Читать книгу A Social and Cultural History of Republican Rome - Группа авторов - Страница 26

We are so accustomed to think of Rome as the massive empire it became, dominating the Mediterranean, that we do not often think about how Rome began. The lack of contemporary sources makes it difficult to know much about this period with any precision, and later Romans were inclined to exaggerate Rome’s early accomplishments. Yet even the stories that the Romans themselves told suggest that at first Rome was just an ordinary city on the Italian peninsula, and not a particularly strong one either. The first hundred years of the Republic are marked by constant border skirmishes with their neighbors without significant territorial gains. The first major conquest of the Roman state as they saw it was the town of Veii, around 396 BCE. Roman accounts of this campaign bear a strong resemblance to the epic narrative of the Trojan War: a ten-year long campaign, a heroic commander, and a victory assured only when the chief deity left the besieged state. Yet Veii lies merely ten miles from Rome – in one hundred years the Romans had expanded only ten miles to the north. Certainly the pace of conquest picked up over the following centuries, but in her early years Rome was merely one city out of many, fighting for her very existence.

Rome’s weakness is further demonstrated by a massive defeat that she suffered a mere six years after the conquest of Veii. Around 390 BCE, a nomadic tribe of Gauls (modern day France) made its way down the Italian peninsula. Although the Romans marched out to defend their territory, they were badly beaten at a battle on the Allia river; the defeat was so bad that the date was remembered as a dies ater, a “black day”, on the Roman calendar. The Gauls proceeded to sack the city of Rome and could easily have uprooted and destroyed the entire Roman state. Fortunately for the Romans, the Gauls were a nomadic people more interested in collecting as much money as they could and then moving on to a new target (see Textbox in Chapter 1). Following their departure, the Romans quickly rebuilt their city and recovered the territory they had lost, so the Gallic sack had only a minimal impact on Roman expansion. The impact on the Roman mindset, however, was enormous: throughout the Republic the Romans had an almost irrational fear of the Gauls, and they engaged in warfare almost constantly for the next four hundred years, seemingly never satisfied that they were safe from potential invaders.

Part of Rome’s weakness may be traceable to internal dissension, though it is difficult to trace through the layers of later exaggeration. Roman sources paint this period as one of conflict between two hereditary orders, or groupings: patricians, who were generally wealthier and were viewed as Rome’s aristocracy, and plebeians, the lower classes who comprised the great mass of the populace. Stories from this period revolve around the plebeians’ struggle to gain a measure of political power from which they were initially excluded; modern historians call this the Struggle of the Orders. Their standard technique was known as the Secession of the Plebs: the plebeians would abandon the city of Rome and take up residence outside the city, sometimes even on the Aventine hill just across the valley where the Circus Maximus would one day be (Figure 2.2). Because the plebeians made up the bulk of the fighting men in the army, a war with one of Rome’s neighbors would force the patricians to recognize how much they needed the plebeians, and so they would make some concession to their demands. At first the concessions involved the creation of ten Tribunes of the Plebs, who were given the authority to intervene in deliberations of the patrician Senate and prevent any proposal from even being discussed, let alone becoming law. Later secessions brought the plebeians the right to have one of the two consuls come from the plebeian class, and eventually all political offices were opened to the plebeians. Modern historians typically place the end of the Struggle of the Orders in 287 BCE, when the lex Hortensia declared that any proposal passed by the assembly comprised of the plebeians alone would be binding upon all Romans, plebeian and patrician alike. More recent studies have seen this process not as the gradual empowerment of the entire plebeian class, but as the gradual empowerment of rich and successful plebeian individuals, who had previously been barred from political influence no matter how rich and successful they became.

Figure 2.2 Map of Republican Rome.

One milestone that the Romans often connected with the Struggle of the Orders was their first written legal code, known as the Twelve Tables. It was passed, according to Roman tradition, in 451 and 450 BCE. This lawcode, despite its early date, remained the basis of Roman law all the way through the Republic and into the Empire (see further Chapter 10). The stories surrounding the creation of the legal code bear a similarity to other stories whose moral is to restrain abuses committed by the powerful members of society; one story bears a remarkable resemblance to the sexual assault of Lucretia described above. However, most of the surviving provisions of the Twelve Tables are heavily weighted towards the preservation of property rights, which clearly benefits the wealthy, causing many modern historians to doubt whether the creation of this law code should be seen as a victory for the lower classes. One might see the Twelve Tables as a step forward for the plebeians in the simple fact of engraving laws; in a society without mass communication, it is likely that only the elites would have known what the laws were, making it difficult for plebeians to challenge legal judgments against them. If we understand the Struggle of the Orders as wealthy plebeians fighting for inclusion into the ruling elite of Rome rather than for the rights of the mass of plebeians, provisions benefitting the wealthy make more sense. Wealthy plebeians had no desire to help the poor any more than wealthy patricians did. By the end of the fourth century BCE, the formation of a mixed patrician–plebeian aristocracy based primarily on wealth and family connections had temporarily resolved much of the internal conflict.