United States or British Indian Ocean Territory ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The plebs, reduced to utter misery by the disaster, began to murmur that mysterious people had been seen hurrying through the different quarters, kindling the fire and cumbering the work of help; these incendiaries must have been sent by some one in power by whom?
In reality through the co-ordinate jurisdiction of the plebs and the community the estates, limbs, and lives of the burgesses were abandoned to the arbitrary pleasure of the party assemblies. Legislation With this co-ordinate jurisdiction there was further associated a co-ordinate initiative in legislation.
These changes are very great, but are none of them radical, dating from the recognition of the plebs as pertaining to the Roman people. They are normal developments, not corruptions, and the transition from the consular republic to the imperial was unquestionably a real social and political progress.
It is only certain that all society was divided into three classes, according to ancestry; that two of these classes constituted a ruling oligarchy;* and that the third, or "foreign" class represented the bulk of the nation, the plebs.
To sit still and watch a good play would become more tiresome as the plebs grew more restless, and probably even the taste of the better educated was degenerating as the natural result of luxury and idleness.
And Marcella could not get over the astonishment of Wharton's part in it. She shut her eyes sometimes for an instant and tried to see him as her girl's fancy had seen him at Mellor the solitary, eccentric figure pursued by the hatreds of a renounced Patricianate bringing the enmity of his own order as a pledge and offering to the Plebs he asked to lead. Where even was the speaker of an hour ago?
At first they were not allowed to intermarry with the patricians. Their oppression provoked resistance. The struggle which ensued is one of the most memorable in Roman history. The haughty oligarchy were obliged gradually to concede rights. These rights the plebs retained. First they gained a law which prevented patricians from taking usurious interest.
The power accorded to the plebs, or commons, as Niebuhr calls them who is, perhaps, too fond of explaining the early constitution of Rome by analogies borrowed from feudalism, and especially from the constitution of his native Ditmarsch was simply an obstructive power; and when it, by development, became a positive power, it absorbed all the powers of government, and created the Empire.
Provisions are exhausted; those who man the walls, weapons in hand, have eaten the flesh of the last horses that remained in the city. The plebs are perishing of hunger. Every night hundreds of corpses are gathered and burned on the Acropolis for fear of their being devoured by wandering dogs pressed by hunger, which have turned into veritable wild beasts that attack even the living.
Now at length, when civil war was imminent and the conflict in the streets might hourly begin, the decemvirs renounced their usurped and dishonoured power; and the consuls Lucius Valerius and Marcus Horatius negotiated a second compromise, by which the tribunate of the plebs was again established.
Word Of The Day