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Rh be a plebeian. This last provision opened to any one of the plebeian class the highest office in the state. The nobles, when they saw that it would be impossible to resist the popular demand, had recourse to the old device. They effected a compromise, whereby the judicial powers of the consuls were taken from them and conferred upon a new magistrate, who bore the name of praetor. Only patricians, of course, were to be eligible to this new office. They then permitted the Licinian laws to pass (367 B.C.).

During the latter half of the fourth century B.C. (between the years 356–300) the plebeians gained admittance to the dictatorship, the censorship, the praetorship, and to the College of Augurs and the College of Pontiffs. They had been admitted to the College of Priests having charge of the Sibylline books, at the time of the passing of the Licinian laws. With plebeians in all these positions, the rights of the lower order were fairly secured against oppressive and partisan decisions on the part of the magistrates, and against party fraud in the taking of the auspices and in the regulation of the calendar. There was now political equality between the nobility and the commonalty.

The First Samnite War (343–341 B.C.).—The union of the two orders in the state allowed the Romans now to employ their undivided strength in subjugating the different states of the peninsula. The most formidable competitors of the Romans for supremacy in Italy were the Samnites, rough and warlike mountaineers who held the Apennines to the east of Latium. They were worthy rivals of the "children of Mars." The successive struggles between these martial races are known as the First, Second, and Third Samnite wars. They extended over a period of half a century, and in their course involved almost all the states of Italy.

Of the first of this series of wars we know very little, although Livy wrote a long, but unfortunately very unreliable, narration of it. In the midst of the struggle, Rome was confronted by a