Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/218

194 the "men of the multitude" stood face to face in the same State; the former in exclusive possession of political power, and forming a solid aristocratic government of high-born and wealthy men; the latter giving their services to the State in the newly-organised army of centuries, but politically almost helpless, the machinery of government being wholly out of their reach.

But the political good sense of the Roman people, the increase of the plebs by the absorption of conquered peoples, and the necessities of warfare in the period which followed the abolition of monarchy, combined in course of time to unite these two distinct bodies into one solid political whole. The process went on through two centuries, but was at last completed, and left no ill blood behind it. The patrician position was forced at all points ; the fortresses of legal knowledge, of religious knowledge, of executive government, of social exclusiveness, were carried one after the other, and, according to the traditional accounts, with little violence and no bloodshed. Let us trace the story of this process of unification step by step, leaving to another chapter the question as to the form of government which was the result of it.

At the very outset of the Republic, according to the received tradition, the new form of the armed people — which we may believe to have been so far used, as it was originally intended, only for military and financial purposes — began to be now applied in the election of magistrates; the centuriate army became a centuriate assembly.