Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/386

 880 THE REVOLUTIONS. BOOK IV. and the king increased their importance. The kings and the i)Iebs early felt that they had the same ene- mies. The ambition of the kings was to cut loose from the old principles of government, which limited the exercise of their power. The ambition of the ple- beians wai? to bi'eak the ancii nt barriere which exclud- ed them from the religious and political associations. A tacit alliance was established — the kings protected the plebs, and the plebs sustained the kings. The traditions and testimony of antiquity place the great progress of the plebeians under the reign of Ser- viua. The hatred which the patricians preserved for this king sufficiently shows what his policy was. His first reform was to give lands to the plebeians, not, it is true, in the ager Homanus^ but in the territory taken from the enemy ; still, this conferring the right to own land upon families that iiad previously cultivat- ed only the fields of others was none the less an in- novation.' What was graver still was, that he published laws for the plebs, which had never been done before. These laws, for the most part, related to obligations which the plebeian might contract with the patrician. It was the commencement of a common law between the two ordere, and for the plebs it was the commencement of equality.* Later this same king established a new division in the city. Without destroying the three ancient tribes, where the patrician families and clients were classed ' Livy, I. 47. Dionysius. IV. 13. The preceding kings had already distributed the lands taken from the enemy ; but it is not certain that they admitted the plebs to share in the di- vision. • Dionysius, IV. 13; IV. 43.