It was an armor that enabled them to defend plebeians from oppression by the rich and powerful and from arbitrary treatment by a magistrate by bringing them auxilium, assistance. This meant that a tribune could intervene in person and rescue a put-upon ordinary citizen. He enforced his will by coercion, coercitio. He could fine, imprison, or execute anyone who challenged his authority or, even, merely bad-mouthed him. If he was confronted with force, he could threaten the terrifying consequences of the lex sacrata. As one contemporary scholar has neatly put it, this was “lynch law disguised as divine justice.”
At first, the authority of the tribunes was extralegal and formed no part of the Roman constitution. Many unreconciled patricians refused to recognize the new plebeian institutions, and it was not for another two decades that a law gave the plebs the official right to hold its own meetings and elect its own officers. In the middle of the century or later, the tribunes won their greatest and unparalleled power—the right to “intercede” in the business of government. Intercessio, as previously noted, was a polite word for “veto.” A tribune could quite simply cancel any act by an elected official (except a dictator, until the year 300), any law, and any election. He had the authority, if he so wished, to bring the state to a standstill.
EVEN WHEN THE first secession was over (it is unreliably reported that there were to be more of them until a last one in about 287), the plebeians maintained their link with the Aventine. In fact, the hill became a memorial to the plebeian cause, a center for activism and a symbolic alternative city, an anti-Rome. In 493, a couple of years after the crisis, a temple to Ceres, the goddess of grain and fertility, was built. It had been vowed a few years earlier during a famine, and soon became a plebeian stronghold.
The shrine was a small but competitive copy of the Temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest, which could be seen in the distance. The resemblance can have been no accident. Like its counterpart on the Capitol, it was built in the old Etruscan manner, with deep eaves and colorful terra-cotta statues on the roof; there were chambers for three divinities, housing not only a statue of Ceres but also one of her daughter, Proserpina, and Father Liber, an Italian version of the Greek god of fertility and wine, Dionysus. It was a rich endowment where many works of art were assembled over the years. The walls were decorated with frescoes, and a famous painting of Dionysus, looted from Greece in the second century, was displayed there.
The plebs used the building for distributing food to the poor during times of shortage, and (along with the neighboring Temple of Diana, whose cult was especially popular with slaves) it was a safe sanctuary for runaways. Temple administrators were appointed, who reported to the tribunes; they were called aediles (after the Latin for temple, aedes).
The aediles soon had an addition to their job description. The consuls and the Senate understood that one way of preserving their power was to ban information about their activities. No reports of their proceedings were published, and the consuls suppressed or even falsified senatorial decrees. By the middle of the fifth century, pressure from the plebs opened up the proceedings of government to general scrutiny. The aediles were authorized to take charge of all the records of the plebs, of the People’s Assemblies, and of the Senate, which they archived at the Aventine, “so that nothing that was transacted should escape their notice.”
IN THE REPUBLIC’S early days, the surviving lists of consuls, the fasti, show that men who were not of the patrician class could be, and were, elected to the chief magistracy. But as time passed the consulship became in practice a patrician prerogative—a bitter response, perhaps, to the advances made by the plebs. The plebs reacted strongly, and what had begun as a campaign against unfair treatment gradually turned into a political struggle between the patrician aristocracy, with its inherited authority and control of the state religion, and the rest of society, spearheaded by the plebeians. It was at this point that plebs came to mean “the People.”
This growing antagonism is well illustrated by an exemplary story of unbending pride and its consequences. Once again, it is an incident that tells a symbolic truth; we do not know how much, if any of it, actually took place. Gnaeus Marcius, a patrician, was a brave soldier and in his youth won the Civic Crown. This treasured honor, a garland of oak leaves, was awarded to anyone who saved the life of a fellow citizen in battle.
In the early fifth century, a war broke out with the Volsci in the south, constant as ever in their belligerence. The Romans laid siege to the enemy town of Corioli. All at once, a Volscian force appeared on the scene and, simultaneously, there was a sortie from the town. Marcius happened to be on guard at the time. He took a specially selected body of men and not only drove back the sally but managed to enter the town himself. He seized a firebrand and threw it into some houses overhanging the city wall. The flames and the wailing of women and children convinced the Volscians outside that Corioli was lost and they withdrew from the fray. The Roman army turned its attention back to the siege, and the town was soon theirs.
The consul in command showered praise on Marcius and, as a reward for his valor, offered him one-tenth of the captured booty—equipment, men, horses—before it was shared out, as was the practice, among the soldiers. He declined, saying fiercely that that would be a payment, not an honor. He accepted only a single horse, and asked that a prisoner, who was a Volscian guest-friend, be released. In response, the consul awarded him the cognomen of Coriolanus, to mark his leading role in the victory.
Back in Rome, Coriolanus stood for the consulship. His distinguished military service made it highly probable that he would be elected. He canvassed for votes in the Forum as candidates were expected to do, and made a good impression by showing off his battle scars. Unfortunately, on election day he made a pompous entry into the Forum accompanied by the Senate and crowds of patricians, and the popular mood swung against him.
Furious at having been rejected, Coriolanus decided to punish the voters. He surrounded himself with some arrogant and showy young patricians and did his best to annoy the tribunes, Brutus and Sicinius. He taunted them: “Unless you stop disturbing the Republic and stirring up the poor by your speeches, I’ll not oppose you with words but with actions.” There was a food shortage, and when a large delivery of grain arrived from Sicily the People assumed that it would be sold cheaply. Coriolanus spoke out against the proposition. “Any such measure on our part would be sheer madness,” he said. “If we are wise, we shall take their right to have Tribunes away from the People, for it makes the Consulship null and void, and divides the city.”
Wiser heads among the nobility felt that Coriolanus was going too far, but he was carried away by his hotheads. The tribunes impeached him at an Assembly, but he refused to come and answer the charges. When the aediles tried to arrest him, patricians drove them away. Evening put an end to the disturbances.