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Updated: June 14, 2025
Lastly it was added that the holding of the tribunate should in future disqualify for the undertaking of a higher office an enactment which, like many other points in Sulla's restoration, once more reverted to the old patrician maxims, and, just as in the times before the admission of the plebeians to the civil magistracies, declared the tribunate and the curule offices to be mutually incompatible.
Accordingly the Second Consul, when he, the next day, presented the decree to the Council of State, did not fail to eulogise this extreme moderation, which banished even the shadow of suspicion of any ambitious after-thought. Thus the Senate found itself out-manoeuvred, and the decree of the Consuls was transmitted at once to the Legislative Body and to the Tribunate.
But, in the year 367 B.C., the tribunes Licinius and L. Sextius secured the passage of three memorable laws in the Curiata Tributa—the abolition of the military tribunate, which had increased the power of the patricians, and the restoration of the consulate, on the condition that one of the consuls should be a plebeian; the second, that no citizen should possess more than five hundred jugera of the public lands; and the third, that all interest thus paid on loans should be deducted from the principal.
Drusus and the senate thus had a logical ground for the step which seems to have been taken, of relieving all the land which had been distributed since the tribunate of the elder Gracchus from the payment of vectigal.
The rival kings transferred their claims, and possibly their pecuniary offers, from the province to the capital, and the network of intrigue which soon shrouded the question was brutally exhibited by Caius Gracchus when, in his first or second tribunate, he urged the people to reject an Aufeian law, which bore on the dispute.
"Without doubt," said he "harmony is desirable amongst the authorities of the Republic; but the independence of the Tribunate is no less necessary to that harmony than the constitutional authority of the government; without the independence of the Tribunate, there will be no longer either harmony or constitution, there will be no longer anything but servitude and silence, a silence that all Europe will understand."
First of all, however, if the law passed and Marius was called to the independent carrying out of these immense schemes of conquest and assignation, he would become practically until those plans should be realized or rather, considering their indefinite and unlimited character, for his lifetime monarch of Rome; with which view it may be presumed that Marius intended to have his consulship annually renewed, like the tribunate of Gracchus.
I endeavoured to soothe his anger, and observed, that one precipitate act might injure him. "You are right," he continued; "but stay a little, they shall lose nothing by waiting." The Tribunate pleased Bonaparte better in the great question of the Consulate for life, because he had taken the precaution of removing such members as were most opposed to the encroachments of his ambition.
So this singular magistracy was instituted, which presented to the commons an obvious and available aid, and yet could not possibly carry out the necessary economic reform. It was no proof of political wisdom, but a wretched compromise between the wealthy aristocracy and the leaderless multitude. It has been affirmed that the tribunate of the people preserved Rome from tyranny.
The Tribunate of the People as an Instrument of Government While the Roman magistrate was thus more and more completely and definitely transformed from the absolute lord into the limited commissioner and administrator of the community, the old counter-magistracy, the tribunate of the people, was undergoing at the same time a similar transformation internal rather than external.
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