This division had a permanency which resembles the permanency of being born into a caste. A citizen was born either a patrician or a plebeian. One could not become a patrician merely by acquiring wealth or political power. Kinship and marriage too were closely linked with the division of Roman society into two orders. Till B. The patricians were a privileged class of Roman citizens who exercised great political and religious power, held military authority, especially during the monarchy and the Roman Republic.
Patrician status was obtained only by birth. Patrician social organization was based on kinship groups called gentes. Each gen traced its origin to a common ancestor.
Patrician gentes were patrilineal and rigidly patriarchal. Kinship ties played an important role at the level of patrician social organization. Their closed kinship structure was so strictly regulated that during the republic the number of gentes were steadily decreasing.
The patricians were the economically, politically and socially dominant group. Patricians could exercise a high degree of control over Roman religion. When the republic came into existence the patricians converted the senate into an exclusive oligarchical institution for governing Rome. Membership in the patrician class was inherited. The patricians could influence the proceedings of the comitia curiata by choosing appropriate presiding officers.
The upper-class plebeians were barred from magistracies. Middle and lower classes felt the economic burden. Rural farmers were feeling the effects of war because they had to do much of the fighting. Poor plebeians were subject to harsh debtor laws.
The fact that the patrician class was an aristocracy based on birth ultimately led to a decline in the number of patrician clans, from about 50 in B. New patricians created in this manner could pass this status on to their descendants.
Even so, the hereditary class of patricians seems to have disappeared by the A. The emperor Constantine revived the title of patricius in the early A. At the beginning of the Roman Republic, plebeians were excluded from all important positions in the government. After the Conflict of the Orders struggle, plebeians largely attained political equality with patricians.
In B. This was the first of five secessions by the plebeians that occurred during the early years of the republic. They formed their own popular assembly and elected their own officials, called Tribunes, to protect their interests against the actions of the patricians.
Since the withdrawal of large numbers of citizens weakened the army, the patricians relented. The plebeians developed their own institutions that were separate from those of the patricians. They formed an assembly called the concilium plebis, which excluded all patricians. Decisions called plebiscite made by the concilium plebis were binding only on plebeians, although they could be applied to all Romans if they were also approved by the patricians.
When this condition was removed at the end of the Conflict of the Orders, plebiscita became law for all the Roman people. The concilium plebis elected the tribunes and the two plebeian aediles. Each year, the assembly elected ten tribunes to represent the interests of the plebeians. Although they were not magistrates of the Roman government, tribunes had considerable power. The most powerful weapon in the hands of the plebeians was the refusal to render military service secession.
Around B. Although the result Twelve Tables was harsh and restrictive, it made the laws known to all and not subject to the arbitrary decisions of magistrates.
For the first time, plebeians could hold the office of consul. By the end of the s B. After the plebeians' final secession in B. After this time, plebeians and patricians had equal political and legal rights.
Although this marked the end of the Conflict of the Orders, most political power remained in the hands of the wealthier noble families. Patrician families would seize all the public land for their own use, driving many small landowners into debt. The plebeians were constantly fighting for a greater say in the government, and finally, the first plebeian consuls were elected in B.
However, the patricians continued to control the Senate, sometimes taking ambitious plebeians into their ranks to achieve their aims. During the time of the Roman Republic, there was constant struggle between the rich patrician aristocracy and the plebeians who ranged from jobless laborers to wealthy landowners who did not belong to the noble class.
The system evolved by the patricians after the establishment of the Republic completely denied the plebeians any say in the government. The Roman aristocracy had to seek the support of the peasantry for defending the city and subsequently for expansion in Italy.
Roman military organization was heavily dependent on the peasants who constituted the main fighting force. The army comprised unpaid soldiers who were primarily recruited from the peasantry. The soldiers had to supply their own fighting equipment. All able-bodied male adults had to render military service.
Cicero , writing some thrde centuries later, refers to the two new tablets, created by the second set of Decemviri Decemvirs , as "unjust laws. Although failure to step down at the end of the year had always been a possibility with the consuls and dictators, it hadn't happened. One man, in particular, Appius Claudius, who had served on both decemvirates, acted despotically.
Appius Claudius was from an originally Sabine family that continued to make its name known throughout Roman history. This early despotic Appius Claudius pursued and brought a fraudulent legal decision against a free woman, Verginia, daughter of a high ranking soldier, Lucius Verginius. As a result of Appius Claudius' lustful, self-serving actions, the plebeians seceded again. To restore order, the Decemvirs finally abdicated, as they should have done earlier. The laws the Decemviri created were meant to resolve the same basic problem that had faced Athens when Draco whose name is the basis for the word "draconian" because his laws and punishments were so severe was asked to codify Athenian laws.
In Athens, before Draco, interpretation of the unwritten law had been done by the nobility who had been partial and unfair. Written law meant everyone was theoretically held to the same standard. However, even if exactly the same standard were applied to everyone, which is always a wish more than a reality, and even if the laws were written, a single standard doesn't guarantee reasonable laws.
In the case of the 12 tablets, one of the laws prohibited marriage between plebeians and patricians. It's worth noting that this discriminating law was on the supplemental two tablets—those written while there were plebeians among the Decemvirs, so it is not true that all plebeians opposed it.
The 12 tablets were an important move in the direction of what we would call equal rights for the plebeians, but there was still much to do. The law against intermarriage between the classes was repealed in When the plebeians proposed that they should be eligible for the highest office, the consulship, the Senate wouldn't completely oblige, but instead created what we might call a "separate, but equal" new office known as military tribune with consular power.
This office effectively meant plebeians could wield the same power as the patricians. We know of Athens as the birthplace of democracy, but there was more to Roman's decision to study the Athenian legal system than this, especially since there is no reason to think the Romans were trying to create an Athenian-like democracy. Athens, too, once had an underclass suffering at the hands of the nobles. One of the first steps taken was to commission Draco to write down the laws.
After Draco, who recommended capital punishment for crime, continued problems between rich and poor led to the appointment of Solon the law-giver. Solon and the Rise of Democracy. In The Beginnings of Rome , its author, T.
Cornell, gives examples of English translations of what was on the 12 Tables. The tablet placement of the injunctions follows H. As Cornell says, the "code" is hardly what we would think of as a code, but a list of injunctions and prohibitions. There are specific areas of concern: family, marriage, divorce, inheritance, property, assault, debt, debt-bondage nexum , freeing of enslaved people, summonses, funeral behavior, and more.
This hodge-podge of laws does not seem to clarify the position of plebeians but instead seems to address questions in areas in which there was disagreement. It is the 11th Table, one of the ones written by the plebeian-patrician group of Decemvirs, that lists the injunction against plebeian-patrician marriage.
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Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Gill, N. Conflicts of the Orders Patrician and Plebeian. Early Rome and the Issue of the 'King'. The Roman Republic's 3 Branches of Government. Roman Leaders at the End of the Republic: Marius.
Hierarchy of Roman Offices in the Cursus Honorum.
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