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The decemvirs had fallen, and the state was without any executive government. It has been supposed, as we have said above, that the government of the decemvirs was intended to be perpetual. The patricians gave up their consuls, and the plebeians their tribunes, on condition that each order was to be admitted to an equal share in the new decemviral college.
Saint- Just, in proposing the establishment of the decemviral power until the restoration of peace, did not conceal the motives nor the object of this dictatorship. "You must no longer show any lenity to the enemies of the new order of things," said he. "Liberty must triumph at any cost.
Another great increase of power among the plebeians, about twenty years after the decemviral legislature, was the right, transferred from the curiæ to the centuries, of determining peace and war. The former were kept at bay by the aid of the Latin and Hernican allies.
After the decemviral laws fell into disuse, the Romans in the days of the republic passed from extreme rigor to great lenity, as is observable in the transition from the Puritan régime to our own times in the United States. Capital punishment for several centuries was exceedingly rare, and was frequently prevented by voluntary exile.
Before they marched out of the city, they engraved on brass, and fixed up in public view, the decemviral laws, which have received the name of "the twelve tables." There are some who state that the ædiles discharged that office by order of the tribunes.
The convention was, however, carried much too far by the partisans of reaction; in its desire to repair all and to punish all, it fell into excesses of justice. After the abolition of the decemviral regime, the past should have been buried in oblivion, and the revolutionary abyss closed after a few expiatory victims had been thrown into it.
Then another law made by a consul concerning the right of appeal, a singular security to liberty, and subverted by the decemviral power, they not only restore, but guard it also for the time to come, by enacting a new law, "that no one should appoint any magistrate without a right of appeal; if any person should so elect, it would be lawful and right that he be put to death; and that such killing should not be deemed a capital offence."
There are many signs in tradition and early history of relations between Greece and Rome; as the decemviral legislation, the various consultations of the Delphic Oracle, the legends of Pythagoras and Numa, of Lake Regillus, and, indeed, the whole story of the Tarquins; the importation of a Greek alphabet, and of several names familiar to Greek legend Ulysses, Poenus, Catamitus, &c. all antecedent to the Pyrrhic war.
It needed no great acuteness to discern that in this decemviral college it was intended to create a power after the model of that of Pompeius, only with somewhat less of a military and more of a democratic hue.
The republican calendar, which strangely enough was still the old decemviral calendar an imperfect adoption of the -octaeteris- that preceded Meton had by a combination of wretched mathematics and wretched administration come to anticipate the true time by 67 whole days, so that e. g. the festival of Flora was celebrated on the 11th July instead of the 28th April.
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