4 Rome’s Great Leap Forward
Besides the two consuls, there were a series of positions below that: praetors and quaestors. The senate was a permanent counsel of those that had previously held public office.
It was in the republican period between 500-300 BC that the roman institutions and a way of thinking about things were solidified. There were on the one hand series of violent conflicts between the hereditary patrician families, who had monopolized control of power, and the mass of citizens called plebeians, who had been completely excluded. Through time, the plebeians won the right, or freedom, to share power with the patricians. On the other hand, Rome was gradually gaining control over the Italian peninsula through a series of military victories.
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, around 450 BC, rose to lead Rome to a victory, then gave up power and returned home to farm. Gaius Marcius Coriolanus was a war hero turned traitor around 490 BC.
The laws, or the twelve tables, were a series of around 80 clauses from the first written regulations. We can recognize that the scope and language reveals a still nascent legal and literate mind. It shows that by this point there was a need to codify law. They aren’t nearly as grand as a comprehensive legal code, but they show a need for some sort of agreed upon ways of settling disputes.
The conflict of orders
Shortly after the republic, plebeians started to grumble about their exclusion from political power. They asked why they should go fight in wars that would only line the pockets of patricians? Starting in 494 BC, they went on a series of strikes until they won concessions. Over the next centuries, they gained the political power they wanted. First, in 494 BC, was the tribuni plebis, to defend the interests of the plebs. Then they were granted a pleb assembly, but this time based not on wealth, but on geographic location.
By 287 BC, the decisions of this assembly were automatically binding over all Roman citizens. In 326BC, debt slavery had been outlawed. In 342 BC, consuls could be plebs.
In the mid 400s BC, the plebs were able to get the laws published. They had previously been held by the patricians, and weren’t available to everyone. A panel of ten men (decemviri) were appointed to collect, draft, and publish the laws. The second decemviri collected more laws and published them, but this panel was much more conservative. The second set banished marriage between patrician and pleb.
The outside world: Veii and Rome
In 396 BC, the Romans conquered the Veii, a town about 10 miles north of Rome. It seems rather to have been annexed, since shortly after, there were four new geographical tribes of Romans created. Livy mentions that the soldiers fighting against the Veii were paid from Roman taxes, marking a truly centralized organization of the state.
In 390 BC however, Rome was invaded by “Gauls”, who sacked the city.
The Romans versus Alexander the Great
In 321 BC, the southern Italian Samnites trapped the Romans in a valley, and the Romans surrendered. But despite some of these defeats, between 390 BC and 295 BC, the Roman army grew dramatically. Veii was a small town 10 miles away. Sentinium in 295 BC was 200 miles away across the Appennine mountains. The results of Roman victories were increased Roman territory and Roman citizenship offered to the defeated.
Expansion, soldiers and citizens
Despite Rome’s reputation for belligerence, they probably weren’t any more so than others of that time. Rome likely never thought of conquering territory in the way we think of it today. They probably saw the wars more as a change of relationship with the conquered peoples. There was really only one obligation Rome placed on conquered people: supply of men for the army. There were no occupying forces or administrative changes forced on the conquered. But the fact that their sons were now part of the Roman army effectively forged unspoken alliances, by forcing the locals to root for Rome while their sons were engaged in fighting. If Rome succeeded in the fight, their sons shared in the booty. If Rome was defeated, their sons were captured or killed. By around 300 BC, Rome had probably close to half a million soldiers. This made them nearly invincible.
But the more radical development was that the conquered peoples were offered citizenship in Rome. This had the unparalleled, in the ancient world, consequence of redefining what citizenship meant. Citizenship had previously meant living in a particular city. Now, citizenship was being defined as a political status regardless of race or geography. This model of citizenship would have enormous significance for Roman ideas about governance, political rights, ethnicity and nationhood.
Causes and Explanations
There was a further consequence of the conflict of orders. It effectively replaced a government defined by birth with a one defined by wealth and achievement. But no achievement was more celebrated in Rome than military victory, and the desire of the new elite to achieve victory was an important factor in intensifying and encouraging warfare. It was also the power over increasingly far-flung peoples that drove many of the innovations that revolutionized life in Rome.
Finally, it was the size and logistics of managing such an empire that developed Roman management. Roman military expansion drove Roman sophistication.