The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire (17 page)

For a while, the democratic process was stymied. Beneath the surface, though, pressure began to build toward another explosion. Having won a victory over the records of the Senate, the tribunes pursued their struggle for greater governmental transparency. One of the means by which oligarchies keep power in their hands is by controlling the legal system. In Rome, the laws were not published. They were in the care of the
pontifices
, who kept them under lock and key as sacred books, and only patricians were allowed to read them. In 462, a tribune launched an attempt to prevent the consuls from acting arbitrarily and demanded that legislation governing the powers of the consuls be fully disclosed. The campaign soon widened to embrace all the Republic’s laws. Magistrates and the Senate mounted
a spirited resistance, but in 451 both sides, exhausted by the long quarrel, came to a very remarkable agreement.

The constitution was suspended and the posts of consul and tribune were abolished—but for one year only. A new Board of Ten, the decemvirs, or
decemviri legibus scribundis
(that is, “ten men for writing the laws”), took charge of the state; they were given plenary
powers, and there was no right of appeal against their decisions. Their task was to review, codify, and then publish Rome’s laws. This they did, producing Ten Tables of laws. The next year, the first slate of decemvirs, all of them patricians, retired and were replaced by another, which included some plebeians. Only one man was reappointed: Appius Claudius, grandson of the founding immigrant, with whom he shared the same high temper. The second Decemvirate published two additional Tables and ran into a storm of protest when it decided not to retire at the end of its year but to remain in office for a third year.

This is all very mysterious. Why hand over the Republic and its constitution to a group of people who are in effect a commission of inquiry into one particular topic? They would have been able to get on with their work much more easily if they were not at the same time tasked with running the country. On the other hand, it may be that the decemvirs were meant to be a permanent reform, presumably bringing the plebeians and their “state within a state” inside the constitution. In that case, the election, after one year, of a new college makes perfect sense (although one wonders why the first decemvirs were all patricians). The main problem here is that the literary sources insist that the new magistrates had a temporary role and were to hand over power to consuls and tribunes when their legal review was complete; according to them, the second college was elected only because the first one had not done its job to everyone’s satisfaction.

It is evident that the ancient historians were confused, and modern scholars have indulged themselves with
ingenious speculations. The most plausible solution of the riddle—that is, the account that explains most of the data and is consistent with the realities of political life—is that the Decemvirate was intended as a permanent new system of government and that the legal codification was the first major item on its agenda.

One way or another, the reform failed. Livy writes: “The Decemvirate,
after a flourishing start, soon proved itself a barren tree—all wood and no fruit—so that it did not last.” His account of what happened next is one of the finest episodes in his long history, although (as ever) it is unclear how much of it is fact and how much fiction or imaginative reconstruction.

After elections were held for the second year, the new decemvirs, informally headed by Appius Claudius, took office. Once in place, they behaved brutally and irresponsibly, and it was whispered that they had bound themselves by oath to hold no more elections and to retain their power indefinitely. One of their two additional legal Tables included a ban on intermarriage between patricians and plebeians—tantamount to a declaration of war by the former against the latter.

The date for new elections in May 450 (then the beginning of Rome’s political year) came and went. Technically, the decemvirs’ term was over, but no new magistrates were nominated. Appius and his colleagues continued in power as if nothing untoward were happening.

A declaration of war by the Sabines and then the Aequi transformed the situation. The shaken decemvirs, well aware of their unpopularity, had no alternative but to consult the Senate. Lucius Valerius Potitus, a senior patrician who sympathized with the plebs, called for an open debate on the political situation, and an angry senator, Marcus Horatius Barbatus, said that the decemvirs were “
ten Tarquins.” A motion was put to take no action on Appius’s proposal to raise troops, on the grounds that he held no official position. Eventually, though, after more hard words the Senate gave way and raised no objection to the holding of a levy.

THE WAR WENT
badly, and disaffection spread among the soldiery. However, the final crisis, when it came, was neither military nor political in character.
As with the fall of the kings, it apparently stemmed from a sex scandal. Appius fancied a beautiful young
woman from a plebeian family. The daughter of Lucius Verginius, a serving centurion in the army, she was the fiancée of a former tribune, Lucius Icilius. Roman girls married young, and we may assume that she was in her early teens. She resisted Appius’s blandishments, so he decided on an ingenious kind of compulsion.

He told a dependent or client of his to claim Verginia as his slave and seize her. One morning, the man laid hands on her in the Forum as she was on her way to school. He claimed that, like her mother before her, she was his slave and instructed her to follow him. The girl was dumbstruck with shock and fear, but her nurse had her wits about her and shouted for help. A crowd quickly gathered.

Appius, who was sitting on a nearby platform presiding over a law court, saw that abduction was now out of the question. He therefore summoned Verginia to appear before him and assured everyone that the affair was completely aboveboard. He had excellent evidence, he said, that she had been stolen from his house, where she was born, and palmed off on Verginius.

The mood in the Forum grew ugly, and Appius reluctantly agreed to postpone the hearing until Verginius could be recalled from the front. He insisted that in the meantime Verginia should be cared for by the claimant. By this time, Icilius had arrived and after angry exchanges Appius gave way again and surrendered the girl to her fiancé. The following morning, father and daughter appeared before the court. The proceedings had hardly begun when Appius interrupted and gave his judgment. Verginia was a slave and should be handed over to her rightful owner.

Supporters standing around the girl refused to let her go. An officer of the Decemvirate blew a trumpet for silence, and Appius spoke. “
I have incontrovertible evidence,” he said, “that throughout last night meetings were being held in the city for seditious purposes. I have therefore brought an armed escort with me to check disturbers of the peace. It will be wiser to keep quiet. Lictor,
clear the crowd. Let the master through to take possession of his slave.”

Until this point, Verginius had been loudly protesting, but he now changed tack. He apologized to the decemvir for his behavior. “Let me question the nurse here, in my child’s presence,” he said. “Then if I find I am not her father, I shall understand and be able to go away in a calmer frame of mind.” Permission was granted, and he led the two women to a row of shops, called New Shops, near the shrine of Venus Cloacina, tutelary spirit of the Cloaca Maxima, the drain that crossed the Forum.

He then grabbed a knife from a butcher. “This is the only way to make you free,” he said, stabbing his daughter to the heart. “Appius, may the curse of this blood rest on your head forever.”

Undismayed, the decemvir summoned Icilius. The crowd was now at fever pitch. Valerius and Horatius joined the press around the young man and ordered the lictors to refuse service to Appius, as he had no official position. At this point, the decemvir’s nerve failed him and, afraid for his life, he wrapped his head in his cloak and disappeared into a nearby house.

The decemvirs refused to resign, and the Senate could not make up its mind what to do. A Roman army in the field made it up for them. They returned to the city and
encamped on the Aventine, where they were joined by much of the civilian population. This second secession did the trick. The decemvirs resigned, hoping not to be punished. Appius, though, remarked, “
I know well enough what is coming to us.”

He was right. The old constitution was restored. New consuls, Horatius and Valerius, who, in Cicero’s words, “
wisely favored popular measures to keep the peace,” were elected, and so was a full roster of tribunes and aediles. Appius was summarily flung into jail. He appealed to the People and a trial was agreed. He kept up the typical
haughty manner of a Claudian, but he could sense the rising anger in the city as the day of the hearing approached. He decided not to face his day in court and
killed himself.

For a Roman, suicide was an appropriate act in the face of a hopeless situation—
nulla spes
. But a Claudian was expected to show contempt for circumstance, and Appius’s family pretended that he had died a natural death. His son was in charge of the funeral arrangements, and asked the tribunes and the consuls to convene an Assembly in the Forum, as was the custom with the famous dead, at which he could deliver a eulogy. Permission was refused.

THE FATE OF
the decemvirs had important consequences. First of all, it offered future generations a striking moral and human example. Verginius joined Brutus as another heroic killer of his own offspring—bloodshed as
virtus
. On this occasion, the lesson to be drawn is the high priority the Roman family placed on the purity of its daughters. Sex with an unmarried and freeborn young woman was absolutely prohibited, because it interfered with the hereditary bloodline. (By contrast, going to bed with a non-citizen, whether male or female, was acceptable, if not exactly admirable, behavior).

The collapse of the Decemvirate and the second secession marked a further triumphant phase in the advance of the plebs.
The consuls had three important laws passed by the official, constitutional general assembly, the
comitia centuriata
. The first one endorsed the sacrosanctity of the tribunes of the People and perhaps their power of veto; until now, their status had been guaranteed only by an oath taken by the extraconstitutional
concilium plebis
, the Plebeian Council. In future, the Republic itself would stand guarantor of the tribunes’ safety. The state within a state had at last joined the state.

The second law concerned citizens’ right of appeal. The basic principle had been dealt with in 509, but the decemvirs had been created specifically without a right of appeal against their decisions. The loophole had to be plugged, and Valerius and Horatius prohibited the Republic from bringing into being any new magistrates not subject to appeal.

Finally, and most controversially, proposals approved by the Plebeian Council were given the force of law, although probably on
condition of some kind of external validation. This was a significant advance, for it will be recalled that the council voted by tribes and not according to the unfair division into centuries, which heavily favored the voting power of the wealthy.

ALTHOUGH THE DECEMVIRS
came to grief, they had a signal achievement of which they could be justly proud—the Twelve Tables (as the Ten plus the Two came to be called). These codified customary law into statutes, and opened the administration of justice to public scrutiny, at least in principle. Livy writes that they are “
still today the fountainhead of public and private law, running clear under the immense and complicated superstructure of modern legislation.” Cicero recalls having to learn them by heart when he was a schoolboy.

Curiously, for a document so highly valued and widely distributed, no text has come down to us. A number of quotations survive here and there in an archaic Latin, but one cannot be quite sure how accurately they have been remembered and how characteristic they are of the whole. The plebs quickly ensured the repeal of the offensive ban on marriage between noble and commoner, but the rest of the Twelve Tables were well received. A strengthening of the rights of wives moderated the domestic despotism of
patria potestas
, a father’s authority over his family. Other rules facilitated the emancipation of slaves and regulated inheritance, debt, and
nexum
, interest on loans, contracts, and conveyancing. Extravagance was discouraged.

The emphasis was on day-to-day exchanges between individuals, and there is little concerning the relation of the individual and the community. Thus: “
A man might gather up fruit that was falling down onto another man’s farm,” and “
Let them keep the road in order. If they have not paved it, a man may drive his team where he likes.”

The sheer strangeness of some of Rome’s early laws puzzles the mind. Here is the grisliest: “
Where a party is delivered up to several
persons, on account of a debt, after he has been exposed in the Forum on three market days, they shall be permitted to divide their debtor into different parts, if they want to do so; and if anyone of them should, by the sharing out, receive more or less than he is entitled to, he shall not be responsible.” This means, literally, what it says: if there was more than one creditor, they were entitled to cut a debtor’s body into different bits, the shares reflecting the amounts of debt owed.

Shylock would have felt vindicated, with Portia straining for the quality of mercy.

THESE WERE FAMOUS
victories for the People, but it was soon obvious that the game was not yet over. Within a few years, there was another dramatic but mysterious upheaval. In 444, the consuls were swept away and replaced by military tribunes with consular powers (
tribuni militum consulari potestate
). In any given year, there were not fewer than three of these new officials, and often as many as six.