employment on the estates of their richer neighbours. Their motives in this struggle may have been less pure than Solon's,[1] but their efforts were plainly directed to the same end as his.
Their work marks, indeed, a stage of development in some sense even nearer to democracy than that of Solon. The highest executive office was now open to all citizens; the popular legislative assemblies were sovereign in the constitution; and if these laws were faithfully carried out there would be a fairly even distribution of wealth throughout the community, such as would enable all to take a reasonable amount of interest in the government, proportionate to their own share in the general wellbeing. On the face of things there was no reason why genuine democratic institutions should not have taken root and grown, and there are some signs in the annals a generation or two later that such a growth was actually beginning.[2] But true democracy is a plant of very great rarity, which will not grow on every soil. Why it withered at Rome — why after all, the Romans never learnt to govern themselves like the Athenians — will be explained in another chapter.
- ↑ It is likely enough, as Mommsen suggests, that they represented the claims of the richer plebeians in their efforts to throw open the consulship. Sextius was himself the first plebeian consul in the year 366 B.C.
- ↑ Livy, ix, ch. 46, x. 7. For the action of Appius, the censor of 312 B.C., in allowing landless citizens to be enrolled in any tribe, see Appendix to the first volume of Mommsen's Roman History, p. 498 foll. There are undoubtedly some signs in the story both of a tyrannic and of a democratic tendency to deal recklessly with ancient custom, which is exceedingly rare at Rome.
