Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/260

236 few chapters of Livy's later books to convince ourselves that this was so. The people pass laws, but at the instance of the Senate; and it is the decrees of the Senate which the magistrate executes. The Senate is foreign minister, financial minister, war minister; and the Senate is responsible to no other person or assembly. Here is an oligarchic organ in the highest state of adequacy to which necessity and use can develop it.

3. At Athens, as we have seen, the work of government in all its details was done by the people themselves. A novice in Roman history might not unnaturally ask why the Roman people was incapable of such work, or let it pass without remonstrance into the hands of a few. To account for this merely by reference to the composition of the Senate, and the long series of wars through which the Senate steered the State, is hardly going far enough, it might be said; the people, as really and ultimately sovereign, was itself responsible for these tendencies, and might have substituted for them a peaceful development towards real democracy.

It is to the Roman character and public economy that we must look for an explanation of this difficulty. The very first thing a student of the Republican period should set himself to do is to make it clear to himself what manner of people the Romans were, and what was their daily life and occupation. In the Latin literature he ordinarily reads, in Virgil and Horace, for example, he will find some indication of the way in which the later Romans believed their ancestors to have lived. But