Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/289

Rh than the general and the army as such should not under ordinary circumstances enter the city proper. That organic and permanently operative enactments could only be made under the superintendence of the civil power, was implied in the spirit if not in the letter of the constitution. Instances indeed occasionally occurred where a magistrate, disregarding this principle, convoked his force in the camp as a burgess-assembly, nor was a decree passed under such circumstances legally void; but custom disapproved of such a proceeding, and it soon fell into disuse as though it had been forbidden. The distinction between Quirites and soldiers became gradually formed and was ever gaining strength in the minds of the burgesses.

Time however was required for the development of these consequences of the new republicanism; vividly as posterity felt its effects, the revolution probably appeared to the contemporary world in a different light. The non-burgess indeed gained by it burgess-rights, and the new burgess-body acquired in the comitia centuriata comprehensive prerogatives; but the right of rejection on the part of the patrician convention, which in firm and serried ranks stood confronting the comitia like an Upper House, legally neutralized their free action, and although not in a position to thwart the serious will of the collective body, could yet practically interpose annoyance and delay. The nobles probably expected by means of their convention to rule in the new organization of the state, based on two assemblies, quite as securely as they had ruled before when they were the sole representatives of the community: and while in this way they did not seem to have lost much, they had in other respects decidedly gained. The king, it is true, was a patrician as well as the consul; but while his exceptional position raised the former no less above the patricians than above the plebeians, and while might easily occur in which he would be obliged to lean upon the support of the multitude even against the nobility, the consul on the other hand—ruling for a brief term, but before and after that term simply one of the nobility, and obeying to-morrow the noble fellow-burgess whom he had commanded to-day—by no means occupied a