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Updated: June 28, 2025
On the following day the dictator sold the inhabitants of free condition by auction: that was the only money applied to public use, not without resentment on the part of the people: and for the spoil they brought home with them, they felt no obligation either to their commander, who, in his search for abettors of his own parsimony, had referred to the senate a matter within his own jurisdiction, or to the senate, but to the Licinian family, of which the son had laid the matter before the senate, and the father had been the proposer of so popular a resolution.
At the close of the year a dispute between the patricians and commons suspended the consular elections, the tribunes refusing to allow the elections to be held, unless they were held conformably to the Licinian law; the dictator being determined to do away with the consulate altogether from the state, rather than to make it common to the patricians and the commons.
It was, in fact, merely the Licinian law over again with certain modifications, and the existence of that law would make the necessity for a repetition of it inexplicable had it not been a curious principle with the Romans that a law which had fallen into desuetude ceased to be binding.
If it was the Licinian law of the middle of the fourth century, this law must have been renewed, or must still have continued to be observed, at a period not very long anterior to the Gracchan proposal; for Cato could point his argument against the declaration of war with Rhodes by an appeal to a provision attributed to this measure an appeal which would have been pointless, had the provision fallen into that oblivion which persistent neglect of an enactment must bring to all but the professed students of law.
Accordingly when, the elections being repeatedly adjourned, the dictator resigned his office, matters came to an interregnum. Upon this, when the interreges found the commons incensed against the fathers, the contest was carried on by various disturbances to the eleventh interrex. The tribunes held out as their plea, the protection of the Licinian law.
The result of the Licinian laws in reality therefore amounted nearly to what we should now call the creation of a batch of peers.
The revolution then effected was strictly conservative in its nature, and whatever of internal evil Rome afterwards experienced was owing, not to the adoption of the Licinian law, but to the departure by the state from the practice under it which it was intended permanently to establish.
Moreover the dictatorship was thrown open to plebeians in 398, as the mastership of the horse had already been in the year before the Licinian laws ; both the censorships were thrown open in 403, and the praetorship in 417; and about the same time the nobility were by law excluded from one of the censorships, as they had previously been from one of the consulships.
What does History care for the election results in some village in Montenegro? Or for the passage of the Licinian Rogations, or the high exploits of Terentilius Harsa? Yet, too, we must get a view of this people in pralaya, that we may understand better the workings of the Human Spirit in its fulness.
"But the real speeches of Cato are almost as numerous as those of Lysias the Athenian; a great number of whose are still extant. For Lysias was certainly an Athenian; because he not only died but received his birth at Athens, and served all the offices of the city; though Timaesus, as if he acted by the Licinian or the Mucian law, remands him back to Syracuse.
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