The Historians' History of the World 05

The principle of hereditary succession to the senate was never recognised under the Roman Republic, but the practical restriction of the great offices from which it was replenished to one or two hundred families, allowed none of the chief Roman houses to remain unrepresented in the great council of the nation. To these houses Sulla wished to confine the entire legislation of the commonwealth. He repealed the lex Hortensia

, by which the resolutions of the tribes were invested with the force of law, and gave to the senate alone the initiation of all legal enactments. To the senate he transferred once more the exclusive possession of the

judicia

, while he extended the authority of the quæstiones perpetuæ, or standing commissions for the trial of political offences, to a large class of criminal cases, which had hitherto fallen under the cognisance of the popular assemblies. Nothing however so much advanced the influence of the senate as the limitations Sulla placed upon the functions of the tribunate. He deprived the champions of the people of the right of proposing measures in the assembly of the tribes,[97] forbade them to exercise their arbitrary veto upon the legislation of the curia, and restricted their protectorate of the plebs to the relief of individuals in a few trifling cases of civil or criminal process. Whatever shadow of authority the office of tribune might still retain, a stigma was cast upon it by the decree which declared its holder incapable of succeeding to any of the chief magistracies of the state. Ambitious men disdained an office condemned to silence and obscurity. By the disparagement of its leaders the assembly of the tribes lost all its real power [though it could make laws with the senate’s consent and elect certain inferior magistrates]. As for the assembly by centuries, Sulla seems to have felt the impossibility of restoring the complicated machinery by which the citizens were enrolled in classes, according to their means, and the numbers of the lower ranks balanced by an artificial adjustment. If he could not restore in this popular assembly the preponderance which the Servian constitution had secured to property, the superiority he conferred upon the senate in the matter of legislation might suffice to keep the comitia in due subordination. The assembly of the centuries retained the election to the higher magistracies; the dictator relied on the influence of wealth, rank, and dignity, in breaking down the independence of the electors, already sapped by the prevalent dissolution of manners and degeneracy of public feeling. Nevertheless, he took from the people the appointment to the college of pontiffs, and placed the great political engine of the state religion in the hands of a self-elective corporation of the noblest members of the aristocracy.

The senate thus planted one foot on the neck of the knights, the other on that of the commons. Having, as we have seen, almost re-created it by one enormous draft from an inferior order, Sulla wished to insure the permanence of its constitution, and he would have looked, we may suppose, with jealousy on the independent action of the censorship, which ought to have called all its members to account every fifth year, and summarily ejected the unworthy. Accordingly he allowed no censors to execute their functions during his retention of power, nor was their venerable office revived for several years afterwards. The slaughter of the civil wars had caused a frightful reduction in the old Roman population. It was necessary to take measures for recruiting it, and on this account, perhaps, more than from any regard for the promises he had made at an earlier period, the dictator abstained from closing the franchise against the Italians.[98] He showed his contempt for the needy and venal populace by the enfranchisement at one blow of ten thousand slaves, the miserable remnant of the families of proscribed and murdered citizens. Left without masters they would have endangered the tranquillity of the commonwealth, but enrolled among the citizens they might become themselves masters in their turn, and help to keep the oppressed and discontented in subjection, both at home and abroad. They might at least devote themselves to the policy of the dictator.