As Livy tells the story, the tribunes repeatedly called an assembly, but a body of armed patricians refused to allow the voting to go ahead. “Very well,” shouted Sextius. “As you are determined that a veto shall be so powerful, we will use that very weapon to protect the People. Come on, Senators, call an assembly for the election of Military Tribunes. I’ll see that you get no joy out of that word ‘veto,’ which now so delights your ears.” This was not an idle threat, for the tribunes aborted the elections, at least for a year.
The crisis trundled on angrily for a decade. In 368, the number of commissioners who looked after the Sibylline Books and organized the annual Games of Apollo was increased from two patricians to ten men, five of whom had to be plebeians; these were the decemviri sacris faciundis. It was clear which way the wind was blowing, and the following year the aged Camillus presided over a historic compromise. The Licinio-Sextian Rogations were finally passed and, as a concession to the opposition, the post of praetor was created as a junior colleague for the consuls to be reserved for patricians. The praetor became the acting chief magistrate in Rome when the consuls were away on military business, as they often were, and came to specialize in running the law courts.
It is perhaps no accident that in this year Camillus promised a Temple of Concord, for the new legislation went a long way toward pacifying the plebeian movement. The poet Ovid wrote:
A small mystery adheres to this gift: the grateful People absolved the old dictator from his pledge and said they would fulfill it in his place, but for some reason failed to do so. Its site, in the Forum just below the Capitol, was designated for the temple and kept as an open space. The temple was finally built in the second century, following the violent death, at the hands of senators, of a turbulent tribune—a bitter irony.
The Rogations did not finally settle the great quarrel between patricians and plebs, and further measures of social appeasement were undertaken. Above all, the problem of indebtedness remained despite the lawgivers’ best intentions. In 326, a scandal led to the reform of debt bondage, the nexum. An attractive youth sold himself into bondage to a creditor of his father. The creditor regarded the youth’s charms as an additional bonus to sweeten the loan and tried to seduce his new acquisition. Meeting resistance, he had the boy stripped naked and flogged. Bleeding from the lash, the boy rushed out into the street. An angry crowd gathered and marched on the Senate House for general redress.
The consuls, taken aback, conceded the point. They won the People’s approval of a law limiting the nexum to extreme cases, which, in addition, had to be adjudicated by a court. As a rule, to repay money lent him, a debtor’s property could be seized, but not his person. This was tantamount to abolition, and, in Livy’s slightly overheated opinion, “the liberty of the Roman People had, as it were, a second birth.”
IT IS AT this point that we meet the first truly historical, truly alive personality in Rome’s story so far. This was Appius Claudius Caecus, or the Blind (he lost his sight toward the end of a long life). He was as arrogant and awkward as most of his clan. An individualist to the core, he wrote a series of sharply turned moral sayings in verse. The most famous asserts, “Every man is the maker of his own luck.”
A wealthy patrician, Appius Claudius served twice as consul and once as dictator. A radical populist who aimed to win a following among the masses, he was a ferocious partisan for the plebs, as he made clear during his famous censorship of 312. Every four years or so, two censors were elected to hold office for eighteen months. They were usually former consuls, and although they did not have imperium, they wielded great influence. The post was regarded as the pinnacle of a Roman’s career.
Censors had two main tasks. Their primary function was to make up and maintain a comprehensive list of Roman citizens. They were also charged with the supervision of morals; if they agreed that a citizen deserved censure, they set out their reason and marked his name on the list. This had the effect of disqualifying him from his tribe and removing his voting rights. Sometime in the second, third, or the fourth century, the censors took over from the consuls the responsibility for appointing senators, who served for life. (Over time, membership became ex officio for present and former public officials.) They also reviewed the behavior of senators and excluded those they deemed guilty of serious misconduct.
Appius Claudius seized the hour. His basic aim was to bring plebeians into public life, and he particularly wanted to further the interests of the lowest of the low, the landless urban population. These were the capite censi, the “head count”; they were so poor that they did not have any property to be assessed in the census and so were disqualified from military service. No reformer had ever tried to help this group before.
Some were not necessarily without funds but owned no land or property—for example, freedmen and their sons. With astute generosity, the Romans often liberated their slaves (although they remained in the owner’s clientela), and so, in effect, gave them citizenship. However, they were not allowed to run for elective office. Scandalously, the radical new censor enrolled some sons of freedmen in the Senate. His colleague as censor resigned in disgust, but Claudius obstinately stayed in office and, indeed, did not step down until well after the eighteen-month limit had expired. The concession was quickly revoked by the following year’s consuls, and for centuries afterward it remained only a revolutionary idea.
Appius Claudius also distributed landless city dwellers among all Rome’s thirty-one tribes, not simply the four urban ones. This was a most ingenious move, for they would then have an advantage over their rural fellow tribesmen because they were on the spot and some of the latter would be unlikely to bother traveling to Rome to cast their votes (despite the impact of the Via Appia—see below). The reform significantly enhanced the power of the urban proletariat.
Censors had other duties—certain kinds of tax collection and the letting of contracts for public works. Appius Claudius commissioned two vastly expensive building projects that emptied the treasury—Rome’s first aqueduct (aqua Appia) and the Appian Way (via Appia). The aqueduct is evidence of the growing size of Rome and the probable overuse of the city’s wells. For most of its ten-mile course, it ran underground, partly because of the layout of the land and partly to protect the water supply from enemies. The builders may have borrowed the tunneling techniques of Veii’s irrigation experts. The aqueduct dropped only 30 feet over its entire length and delivered 240,000 cubic feet of water every day—a remarkable feat of engineeering.
The Roman road was the outcome of military necessity. At the time of Appius’s censorship, the Republic was absorbed in a life-and-death struggle with the Samnites. The Via Appia led south to Capua, in Campania, and was an invaluable communications link, facilitating resupply and reinforcement of Rome’s armies in the field, its bases, and coloniae (settlements of Roman citizens or Latins in former enemy territory); the road also made it easier for voters living in outlying areas to get to Rome for Assembly meetings and elections. Over the years, it was extended across the Apennines to the Greek seaport of Tarentum. It finally reached Brundisium, today’s Brindisi, the customary port of departure for sea voyages to the Eastern Mediterranean. Originally surfaced with gravel, its first few miles from the city were paved and became an ideal place for wealthy families to memorialize their dead. By Cicero and Varro’s day, two long lines of grand marble tombs and mausoleums bordered the road and stretched far into the distance. They can still be visited today.