Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/287

Rh elements shall eventually preponderate, and whether they will work harmoniously together or maintain their antagonism. To look therefore simply to the direct innovations introduced, such as the mere change in the duration of the supreme magistracy, is altogether to mistake the broad import of the first Roman revolution: its indirect effects were by far the most important, and of greater potency perhaps than even its authors anticipated.

It was at this period, in short, that the Roman burgess-body in the later sense of the term originated. The plebeians had hitherto been metœci, who were subjected to their share of taxes and burdens, but who were nevertheless in the eye of the law really nothing but tolerated aliens, between whose position and that of foreigners proper it may have seemed hardly necessary to draw a definite line of distinction. They were now enrolled as burgesses in the register of the curies, and, although they were still far from being on a footing of legal equality—although the old burgesses still remained solely eligible to the burgess magistracies and priesthoods, and exclusively entitled to participate in the burgess usufructs, such as the joint use of the public pastures—yet the first and most difficult step towards complete equalization was gained from the time when the plebeians no longer served merely in the common levy, but also voted in the common assembly and in the common council, and the head and back of the poorest metoikos were as well protected by the right of appeal as those of the noblest of the old burgesses.

One consequence of this amalgamation of the patricians and plebeians in a new corporation of Roman burgesses was the conversion of the old burgesses into a gentile nobility, which bore from the first the stamp of an exclusive and wrongly privileged aristocracy impressed upon it by its exclusion of the plebeians from all public magistracies and public priesthoods (while yet they were admissible to the position of officers and senators), and by its maintenance, with perverse obstinacy, of the legal impossibility of marriage between old burgesses and plebeians.

A second consequence of the new union of the burgesses have been a more definite regulation of the right of settlement, with reference both to the Latin confederates and to other states. It became necessary—not so much on account of the right of suffrage in the centuries (which indeed be-