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Indeed when in 570 Cato and his like-minded patrician colleague, Lucius Flaccus, solicited the censorship, and announced beforehand that it was their intention when in that office to undertake a vigorous purification of the burgess-body through all its ranks, the two men so greatly dreaded were elected by the burgesses notwithstanding all the exertions of the nobility; and the latter were obliged to submit, while the great purgation actually took place and erased among others the brother of Africanus from the roll of the equites, and the brother of the deliverer of the Greeks from the roll of the senate.

These so-called Latins, issuing from the Roman burgess-body and feeling themselves in every respect on a level with it, already began to view with displeasure their subordinate federal rights and to strive after full equalization.

The burgess-body had since then become different; but clear indications attest that the disproportion between poor and rich had remained at least as great. The effect of such poverty and such riches was on both sides an economic and moral disorganization outwardly different, but at bottom of the same character.

Decreasing Importance of the Burgess-Body But notwithstanding these enlargements of the powers of the burgess-assemblies, their practical influence on state affairs began, particularly towards the close of this period, to wane. First of all, the extension of the bounds of Rome deprived her primary assembly of its true basis.

So greatly had the state of things been changed that that portion of the burgesses which had once possessed exclusively the right of voting was thenceforth, under the usual form of taking votes binding for the whole burgess-body, no longer so much as asked the question. The Later Patricianism The struggle between the Roman clans and commons was thus substantially at an end.

The ground- tenth levied by Hiero and Carthage in Sicily went far beyond the amount of an annual war-contributioa With justice moreover Scipio Aemilianus says in Cicero, that it was unbecoming for the Roman burgess-body to be at the same time the ruler and the tax-gatherer of the nations.

Attempts to throw it off were, as a matter of course, not wanting. The opposition rested on the support of the public assembly, as the nobility did on the senate: in order to understand the opposition, we must first describe the Roman burgess- body during this period as regards its spirit and its position in the commonwealth. Character of the Roman Burgess-Body

At the close of this period the Roman burgess-body, in a tolerably compact mass, filled Latium in its widest sense, Sabina, and a part of Campania, so that it reached on the west coast northward to Caere and southward to Cumae; within this district there were only a few cities not included in it, such as Tibur, Praeneste, Signia, Norba, and Ferentinum.

While a complete legal equality therefore had subsisted within the old burgess-body, the new burgess-body or former metoeci came to be in this way divided from the first into a number of privileged families and a multitude kept in a position of inferiority.

IV. IV. Dissatisfaction in the Capital, IV. V. Warfare of Prosecutions Even from our scanty information, the best part of which is given by Diodorus, p. 538 and Strabo, v. 4, 2, this is very distinctly apparent; for example, the latter expressly says that the burgess-body chose the magistrates.