Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/434

 428 THE EEV0LUTI0N8. BOOK IT> ity, and as skill, prudence, courage, and the art of com- manding became necessary, men no longer believe<l the choice by lot was sufficient to make a good magistrate. The city no longer desired to be bound by the pre- tended will of the gods, and claimed to have a free choice of its chiefs. That the archon, who was a priest^ should be designated by the gods, was natural ; but the strategus, who held in his hands the material in- terests of the city, was better elected by the citizens. If we closely observe the institutions of Rome, we see that changes of the same kind were going on there. On the one hand, the tribunes of the people so aug- mented their importance that the direction of the re- public — at least, whatever related to internal affiiirs — • finally belonged to them. Now, those tribunes who had no priestly character bore a great resemblance to the strategi. On the other hand, the consulship itself could subsist only by changing its character. What- ever w^as sacerdotal in it was by degrees effaced. The respect of the Romans for the traditions and forms of the past required, it is true, that the consul should con- tinue to perform the ceremonies instituted by their ancestors ; but we can easily understand that, the day when plebeians became consuls, these ceremonies were no longer anything more than vain formalities. The consulship was less and less a priesthood, and more and more a command. This transformation was slow, in- sensible, unperceived, but it was not the less complete. The consulship was certainly not, in the time of the Scipios, what it had been in Publicola's day. The military tribuneship, which the senate instituted in 443, and about which the ancients give us very little information, was perhaps the transition between the consulship of the first period and that of the second.