Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/283

Rh it. As soon as he was nominated, all the other magistrates became legally powerless and entirely subject to his authority. To him as to the king was assigned a "master of the horse;" and as the nomination of a dictator took place primarily and mainly on occasions when internal troubles or danger from war necessitated the calling out of the burgess-force, the nomination of a master of the horse formed as it were a constitutional accompaniment to that of dictator. The intention in all probability was that the dictator's authority should be distinguished from that of the king only by its limitation in point of time (the maximum duration of his office being six months), and by the circumstance that as an extraordinary magistrate he nominated no successor.

On the whole, therefore, the consuls continued to be, as the kings had been, the supreme administrators, judges, and generals; and even in a religious point of view it was not the rex sacrorum (who was only nominated that the name might be preserved), but the consul, who offered prayers and sacrifices for the community, and in its name ascertained the will of the gods with the aid of those skilled in sacred lore. Against cases of emergency a power was retained of reviving at any moment, without previous consultation of the community, the full and unlimited regal authority, so as to set aside the limitations imposed by the collegiate arrangement and by the special curtailments of jurisdiction. In this way the problem of legally retaining and practically restricting the regal authority was solved in genuine Roman fashion with equal acuteness and simplicity, by the nameless statesmen who worked out this revolution.

The community thus acquired by the change of constitution rights of the greatest importance: the right of annually designating its presidents, and that of deciding in the last instance regarding the life or death of the burgess. But the body which acquired these rights could not possibly be the community as it had been hitherto constituted—the patriciate which had practically become an order of nobility. The strength of the nation lay in the "multitude" (plebs), which already comprehended in large numbers people of note and of wealth. The exclusion of this multitude from the public assembly, although it bore part of the public burdens, might be tolerated as long as that public assembly itself did not materially interfere in the working of the state machine, and as long as the royal power by the very fact of