The Early Republic & the Struggle of the Orders

1. The New Republic — Consuls, Senate and Assemblies

With the monarchy abolished (c. 509 BC), the Romans created a republic of annual magistrates and a sovereign people, carefully designed — through a system of checks, balances and short terms — to prevent any one man from again becoming king. At its head stood two consuls, elected for a single year, who shared the supreme civil and military command (imperium) and could veto each other. The Senate, the council of elder statesmen and former magistrates, advised and controlled finance, foreign policy and religion, and became the real directing force of the state. The people governed through the assemblies: the comitia centuriata (the army-assembly arranged by wealth, which elected consuls and senior magistrates), the comitia tributa (the tribal assembly of all citizens) and the concilium plebis (the assembly of the plebeians). No written constitution existed; instead a set of customs, precedents and laws — the mos maiorum ("the way of the ancestors") — regulated the state. The genius and the tension of the Republic lay in balancing the power of the Senate (aristocratic), the magistrates (executive) and the people (sovereign) (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Republic," worldhistory.org/Roman_Republic/).

2. The Struggle of the Orders — Patricians vs. Plebeians

The central political drama of the first two centuries of the Republic was the Struggle of the Orders between the patricians (the hereditary aristocracy, who monopolised the magistracies, the priesthoods and the Senate) and the plebeians (the common people, citizens who served in the army and paid taxes but were excluded from office and often crushed by debt). Rather than violent revolution, the struggle produced a remarkable and peaceful expansion of political rights. The plebeians won their first great weapon by seceding (withdrawing from the city) and creating their own magistrates, the tribunes of the plebs (c. 494 BC), sacrosanct officials who could veto the acts of any magistrate and protect a plebeian against injustice. Over the next two centuries the plebeians forced, through repeated secessions and agitation, the opening of one office after another: the quaestorship, the consulship (the Licinian-Sextian laws of 367 BC opened the consulship to plebeians), the censorship (339 BC), and the praetorship; and finally the lex Hortensia (287 BC) made the decisions of the plebeian assembly (plebiscites) binding on the whole people. By the early third century BC the distinction between patrician and plebeian was no longer bar to office, and a new "nobility" of office-holding families had arisen to rule the state (World History Encyclopedia, "Conflict of the Orders," worldhistory.org/Conflict_of_the_Orders/).

3. The Twelve Tables (c. 450–449 BC)

The plebeians’ demand for public, written law — to protect them from the arbitrary judgement of patrician judges and consuls — produced the Law of the Twelve Tables (c. 451–450 BC), engraved on bronze tablets and set up in the Forum. A commission of ten men (decemviri) drew up the code, and though the decemvirate briefly became tyrannical (the famous story of Verginia, a plebeian girl killed by her father to save her from the lust of the decemvir Appius Claudius), the Tables were kept and became the foundation of all Roman law. They codified the rules of family, property, debt, injury and inheritance, including the harsh provision that a debtor could be sold into slavery or killed. For over a thousand years Roman children memorised the Twelve Tables; even in the age of Cicero they were considered the holy scripture of Roman law. The Tables established the principle that law was public and equal — the seed of the entire Roman, and hence modern, legal tradition (World History Encyclopedia, "Twelve Tables," worldhistory.org/Twelve_Tables/).

4. The Instruments of the Plebs — Tribunes, Aediles and the Plebeian Assembly

To enforce their gains, the plebeians created a small but formidable set of offices. The tribunes of the plebs (two originally, later ten) were sacrosanct — to harm one was a capital crime — and could veto (intercessio) any decree of a magistrate or the Senate, and could propose legislation. The aediles managed the public buildings, markets and games. The plebeian assembly elected the tribunes and, after 287 BC, passed laws (plebiscites) binding on everyone. The tribunes became the champions of the common people and, in time, powerful politicians in their own right — often the very men (like the Gracchi) who would shake the Republic. The whole set of institutions shows how far the early Republic’s political genius extended — adapting rather than abolishing, and building control into the very system (World History Encyclopedia, "Tribune of the Plebs," worldhistory.org/tribunus_plebis/).

5. The Roman Army & the Conquest of Italy (509–264 BC)

While the classes quarrelled at home, Rome fought for its life and then for mastery abroad. Almost at once the new Republic faced a comeback attempt by the expelled Tarquin the Proud, who returned with the Etruscan king Lars Porsena; the story of the one-eyed Horatius Cocles holding the bridge against the enemy and of Mucius Scaevola burning his own hand before Porsena captured the Roman spirit of defiance. Rome then defended its position in Latium: it defeated the Latin League (the decisive Battle of Lake Regillus, traditionally 496 BC, where the legendary Castor and Pollux were said to have fought on the Roman side), was sacked by the Gauls under Brennus in 390 BC (when, according to tradition, the cackling of the sacred geese of the Capitol saved the citadel, and the Gauls withdrew after being paid off — "vae victis," "woe to the vanquished"), and then recovered energetically. Under the leadership of the patrician statesman Camillus, Rome rebuilt and resumed its expansion.

Through the Samnite Wars (343–341, 327–304, 298–290 BC) — the first great series of wars, against the mountain peoples of central and southern Italy — and the Latin War (340–338 BC), Rome won control of Italy. Its means were not conquest alone but alliance: the Romans devised the brilliant system of granting citizenship or rights without the vote (the civitas sine suffragio) and of binding allied and subject cities into a web of treaties with the obligation to supply soldiers. The Latin colonies and the network of roads and shared citizenship made Rome not an overlord of resentful provinces but the head of a durable confederation. By 264 BC, having also defeated Pyrrhus of Epirus (the "Pyrrhic" War, 280–275 BC), whose defeat of Roman armies at Heraclea and Asculum cost him so many men that "another such victory and we are ruined," Rome was master of all Italy — now poised to challenge the other great power of the western Mediterranean, Carthage (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Army," worldhistory.org/Roman_Army/).

6. Significance of the Early Republic

The early Republic bequeathed to later Rome (and to the world) three priceless things: the rule of law, embodied in the Twelve Tables and in a system of magistrates and assemblies; the principle of popular sovereignty tempered by aristocratic counsel, resting on the famous balance of consuls, Senate and people; and the military-political instrument of citizenship and alliance that made the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean possible. The "Struggle of the Orders" was also a model — nearly unique in the ancient world — of a status conflict resolved through institutional change rather than civil war or a tyrant’s fiat, and it forged the fiercely independent, legal-minded, competitive citizenry that would build the empire. It is from this foundation — a free people, proud of their liberty — that Rome entered into its epochal conflicts: first with Carthage, and then with the whole Hellenistic and Mediterranean world.

6b. The Sacking of Rome by the Gauls (390/387 BC) and the Camillan Recovery

No event of the early Republic shook Rome more than its capture and burning by the Gauls under Brennus. In 390 BC (or 387 BC) a great host of Celtic warriors, who had been pressing south through Italy, defeated the Roman army at the River Allia, just outside the city, and took Rome itself. The Capitol held out — saved, according to the famous story, when the sacred geese of Juno, kept in her temple on the hill, raised the alarm against the scaling Gauls — until the patrician Marcus Furius Camillus, recalled from exile and made dictator, gathered the remnants and defeated the besiegers, dissuading them (the tradition) with the words the Romans long remembered. The Gauls departed, reputedly paid off with gold — the story of Brennus throwing his sword on the scales with the cry "vae victis" ("woe to the vanquished") passed into legend. The sack, whatever its precise details, was a catastrophe and a turning point: the city was burned, its archives and records partly destroyed, and Rome nearly abandoned by its despairing people — but instead it rebuilt. Camillus, the "second founder of Rome," reorganised the state, rebuilt the temples and the city walls, and persuaded the citizens not to flee to Veii. The recovery from the Gallic sack proved Rome’s extraordinary resilience and capacity for moral renewal — the same resilience that would carry it through Cannae and every later disaster (World History Encyclopedia, "Camillus," worldhistory.org/Camillus/).

6c. The Roman Army and the Manipular Legion Expanded

The army that conquered Italy was not the phalanx of a Greek city but the flexible manipular legion, and its evolution typified Roman adaptability. The early legion was modelled loosely on the Greek phalanx, but the bitter fighting in the Italian mountains (against the Samnites and Gauls) taught the Romans the need for flexibility, and by the 4th–3rd centuries BC the legion had developed its classic manipular form. A standard citizen army consisted of several legions, each of some 4,000–5,000 men, arranged in three lines: the hastati (youngest in front), the principes (the solid battle-hardened line in the middle), and the triarii (the veteran reserve in the rear, whence the proverb "it has come to the triarii"). Each line was broken into manipuli (companies of 120–160 men) that could advance, retire and move independently — an arrangement that let the legion outflank and outfight the solid phalanx, and whose tactical flexibility was a decisive Roman advantage over both the Greek phalanx and the Celtic warband. The velites (light skirmishers) screened the front; the cavalry (equites) covered the flanks. Command was by elected consuls and, in emergencies, a dictator. The legion was officered by the centurions, the professional backbone of the army. It was this flexible, disciplined, citizen army — supplemented increasingly by the allied (Italian) contingents required by the treaty system — that defeated Pyrrhus and Hannibal and conquered the Mediterranean (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Army," worldhistory.org/Roman_Army/).

6d. Roman Citizenship and the Italian Confederation

The secret of Rome’s rise was not simply conquest but the political genius of its citizenship and alliance system. When Rome defeated a neighbour, it rarely enslaved or destroyed it; instead it bound the conquered people by a treaty that required them to supply soldiers in return for protection and a share in Roman expansion. To some, Rome granted full Roman citizenship; to others, the civitas sine suffragio ("citizenship without the vote"), which carried the rights to trade, intermarry and be protected by Roman law but not to vote; and others became socii (allies) in permanent military alliance. Through the Latin colonies (settlements of Romans and Latins planted in conquered lands as garrisons and cities), through the network of roads (of which the Appian Way, begun 312 BC, was the great prototype), and through the generous extension of citizenship, Rome bound the whole of Italy into a single confederation whose peoples, in the words of the historian Polybius, regarded Italy as their own country. This system gave Rome a manpower pool — by the 3rd century BC, fielding armies drawn from all Italy — unmatched by any rival, and it explains how the city of the seven hills could survive disasters like Cannae and still raise new armies. It was the political infrastructure as much as the sword that made Rome master first of Italy, then of the world (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Citizenship," worldhistory.org/Citizenship/).

7. Selected Sources & Further Reading

Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.— traditional Roman maxim of the law-courts