Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/223

VII idea of a State uniting the multitude with the gentes in one body politic; the barrier between the two is even more distinctly marked here than it was under the kings. In the armed host alone the two appear as one, and so also in the form in which that host meets for political purposes (comitia centuriata). In all other respects the plebs appears now as a distinct corporation, with officers and a kind of charter of its own, enabling those officers to transact its business in a purely plebeian assembly, meeting in tribes.

But the very distinctness of this separation brought the plebs into a new prominence. The mass of unorganised humanity that seceded to the Sacred Mount had been given a form and a voice, and could now act and speak, imperfectly, perhaps, but efficiently. And as every motive which could call forth their speech or action was rooted in the inequality of their position in relation to the patrician executive, we are not surprised to find them using their new advantages to do away with that inequality. They have at last secured the means of doing this. They are no longer a mere rabble, like the followers of Jack Cade, or the Kentish masses who flocked to London with Wyatt in 1553. They are a compact and organised body, which has already gained its charter and its officers, and is about to use these advantages to obtain others still more effectual and permanent. Their claim is now for union and equality; union with the patrician City-State of which they have so far been, as it were, a mere annex or suburb, and equality with it in all its rights and honours and privileges, both social and political.