According to the account of Plutarch, the Megarian people, at a season of democratic licence, after the expulsion of Theagenes, exacted contributions from the rich, and even passed a decree by which money-lenders were compelled to refund to their debtors the interest which had been already paid. (267) It is difficult for us to conceive a state of society in which the poor are borrowers of money on a large scale in modern states borrowers always have property in possession or expectancy, though

it

may be ultimately exhausted, and they may become insolvent.(266) The poor Athenians, in Solon's time, are described partly as cultivators paying, like métayers, a sixth portion of the produce of the soil in the shape of rent, and having fallen into arrear with their landlords; partly, as persons who had borrowed money upon their corporal security. (269) The plebeian class of

general measure for the remission of debts, and affirmed that the relief was given by lowering the interest of money; Plut. ib. The extant fragments of Solon mention poor freemen, who had been sold as slaves, some justly, some unjustly, and carried in bonds to foreign countries. He restored many of these, after they had become wanderers, and could no longer speak the Attic tongue, to their own country; he likewise liberated many from slavery who had remained at home; Fragm. 15, v. 23; Fr. 28, v. 6, ed. Gaisford. Unfortunately, there are no extant remains of any Roman poet, cotemporary with the first secession. According to the account of the Decemviral law of debt, in Gellius, N. A. xx. 1, the insolvent debtor, after his arrest, was produced on three successive nundina before the prætor, and if the money was not paid on the third period, he was liable to be put to death, or sold beyond the Tiber. The remains of this law are collected and illustrated by Dirksen, Uebersicht der Zwölf-Tafel-Fragmente, p.

234-62.

(267) Plut. Quæst. Gr. c. 18. A'daughter of Theagenes was married to Cylon, who was an Olympic victor in 640 B.C., and whose attempt upon the acropolis of Athens is placed by Clinton at 620 B.c. Compare Grote, vol. iii. p. 60. The story is uncertain; the word akivτokia is probably ancient.

(268) When the poor borrow by pawning their goods, they give a valid security for the debt. This species of borrowing seems to have been unknown to the ancients. Concerning the institution of Monts de Piété, see Beckmann's Hist. of Inventions, vol. iii. art. Lending Houses. Plato, Rep. viii. 9, p. 555, has a striking passage, in which he describes the political discontent caused by the insolvency of debtors, and the pressure of money-lenders. In his picture, however, the debtors are rich oligarchs who have been reduced to insolvency by indolence and profusion-men like Catiline and his associates (Sallust. Cat. 33). According to the law of England, the king may, by his writ of protection, privilege a defendant from all personal suits for one year at a time, in respect of his being engaged in his service out of the realm; Blackstone, Com. vol. iii. p. 289. In former times, protections against creditors were often granted in the continental states; but chiefly, I believe, to men of rank, who had outrun their means. (269) Plut. Sol. 13.

Roman cultivators were owners of the soil, not tenants; they tilled it by their own labour, and that of their sons, without the assistance of slaves, (270) but without the payment of any rent; hence the debts of the plebeians at the time of the first secession are described by the Roman historians as arising exclusively from loans advanced to them by the rich patricians. (271) These debts were, according to Dionysius, all cancelled by a single enactment, and the rights of all private creditors extinguished. An interference of the Roman state for the settlement of private debts is likewise mentioned nearly a century and a half later. In the year 352 B.C. five commissioners were appointed, who, partly by advances of public money, and partly by reducing the amounts due according to an equitable estimate, extinguished a great mass of private debt.(272) Measures of this kind bear little resemblance to acts of public bankruptcy, or repudiation, or depreciation of the currency, affecting the repayment of interest to the national creditor, with which they have been compared. Niebuhr indeed seems to consider their resemblance to consist in their both conferring a benefit on the owners and cultivators of the soil, at the cost of the moneyed interest. (273) But the patri

(270) They were, according to the expression of Dionysius, avrovoyoi (vii. 58), that is to say, they did not employ slave-labour. Compare Plutarch, Cor. 24. Above. vol. i. p. 418, n. 31.

(271) The patricians are represented throughout as being interested in the recovery of the debts, and the plebeians in their remission. See Niebuhr, vol. i. p. 374. Livy says, at the time of the Licinian rogations, more than a century later: An placeret fœnore circumventam plebem corpus in nervum ac supplicia dare; et gregatim quotidie de foro addictos duci, et repleri vinctis nobiles domos? et ubicumque patricius habitat, ibi carcerem privatum esse;' vi. 36.

(272) Livy, vii. 21. The nature and policy of a measure for the remis sion of debts are fully discussed, according to the ideas of Dionysius, in the debate, in v. 63-8. In c. 69, he describes different modes of affording relief. One is, that the property of insolvent debtors should be given up to the creditors, but that their bodies should remain free. Another is, that their debts should be discharged by the state. A third is, that prisoners of war should be assigned to the creditors as substitutes for their debtors.

(273) If a person approves of Sully's diminishing the interest payable to the public creditors, who were swallowing up the revenues of the state, and of his deducting the usurious profit they had long enjoyed from the principal,—if he is aware how lowering the interest, or the capital of its debt, or the standard of its currency, has been the only means whereby more than one state has been able to save itself from the condition in which

cians were as much landowners as the plebeians, and the patricians are described as the money-lending class. (274)

We shall see, moreover, in a future chapter, that, although the complaints of the plebeians respecting the law of debt are represented as being removed by the settlement made at the first secession, they recur in the subsequent period, at various intervals; and that the main grievance, the slavery of the insolvent debtor, was not abolished till the Second Samnite War. (326 B.C.) (275)

the whole produce of the ground and of labour would have fallen into the hands of the fundholders; if he knows how speedily and easily wounds sustained by this class in their property heal; if he considers this, when reviewing the history of the states of antiquity, which were drained by private usury, he will be favourable to measures which tend to preserve hereditary property and personal freedom, as Solon was;' Hist. vol. i. p. 611.

(274) Qui vero se populares volunt, obeamque causam aut agrariam rem tentant, ut possessores suis sedibus pellantur, aut pecunias creditas debitoribus condonandas putant; i labefactant fundamenta reipublicæ;' Cicero, de Off. ii. 22. Tabulæ vero novæ quid habent argumenti, nisi ut emas meâ pecuniâ fundum: eum tu habeas, ego non habeam pecuniam ?' ib. c. 23. In these passages, Cicero lays down the general rule about the remission of debts, without adverting to those special circumstances, which, in certain critical seasons, may have rendered such a measure expedient. Our knowledge of the state of Attica in the time of Solon prevents us however from forming any other judgment of his measure for the relief of debtors beyond that which is founded on his description of its results. With respect to the causes and extent of the prevalence of debt among the Roman plebeians, at the time of the first secession, and the measures adopted for relieving it, our information is still more imperfect.

(275) Below, ch. xiii. § 8, 38.

PART II.-FROM THE FIRST SECESSION TO THE
TERENTILLIAN ROGATION.

(493-462 B.C.)

§ 19 THE first secession is marked by Niebuhr as a great epoch in the Roman history. From this point, he thinks, a true narrative of events may, by a process of conjectural combination, be recovered from the extant accounts, though these are delivered to us by the ancient historians in a confused and distorted state.) There is however nothing to indicate any

(1) The first volume of Niebuhr's History ends with the secession and the institution of the tribunes. In the Preface to his second volume, he says: I saw clearly that, in spite of all scepticism, a critical examination of the facts would enable me to restore and establish a certain and credible

history from the epoch at which this volume begins. . . In like manner, I perceived that the changes in the constitution might be traced step by step; p. vi. In the Introduction, he subsequently states the same view with greater fulness: It was one of the most important objects of the first volume to prove that the story of Rome under the kings was altogether without historical foundation. I have sifted the legends which have taken the place of history: such fragments of the same sort as lay scattered about, I have collected, with the view of restoring the manifold forms they once bore; though with no thought that this could bring us nearer to historical knowledge. Even Fabius beyond doubt knew nothing more [of the time of the kings] than the story that has come down to us: and it would hardly have been possible for him to find any authentic records, unless in the writings of foreign nations; which he could never have reconciled with his own story, or made any use of. On the other hand, his age was in possession of a real history, though in many parts tinged with fable, since the insurrection of the commonalty [the first secession, 494 B.C.]. And though this has only reached us in a very defective state, disfigured by arbitrary transformations, yet from this time forward it becomes my cheering task to undertake the restoration of a genuine, connected, substantially perfect history; vol. ii. p. 1. Historical criticism, by merely lopping off what is worthless, replacing tradition on its proper footing, demonstrating its real dignity, and thus securing it from ridicule and censure (?) will render the story of Rome during the period following the league with the Latins [493 B.c.] no less authentic and substantial than that of many much later periods, where we are in like manner left without contemporary records; ib. P. 15. With regard to these later periods, it should however be remarked, that although the contemporary histories are not now extant, they were extant when the accounts now extant were composed. (See above, ch. ii.) In his Lectures on Roman History, he places the epoch of substantially true history immediately before the first secession. This battle [of Regillus, 496 B.c.] forms the close of the lay of the Tarquins. The earliest period of Roman history is thus terminated, and a new era opens upon us; vol. i. p. 124. In the history of the period which now follows, we find ourselves upon real historical ground we may hence

:

change in the external testimony to the occurrences beginning from this period. We have no reason for supposing that the events of the fifteen years after the secession are better attested than the events of the fifteen years before the secession; except that, being somewhat later, they are somewhat more likely to have been handed down faithfully by oral tradition. With respect to the internal character of the narrative, we shall find, as we proceed, little improvement, until we reach the burning of the city; from which era Livy dates a more regular preservation of the contemporary historical records.

For a period of five years immediately following the secession, the history turns chiefly upon the acts of C. Marcius. Coriolanus; whose drama consists of two acts; the first ending with his punishment, the second with his death. It is narrated at great length by Dionysius, and very briefly by Livy; so that the events which fill the seventh and the chief part of the

forth speak with certainty of men and events, although now and then fables were still introduced into the Fasti. That errors did creep in is no more than the common lot of all human affairs, and we must from this point treat the history of Rome like every other history, and not make it the subject of shallow scepticism to which it has already been too much sacrificed;' ib. p. 126; and see p. 141.

In his Lectures on Ancient History, he draws a similar line: If we divide Roman history into its elements, into what was originally contained in the annals, and into ancient lays, much of which ought not to be disregarded; and if we separate the elements from the falsifications and interpolations of later times, we shall have, from the time of the first secession, and even from a somewhat earlier point, a history, the authenticity of which can be more easily restored the more deeply we study it, without having recourse to invention. It is not however the narratives that have come down to us that are authentic; but the narratives contain the authentic history, and it is our part to discover it;' vol. i. p. 190, ed. Schmitz.

According to Niebuhr, therefore, the history of the first five centuries of Rome is composed of three periods. First: the purely mythical, or fabulous period, comprising the reigns of Romulus and Numa. Secondly; the mythico-historical period, in which truth is blended with fiction, begin. ning with the reign of Tullus Hostilius, and ending at the First Secession, 494 B.C. Thirdly; the substantially historical period, beginning at the First Secession. With respect to the commencement of the mythico-historical period, and its character, see Niebuhr, Hist. vol. i. p. 247; and above, vol. i. p. 125, 529. It will be observed that the distinctions between these three periods rest on the internal character of the narrative, not on any differences of external attestation. Schwegler, vol. i. p. 579, follows Niebuhr, in making the purely historical character of the Roman annals commence from about the time of the First Secession.