As the plebeians believed that the sacerdotal authority was often used against them unfairly, they demanded representation in these boards, and in 360 B. C., succeeded in obtaining the adoption of a law that five of the ten custodians of the sibylline books should belong to their order; and when, in 300 B. C., they gained half of the boards of pontiffs, and also of the augurs, they could congratulate themselves on having an equal right of appointment or election to all the legislative, judicial, sacerdotal, political, and military offices.

Some few wealthy patrician families got much more than an equal share of the high offices of state. In the period of one hundred and ninety-three years, between 366 and 173 B. C., there were three hundred and ninetysix consuls, or consular terms, counting two terms to each year; and of these terms, thirty were held by the Cornelian clan; eighteen by the Valerian; fifteen by the Emilian; twelve each by the Claudian and Fabian; ten by the Manlian; eight each by the Sulpician and Postumian; seven by the Servilian; and five by the Quintian. This gives an aggregate of one hundred and twenty-five consular terms to ten clans, and an average of more than twelve to each.' Between 123 and 109 B. C. "four sons and probably two nephews of Quintus Metellus gained the consulship; five of them gained triumphs, and one was censor, while he himself had filled all the highest offices of the state.' The commoners were probably nineteen-twentieths of the free population, but they did not obtain more than half of the offices.

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The Licinian law that of the two consuls chosen every year one should be a plebeian, fell into desuetude, and it became the custom to take all the candidates from the patricians or from those families which were formerly

plebeian and had been ennobled. When Cicero became consul in the last half century of the republic, it was said that he was the first commoner who had reached the consulship in a generation, and the first who had ever reached it in the first year of his eligibility.

SEC. 445. Vei, etc.-The tradition given in Livy that under King Servius Tullius, about 550 B. C., Rome had 80,000 adult male citizens, is not entitled to unqualified acceptance. When Athens was at the height of her prosperity, when her fleet was the most formidable in the Mediterranean, and when her power was feared at Persepolis and Thebes, she had not 40,000 citizens of military age; and it seems scarcely credible that Rome, while still nearly at the beginning of her career, with independent cities not ten miles from her walls, should have twice as many.

But she may have been already the strongest city in central Italy, and perhaps in the peninsula. Besides the advantages of her site for defense and commerce, and of her larger population, she had the other great advantages of unquestioned pre-eminence in the Latin kinship, which, in the number of citizens, in political coherence, and in military discipline, surpassed that of the Etruscans on the north and that of the Italian Greeks on the south. This Latin kinship included the Latin, Sabine, Volscian, Hernican, Samnite, Umbrian, and Picenite nationalities.

Notwithstanding frequent quarrels among themselves, each of these nationalities of the Latin kinship had a league for resisting attacks by other nationalities; and Rome had an alliance with the Latin league with a preponderant voice in its management. This league was witnessed by a treaty stipulating that “there shall be peace between the Romans and all communities of the

Latins as long as heaven and earth shall endure. They shall not wage war with each other, nor shall they call enemies into the land nor grant passage to enemies. Help shall be rendered by all in concert to any community assailed, and whatever is won in joint warfare shall be equally distributed." The treaty provided that Rome should not make a separate contract with any Latin city, but must deal with all of them on the same terms through the general league. This alliance proved to be far more beneficial to Rome than to the Latin cities; indeed, it enabled her to use them in reducing, first their neighbors and then themselves to subjection.

During the first century of the republic, Rome had a war every summer with some city in her near vicinity, and usually her campaigns added a little to her strength and wealth. But her gains were slow; in three generations she had made only two conquests of territory, one that of Ardea, twelve miles to the southwestward, and that of Fidenæ, five miles to the eastward, on the southern bank of the Tiber. Both of these states had walled towns, so small however that scarcely any traces of their existence can now be found on their abandoned sites, and so small that we cannot comprehend how, during three generations or more, they could have maintained their independence within half a day's march of a city with 80,000 fighting men.

In 396 B. C. Rome doubled the area of her subject territory by conquering the Etruscan city of Veii, twelve miles distant to the northward, after a siege of ten years. The Veiians were avenged in 390 B. C., by the Po-basin Gauls, who, after overrunning Etruria, followed the Tiber down to the plain, defeated the whole military force of the Romans in a pitched battle at Allia, took their city,

despoiled and burned it, and after failing to capture the citadel, accepted a thousand pounds of gold as an inducement to leave the country. Although they had impoverished and weakened Rome, it is probable that they inflicted much greater injury on Etruria, which was then the chief obstacle to the development of the Roman power. Some years afterwards a great naval defeat was inflicted by the Syracusans on the Etruscans, and this combination of disasters, on land and sea, prepared the latter people to become the victims of their southern neighbors, as they did in a succession of petty aggressions, no one of which occupies a prominent place in history. Before 350 B. C. a large part of Etruria was under Roman control.

Having subdued her nearest neighbors on the north, Rome turned her arms southward, and in the first Samnite war, which began in 343 B. C. and lasted two years, she obtained possession of the important city of Capua, with a considerable area of fertile territory. Her next war of note was with the Latins. Its cause, not satisfactorily explained, was perhaps that the Latins threw obstacles in the way of the increasing power of Rome; or, possibly, that they demanded a share of the booty proportioned to their soldiers in the allied army; but more probably that Rome thought the time had come when she could safely reduce Latium to subjection. The last of these explanations presumes that Rome followed the policy which she usually adopted towards those whose services were no longer necessary to her.

The Latin war began in 339 B. C., and continued two years, ending with the subjugation of most of the Latin cities and of some Volscian cities which had sided with them. The men taken in arms were slain or enslaved,

and the noncombatants were spared and made tributary. Several Latin cities which had sided with Rome were rewarded by admission to her citizenship. The second Samnite war began in 326 B. C., and lasted twenty-two years. It tried the strength of Rome severely, but she came out victorious, with the satisfaction of having reduced her most formidable enemy on the peninsula to a defensive position. The third Samnite war, from 298 to 290 B. C., closed with the complete conquest of Samnium. Five years later the Senonian Gauls on the basin of the Po and some Etruscan cities which had entered their alliance, were subjugated; and now Rome held dominion over nearly all the peninsula of Italy. The only independent city was Tarentum.

SEC. 446. Hortensius.-The year 286 B. c. witnessed the last secession of the commoners, who, on this occasion, acting as a body of unarmed citizens, camped on the Janiculum Hill, just outside of the walls, and stayed there till promises were made of concessions, now known as those of the Hortensian laws. These provided that debts should be reduced, that nine acres of public land should be assigned to every citizen applicant, and that the tribal assembly should have authority to enact laws binding on all citizens. As in 495, in 449, and in 366, so in 286 B. C. the commoners left the city without civil war or a serious riot. Though they were a great majority of the citizens, and were all, or nearly all, well trained soldiers, and were well supplied with arms, they angrily, and yet peacefully, abandoned their families, their dwellings, and their fortifications, for the purpose of compelling their noble oppressors, who were a small minority, to make concessions as to debts, public lands, and a share of political power.