Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/256

232 period to dispense with the Senate's sanction for their legislative designs. And though the process was a gradual one — for the Senate's prestige had itself grown with the growing State, — the impression made on the Roman mind was never wholly obliterated. Cicero expresses it exactly when, in the outburst of republican enthusiasm which has already been quoted, he speaks of the magistrates as "the agents of the weighty designs of the Senate." He does not describe them seeking its advice, as men who might follow it or not as they pleased: that was indeed the strictly legal view of their powers, on which, in Cicero's own time, and to his infinite disgust, his political enemies occasionally acted. The view he so eloquently enforces represented the practice of the constitution in its best days, when the Senate's commanding wisdom was still unquestioned; the magistrate must obey the great council of ex-magistrates, and be the loyal agent of its most weighty designs.

2. This startling change in the working of the constitution might, however, have never taken place, if Rome had enjoyed the comparatively untroubled youth of most of the City-States of antiquity. But Rome, as Virgil sang of her, and as Dante wrote of her long afterwards from a very different point of view, seemed destined from her infancy to conquer and to rule. Even by the time when the political equalisation of patricians and plebeians was complete, she had won a dominion in Italy such as had