks.