The Historians' History of the World 05

A still more effective check to collision is to be found in the fact that all measures proposed to the tribe assembly by the tribunes, as well as the centuriate laws proposed by the consuls or other ministers of the senate, must first receive the sanction of the senate itself. The few exceptions which occur are where tribunes propose a resolution granting to a popular consul the triumph refused by the senate. But these exceptions only serve to prove the rule.[71]

Our surprise that no collision is heard of between the two assemblies now takes another form, and we are led to ask how it came that, if all measures must be first approved by the senate, any substantial power at all could belong to the tribes? It would seem that they also, like the centuriate assembly, could at most exercise only a veto on measures emanating from the great council.

That this result did not follow, is due to the rude but formidable counter-check provided by the tribunate. The persons of the tribunes were inviolable; but the tribunes had power to place even consuls under arrest. By the advance of their intercessory prerogative they gradually built up an authority capable of over-riding all other powers in the state.

We are now better able to appreciate the position of the two assemblies as legislative bodies. The tribe assembly was presided over by officers of its own choice, invested with authority generally sufficient to extort from the senate leave to bring in laws of a popular character. No such power resided in the presidents of the centuriate assembly; for the consuls were little more than ministers of the senate. The centuriate assembly more and more became a passive instrument in the hands of the senate. The tribe assembly rose to be the organ of popular opinion.

In elections, the centuriate assembly always retained the right of choosing the chief officers of state, the consuls, prætors, and censors. The tribe assembly, originally, elected only their own tribunes and the plebeian ædiles. But in no long time they obtained the right of choosing also the curule ædiles, the quæstors, the great majority of the legionary tribunes, and all inferior officers of state. But as the centuries were, generally, obliged to elect their prætors and consuls out of those who had already been elected quæstors and ædiles by the tribes, it is manifest that the elective power of the former was controlled and overridden by the latter. In conferring extraordinary commands, such as that of Scipio in Spain, the tribes were always consulted, not the centuries.

JUSTICE

In regard to jurisdiction, it has before been noticed that Rome was tender of the personal liberties of her citizens. Various laws of appeal provided for an open trial before his peers of anyone charged with grave offences, such as would subject him to stripes, imprisonment, or death. Now the centuries alone formed a high court of justice for the trial of citizens; the tribe assembly never achieved this dangerous privilege. But the tribunician power offered to the chief officers of the tribes a ready means of interference; for they could use their right of intercession to prevent a trial, and thus screen real offenders from justice. But more frequently they acted on the offensive. There was a merciful provision of the law of Rome, by which a person liable to a state prosecution might withdraw from Italian soil at any time before his trial, and become the citizen of some allied city, such as Syracuse or Pergamus. But the tribunes sometimes threw culprits into prison before trial, as in the case of App. Claudius the decemvir and his father. Or, after a culprit had sought safety in voluntary exile, they proposed a bill of outlawry, by which he was “interdicted from fire and water” on Italian soil, and all his goods were confiscated. Offending magistrates were also fined heavily, without trial, by special plebiscita, which resembled the bills of attainder familiar to the reader of English history.

These encroachments of the tribunes were met by other unconstitutional measures on the part of the senate. To bar the action of the tribunes and to suspend the laws of appeal, they at one time had constant recourse to dictatorial appointments. These appointments ceased after the Second Punic War; but after this, in critical times, the senate assumed the right of investing the consuls with dictatorial power.