38 



tlie man whose life he had spared? Accordingly we find that the 

 Plebeians were an oppressed and suffering race in the very commence- 

 ment of Roman history. Indeed the younger Tarquin seems to have 

 treated them no better than slaves, if the tradition is true, that many 

 of these unfortunate creatures threw themselves into the Tiber to escape 

 a life of wretchedness and toil. 



Nor did the establishment of the republic materially improve their con- 

 dition. The poor Plebeian continued to be a beast of burden, and one 

 unmercifully treated. The most characteristic feature of his miseries 

 is this, that he is invariably described as a debtor, and his creditor is as 

 invariably a Patrician. The severe Roman law of debt grinds him 

 down, morally and physically ; he is dragged in chains from his family 

 and his home, to the private dungeon of his Patrician creditor, there to 

 await the terrible fate of being sold as a slave into a foreign country, or 

 the hardly credible, because absurd cruelty, of being killed, and having 

 his body literally hacked to pieces and parcelled out among his creditors. 



We ask justly, what is the cause of this constant indebtedness ? Rome 

 was a purely agricultural community; trade and manufactures were 

 hardly known among her citizens ; their coin w^as copper, and so 

 unwieldy in its original plenty, that it required carts to carry the tax 

 of individual citizens to the treasury. These debtors, then, were 

 agriculturists; and how could they sink down to such an abject condition ? 

 Is it likely that they were freeholders ? Does their condition remind us 

 most of Norway or of Ireland ? And how is it that they are always in 

 debt to Patricians? Were the Patricians the money-dealers at that 

 time? They were not; in the later republic they were actually pro- 

 hibited from such pursuits, and the plebeian knights were the regular 

 money-lenders ; but in these ancient times we never hear of plebeian 

 creditors. It appears that these two words were contradictory terms. 



Again : how is it that we hear clamours for agrarian laws repeated 

 almost annually since the consulship of Sp. Cassius? Why do loud 

 complaints disturb the peace of the city, that the Patricians unjustly 

 possess the public lands, and that they eject the poor Plebeians ? Such 

 questions as these will hardly, I think, be considered satisfactorily 

 answered by the theory of Niebuhr, and all those that have followed him, 

 that the Plebeians were a race of freeholders, obtaining as their share, on 

 entering the communion of the Roman citizenship, a farm of seven 

 iugera, unshackled by any burdens but those of equal taxation. Nor 

 will this theory gain probability by the additional hypothesis, that the 

 Patricians held only two iugera of equal freehold apiece. It will hardly 

 seem likely that those who had the disposal of the land would have 

 given it away, and kept almost nothing to themselves as full property. 



