Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/227

VII consuls (comitia centuriata), and the plebs meeting in tribes and presided over by tribunes (concilia plebis). And this means, to put it briefly, that the plebs is now in the fullest sense part of the State, and that their tribunes are now State magistrates.

Four years later the process of social union, as distinct from political, which had no doubt been long going on without legal sanction, is marked by a law enabling patricians and plebeians to inter-marry, and so to form one species where there had been two before. Doubtless there were great searchings of heart over a measure which must have hurt many ancient prejudices, and Livy has reproduced these misgivings with all his rhetorical skill. The gentes were losing their religious exclusiveness; the crowd was pushing profanely into the sacred ground of high descent. But this must have been going on for at least a generation before any one could have been audacious enough to propose to legalise it; and we may take this Lex Canuleia as the best possible proof that there was now a growing tendency on both sides to look upon the State as one complete whole, with common interests and common duties. The State has won its final victory over the gens.

And in the same year we meet with yet another step forward, which is attributed to the same Canuleius. The question had been already raised why plebeians should be excluded any longer from that supreme executive which had now been placed