Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/214

190 plebs, or multitude, retaining exactly the diminished rights they had before, but being now quite independent of patrician authority. In a certain sense, indeed, they were in a worse position; they had to stand on their rights for themselves, and could get no help from patrician patroni. They had no organised religion of their own, no legal locus standi in the State; yet they were still a part of it, served in the army of curiæ, and apparently, as we saw, voted in the curiate assembly. Steadily they increased in numbers, and more and more they came to be felt as an indispensable part of the State; but citizens in the true sense they certainly were not. They were now free men, while as clients they had been only half free; but their freedom was a negative one, and brought no positive rights. They were wholly outside the sacred circle of the gentes; outside the groups of real or supposed kin in which all cives optimo jure were comprised.

This plebs, the many as against the few, slowly won for itself a definite and recognised position both in social and political life. Gradually they must have come to be reckoned as ingenui, and as forming gentes of their own; and so they came also to have their own popular worships like the Demos in Attica in the sixth century. How these steps were one by one secured we can hardly do more than guess; but it is the story of their admission to political equality which concerns us now, and we may leave the other questions to conjecture.

Up to the time of the later kings nothing had been done to utilise and organise this population