l6 EMPLOYMENT OF THE PLEBISCITE CSH 



by means of extra-legal plebiscites.^® When, finally, on the 

 eve of the second Samnite war the Senate refused to ap- 

 prove the popular demand, expressed by a plebiscite, for 

 distribution of land and cancellation of debts, the plebs left 

 the city for Mount Janiculus, and the result was that in 

 the same year the lex Hortensia, 287 B. C, was passed, 

 stipulating that " what the plebs ordered should be binding 

 for all Romans."" 



That the Roman plebiscite, even shortly after this method 

 of registering and enforcing the public will had asserted 

 itself, was anything but a mere form was demonstrated by 

 the plchiscitum held on the occasion of the trial of Corio- 

 lanus, the patrician, who by this decree of the plebs was 

 banished from Rome for his contempt of, and opposition 

 to, the commons.^* 



With the fall of the Republic the Roman plehs surren- 

 dered its hard-fought-for rights to the Emperor and the 

 Senate. 



In the fourteenth book of the Odyssey we are told by the 

 hero of the epic that " When Zeus . . . devised at the last 

 that hateful path which loosened the knees of many a man 

 in death, then the people called on me and on renowned 

 Idomeneus to lead the ships to Ilios, nor was there any way 

 whereby to refuse, for the people's voice bore hard upon 

 us."" 



Proceeding to more historic times we find that in both 

 the Dorian and the Ionian city states, at one time or another, 

 the gradual process or progress from oligarchy and monarchy 

 towards government by the demos. 



In Sparta two centuries of civil strife between the kings 

 and the aristocracy were ended by the laws of Lycurgus, 

 which carried into effect the answer given by the Delphian 



1® Ibid., pp. 140-141. 



^^ " Ut quod ea iussisset, omnes Quirites teneret" (Plinius, Natu- 

 ralis historia, bk. XVI, 10, 15; Gaius, I, 3). 



** Plutarch. Lives, Coriolanus. 



^^ Homer, The Odyssey . . ., done into English prose hy S. H. 

 Butcher and A. Lang, 3d ed.. New York, Macmillan and Co., XIV, 

 235-239- 



