So I bring to your attention a simple, but very long recipe for cooking ...
In the course of the class struggle of patricians and plebeians, Rome turned into a polis republic, the main features of which, as in ancient Greece, were: special rights of the citizen, formal sovereignty of the people, exercised through the popular assembly, the election of magistrates (officials), civil militia. At the same time, Rome remained an aristocratic state, since political power was concentrated in the hands of the nobility. These are approximately 30-40 families and clans: all the highest positions were replenished from their number, and “upstarts” were very reluctantly allowed into their circle, for which there was a special concept of “new man” in the Roman political lexicon ( Homo novus). True, formally the nobility had no special rights, so that its dominant position was determined not by law, but by the merits of the nobles or their ancestors before the state. This superiority was determined by unwritten law - ius, and unwritten law - fas, i.e. tradition, custom, "mores of the ancestors" ( mores maiorum).
The end of the struggle between the patricians and the plebeians accelerated the formation of new estates: senatorial, equestrian and plebs, at the same time, the old division into patricians and plebeians has not disappeared, but simply lost its main political significance. The new class affiliation was not hereditary and clearly fixed: the son of a rider could become a senator if he took any curule position, and the son of a senator was not included in the estate of his father if he refused a political career. The main principle of replenishment of the two upper classes was service, the presence of special merits to the state.
The senatorial estate was considered the highest. Only former senior magistrates could apply for a seat in the Senate, but this necessary condition was insufficient: when included in the list of the Senate, merits were also taken into account - both personal and ancestors. The senatorial estate included only members of the senate; a sign of their privileged position was a special dress - a tunic with a wide purple longitudinal stripe ( tunica laticlavaf Toga with purple border (toga praetexta E was worn only by former higher, or curule magistrates, who had the right to sit on a curule chair (Fig. 10.4).
Riders, like senators, were not born, but became. For this, a high property qualification was not enough, which in the II century. BC e. amounted to 400 thousand sesterces 1: equestrian dignity was awarded by the state in the person of the censor, again the merits of the applicant were taken into account. The newly minted rider received a "community horse" (equus publicus), which he had to take care of. Being for the most part, like the senators, landowners, the horsemen were more actively involved in business life: they were engaged in trade and various financial transactions. During the war, they served in the cavalry or were officers in the legions, and in peacetime they could seek honorary positions that entitle them to a seat in the Senate: one could only get into the senatorial class through the equestrian class.
Rice. 10.4.
The composition of the last estate (plebs) was very heterogeneous: the plebs were divided into urban (merchants, artisans, etc.) and rural (mainly medium and small landowners). A significant part of the first was the urban mob - the poor lumpen, whose slogan later became the famous "rapet et circles"("Meal'n'Real").
In the course of the class struggle, the state structure of republican Rome was finally formed. Supreme State
The body of the Roman Republic was the popular assembly, which existed in three forms: curate, centuriate and tributary comitia. The most ancient - curiat, meetings of patricians in curiae, in fact, have long lost their political significance and rarely met; some researchers believe that in the era of the republic, plebeians also began to take part in them. Curiat comitia adopted a special law - lex curiata de imperio, to which appropriate magistrate his special powers were conferred - empires.
empires- the totality of powers first of the king, and then of the highest officials in Rome; The main content of the empire is military power and jurisdiction. In the Roman Republic, the same word denoted the territory over which the empire of the highest magistrate extended; in the era of emperors - the name of the Roman world power (Imperium will sink).
The centuriate comitia, which met outside the city limits, on the Field of Mars, elected the highest magistrates (consuls, censors and praetors), declared war and approved peace treaties. In the middle of the III century. BC e. a democratic reform was carried out that changed the distribution of centuries by class: each class received an equal number of centuries (70 each). The main type of people's assembly eventually became tributary comitia, which arose from meetings of plebeians in tribes - territorial districts into which the state was divided (31 rural and four urban). From the 3rd century BC e. the patricians also took part in the work of the comitia comitia, and from that time on the basic laws began to be adopted in them. A number of magistrates: curule aediles, quaestors, military tribunes - were elected in this type of popular assembly; as for the tribunes of the people and the plebeian aediles, these officials were elected at purely plebeian meetings by tribes ( concilium plebis). The significance of popular assemblies in the political life of Rome was limited by the fact that they did not have the right to legislative initiative: not a single bill could be proposed by the assembly itself, it was necessarily introduced by a magistrate with such a right (consul, dictator, tribune); also, comitia could not meet at their own discretion - only at the initiative of the magistrate.
Executive and judicial power in the state was exercised by magistrates - officials. All magistracies (except for the dictatorship) were elective, temporary (most for a period of one year) and collegiate. The supreme magistrates, supreme commanders and de facto heads of state were two consul whose names were given to the year. The highest magistrates inherited the insignia of royal power - 12 lictors with fasces, separate curule chairs in the Senate. The consuls convened the senate and the people's assembly, introduced bills, supervised the elections and were considered the bearers of the highest empire.
praetors- junior colleagues of consuls - were engaged court cases. At first there were two of them, but by the end of the republic, when the governors of the provinces began to be appointed from the former praetors, their number increased to 16.
The position was highly respected. censor. Two censors were elected every five years from the former consuls for a period of 18 months. This periodicity is explained by the fact that every five years a census of citizens (census) was held and a revision of the list of senators and horsemen was carried out. The censors also exercised control over the morality of citizens: for bad behavior (waste, drunkenness, mistreatment of children, disrespect to parents), they could make a remark, which was extremely shameful, or even be excluded from the list of senators or horsemen. Among the censors of the Early Republic, the most famous was Appius Claudius, nicknamed "The Blind" (he became blind in old age). Becoming in 312 BC. e. censor, he began the construction of the great road of antiquity, named after him Appian, which connected Rome with Capua. He also improved Rome's water supply by building the first of the Roman aqueducts, drinking water from the Sabine hills. Appius Claudius was the first of the censors to revise the list of senators (the consuls used to do this) and - an unheard of thing! -even included among the senators the sons of freedmen.
Exercise
Model Roman cursus honorum(literally, “running, the path of honors”), putting in the correct sequence (from the lowest to the highest) the positions that the representatives of the nobility passed:
- 1) questor;
- 2) consul;
- 3) praetor;
- 4) censor;
- 5) aedile.
Plebeian magistrates were extremely important in Rome - people's stands. In addition to the right of assistance and the right of veto, they received the right to introduce bills, convene tribunal comitia and the senate, and even arrest magistrates if they opposed them. The significant power of the tribunes was limited only by the fact that any of them could veto the proposal of a colleague, and also by the fact that the powers of the tribunes acted only within the limits of the pomerium - the city limits of Rome. Ambitious young people willingly went to the people's tribunes, for whom this position often became the beginning of a political career.
Question for thought
Why do you think the Greek historian Polybius considered the Roman government to be the best? Justify your answer.
Per public order, the state of city buildings, the cleanliness of the streets were observed aediles; they also took care of the delivery of food and were in charge of organizing public games, for which they spent considerable funds from their own pockets. This paid off in the fact that the generous aedile gained popularity, which contributed to his further career.
Quaestors managed the state treasury (aerarium), which was in the temple of Saturn; they were also in charge of the state archive. In the era of the Late Republic, quaestors were often assistants to provincial governors or generals. Climbing the ladder of magistracies usually began with the position of quaestor, the most worthy and successful reached the top - the position of consul or censor.
In addition to the usual ones, there were also extraordinary, or extraordinary, magistracies in Rome: interrexes, decemvirs, triumvirs, military tribunes with consular power, etc. When the danger from an external enemy was especially great or internal unrest threatened civil strife, by special decision of the Senate, dictator. The powers of the dictator lasted no more than six months; he himself chose his assistant - the head of the cavalry. The ancient dictatorship was created mainly for military purposes. In the event of war, the consuls divided the army into two parts, or commanded in turn, such a double command often led to mutual claims and misunderstanding and harmed the cause. The appointment of an extraordinary magistrate - a dictator - led to unity of command: consuls and praetors in war were obliged to obey him.
Dictator- an extraordinary magistrate in republican Rome, elected for a term of not more than six months, usually for military command; in the Late Republic (Sulla, Caesar) - in fact, an authoritarian ruler.
Magistrates were divided into categories: curule magistrates(those who had the right to a curule chair (Fig. 10.5)) - consuls, dictator, praetors, censors and curule aediles; other positions were considered non-curulum. Officials endowed with an empire - magistrates cum imperio: consuls, praetors, dictator and other extraordinary magistrates (decemvirs, triumvirs). The curule magistrates were considered the highest magistrates, and also, from a certain moment, the people's tribunes.
The most important element of the Roman state system was senate, whose power was based not so much on law as on authority ( auctoritas senatus). In the strict sense of written law, the senate was a purely advisory body, it could not pass laws, but could only give advice, recommendations if the magistrate asked him to do so. However fas- unwritten law, custom (in Rome - the same sources of law as the law) - required the approval of the Senate for all cases without exception, which turned this body, in fact, into the government of the Roman Republic. The Senate approved laws (after 339 BC, only preliminary approval by the Senate of bills submitted to the comitia was required); could cancel, under a plausible pretext, a law adopted by the people's assembly (for example, due to a violation of procedure, unfavorable auspices 1, etc.). He was in charge of finances (budget, taxes), directed foreign policy (acceptance and dispatch of embassies) and military operations (declaration of recruitment, distribution of troops among consuls, military budget, appointment of a triumph, etc.). From the 4th century BC e. the composition of the Senate, the number of which remained the same - 300 people, began to be replenished from the former magistrates, starting with the quaestors. There was a certain voting procedure in the Senate: the first to express his opinion, the princeps cast his vote (princeps senatus), then curule senators (those who have held curule positions in the past), and finally others, but they were rarely reached in turn. The order of replenishment of the senate determined its social composition: the nobility, in whose hands were all the highest magistracies, also reigned in the senate, as the senate - in the life of the Roman state.
Rice. 10.5.
princeps- in the Roman Republic, the senator whose name was first on the list of the Senate, the first to express an opinion in the discussion; in imperial times - one of the titles of the emperor, who was the prince of the senate.
Workshop
The struggle of patricians and plebeians. Laws of the XII tables.
The seminar is devoted to the analysis of the "Laws of the XII Tables" - the oldest source of Roman law. The practical lesson involves reading and detailed analysis of the document, so before the lesson you need to carefully read it.
Tasks
Make a short summary (about 1 page) on the topic “the struggle of the patricians and plebeians”, which will list the main demands of the plebeians, the stages of this confrontation, the reforms and laws adopted, and the results.
Write down and learn the meanings of such concepts as "patrician", "plebeian", "secession", "patron", "client", "decemvirs", "tribune of the people", "plebiscite".
Carefully read the text of the “Laws of the XX Tables” and determine which articles refer to the branches of Roman law (criminal, property, family, hereditary, debt, land), legal proceedings, and the structure of society. As you read the document, make a pivot table. In this table, you must enter the appropriate article numbers (some articles may refer to several positions at once).
Solve problems based on the articles of the "Laws of XX Tables".
Note! When answering the tasks, references to specific articles are required.
- 1. The Roman Publius went to court with a complaint against his neighbor Mark. He claimed that Mark stole logs from him, from which he later built a house for himself. What punishment threatens Mark if his guilt is proven?
- 2. A poor Roman turned to a wealthy comrade with a request to lend 500 asses for a period of one year. He lent him money at interest, with the condition that 600 asses should be returned. A year later, the poor man did not repay the debt and, moreover, went to court, arguing that such a demand was illegal. How should this matter be resolved?
- 3. Two Romans, Gaius and Lucius, have long been in conflict with each other. One night, Guy cut down seven fruit trees on Lucius' property. Lucius came to Gaius the next morning, started a fight, and in the fight broke his opponent's arm. What are the penalties for both?
Socio-political structure of republican Rome
The seminar takes the form of a colloquium.
Tasks
- 1. Make an outline of Polybius's story about the Roman state system (Book VI).
- 2. Compare the Roman comitia (popular assemblies) with each other. At the same time, try to answer the questions: who collected them? What questions were discussed? Was there freedom of speech at these meetings?
- 3. Compare the Roman popular assembly with the Athenian ecclesia. What type of meeting do you think is more democratic? Justify your answer.
Creative task
Compose a situational problem according to the articles of the "Laws of XX Tables" and offer a solution. Try to rely on several articles of the "Laws" at once - this way the task will turn out to be more interesting and more difficult.
Variable task
Fill in the table "Roman magistracies".
|
Master's degree title |
Number |
Length of tenure The same toga was worn by some priests and boys until reaching adulthood, when they dressed in a male toga (toga virilis). Anyone who sought any higher magistracy put on a bleached toga - toga Candida, therefore he was called a "candidate" (candidatus). |
Political rise of Rome
The growth of Rome takes place in three concentric circles corresponding to the three state forms.
In the internal structure of the Roman state, with the help of which a huge agglomeration of cities, regions and peoples was connected to the center, the Romans turned out to be remarkable architects who originally solved the problem of the transition from city to state. In its earliest period, the city of Rome (urbs) was also a state (civitas) - in other words, the Roman state had urban forms. If at this time the power of Rome extended over neighboring communities, then this happened either through the absorption of the community itself by Rome and the adoption of its citizens among Roman citizens, or through the destruction of a hostile city (Wei); despite the conquests, Rome remained the only city on its territory. But already very early, necessity forced the Romans to withdraw to the conquered land or even to the conquered cities, in order to strengthen their power, colonies of Roman citizens, who, constituting a military garrison there, remained citizens of Rome. As a precaution, Rome settled in the colonies at first no more than 300 citizens, so that the colony would not become dangerous for the metropolis. And since Rome at that time was a member of the Latin Union, then in the conquered areas - for example, in the territory of Wei - common colonies were also withdrawn from Roman and Latin citizens, called Latin colonies. The newly founded cities became, in turn, members of the Latin Union. B. 381 BC e. The Romans took an important measure in their consequences: having conquered the city of Tusculum, they attributed its citizens to the R. tribe, that is, they gave them the right to vote in the R. national assembly, but at the same time left Tusculum its city autonomy. The inhabitants of Tusculum thus became citizens of two cities: politically, they belonged to Rome, lived in its legions, voted in the forum, but independently managed their local city affairs, electing, for example, local magistrates.
The city, which was at the same time both in conjunction with Rome and in political subordination to it, was called municipium. Thus, Rome found a convenient formula for incorporating cities that merged with it politically, but retained their autonomy, which was so important for local interests and prosperity. The Romans did not immediately grant the rights of Roman citizenship to all municipalities: the inhabitants of the Etruscan city of Caere, alien in language and customs, they first gave only citizenship without the right to vote (cives sine suffragio) and thereby created a new category of cities; the citizens of such cities of the “Ceritan Law” were real municipes, that is, they carried duties without using their rights. According to Polybius, there were 100,000 citizens of this kind before the second Punic war, out of 173,000 full-fledged Roman citizens. Thanks to the municipalities, ager romanus, that is, "Roman land", could grow, embracing numerous, well-populated and freely governed cities, scattered throughout Italy and at the same time constituting one political body with R., since their citizens were in the tribes of the Roman people and only in the Roman forum could show their participation in R. democracy. Thus, Ager romanus, representing at the beginning of the republic a space of 98,275 hectares, by the beginning of lat. war tripled (309 thousand hectares); the dissolution of the Latin alliance and the transformation of many independent cities of the Latins into municipalities again doubled the size of the R. of the land (603 thousand); the unification of Italy, that is, the victory over the Samnites, Etruscans, Gauls of central Italy; brought the expanse of Roman land to 2,700,000 hectares; the reorganization of Italy after the victory over Hannibal added another 1,000,000 hectares; the conquest of northern Italian Gaul, colonization in it expanded the Ager romanas to 5,500,000 hectares, which is one third of the space of all of Italy (16 million hectares). Another cement that rallied R.'s power was the "treaty" (foedus), thanks to which the defeated city became R.'s ally. The formula of the agreement was different: if the agreement was concluded on the principle of equality (foedus aequum), then it provided the ally with complete autonomy. In fact, however, equality was accompanied by dependence on Rome: the allied city followed the policy of Rome, and not vice versa. The dependence was even greater when the formula majestalem populi romani comiter conservare was included in the contract, that is, the obligation to kindly observe the greatness (supremacy) of the Roman people. By means of such treaties, which assigned a special place to each of the allies, Rome connected with itself 135 free cities of Italy as allies (socii). The middle between Rome and the allies is occupied by lat. colonies (socii ac nomen lalinum - in Libya). After the termination of the lat. Union, the Romans began to withdraw colonies, whose citizens, unlike the former R. colonists, lost the right of R. citizenship and became citizens of the seven old Latin colonies, but for that they enjoyed full autonomy and retained the right to return to Rome and re-enroll in their tribe if they left a family member in the colony to process the allotment they received. With such colonies with a large number of citizens (from 3 to 6 thousand; even 20,000 colonists were brought to Venusia), Rome Latinized the southern and northern. Italy. All Latin colonies, including 7 old ones, were 35, with a space of 830,000 hectares. and with 85,000 citizens called up for military service (in 225, when only 28 colonies were withdrawn). The entire territory of the cities allied to Rome in Italy amounted to 10,500,000 hectares. - twice against the Roman; as for the military forces, the allies could put up to the aid of Rome (including the Latin colonies) almost twice as much (in 225 - 497,000, against 273,000). Thus, after the conquest of Italy by Rome, this country was a federation of cities, under the supreme dominion of one reigning city; it is a single state in terms of the cohesion of its parts and in the subordination of a single authority, but in its structure it has a municipal character, that is, it consists exclusively of cities that are not only self-governing, but also possessing a controlled territory. Upon the entry of Rome into the third concentric circle, its state. the structure had to change: Rome was no longer at war with cities, but with kings; the result of his victories was the acquisition not of allies (socii), but of subjects (dediticii or stipendiarii - taxable). Only in exceptional cases did the Romans grant freedom to cities with which they had previously been on friendly terms, by treaty; another similar category is represented by cities that were granted a privileged position (civitates liberae et immunes) not by mutual agreement, but by a decree of the senate or law. Most of the cities surrendered to the mercy of the Romans; according to the formula of surrender (deditio), they were returned the land and self-government, under the condition of various natural and monetary duties. Consequently, here, too, the city self-governing territory was an element of the state structure, under the supervision or authority of the regional Roman commander, who intervened in place of the king (for example, in Macedonia). But all this was possible until the Romans went beyond the limits of Greek and Phoenician culture, with its urban life. The position of the provinces in areas that did not know the urban culture was different. Here the Romans were the conductors of this culture, the great builders and organizers of cities, with the help of which they Romanized the barbarians. The arrangement of cities was carried out through the settlement of veterans, that is, soldiers who had served their time; other cities were formed from the camps of the Roman legions; the locals were also sometimes organized by the Romans into cities. Gaul, the Danubian regions, and especially Africa, were covered with a network of Roman colonies and municipalities; numerous inscriptions testify to this civilizing mission of the Romans, which is the best page in the history of Rome.
Patricians and plebeians
The expansion of the power of Rome, introducing more and more new elements into it, created two layers in the population - the dominant and the subservient. Such a dualism appears to us already in ancient, prehistoric Rome, manifesting itself in the antagonism between patricians and plebeians. The struggle between patricians and plebeians is a fact that dominates the history of the state structure, social life and legislation of ancient Rome, and therefore the question of their origin has always attracted the special attention of researchers. Antiquity has already given us two different answers to this question. Livy produces patricians from patres, that is, senators, and considers them to be the descendants of the first hundred senators appointed by Romulus; Dionysius, familiar from the history of Greek cities with the role of noble families, suggests the existence of such families from time immemorial in Rome. From the testimony of Livy, it can be seen that in the era of R. historiography, a clear idea of the nature of the ancient patriciate was already lost, but it was preserved to some extent among lawyers who (Gaius) found the definition: plebs gentem non habet (plebeians do not have a clan, that is, a generic life or building). Consequently, the main feature of a patriciate is his tribal system. What it consisted of, we have only late and fragmentary news about this (for example, from Cicero), from which, however, it is clear that the main sign of the tribal system in Rome, as in Greece, is the sacred connection between relatives, their belonging to a special religious cult, probably in connection with ancestor worship; this also includes the existence of a family grave on a site belonging to the family. All relatives have one common name (nomen gentilicium), which is preserved, even if the genus is divided into branches (Cornelii Rufi and Cornelii Scipiones). That a clan had patrimonial property in antiquity can be judged by later inheritance law; about the existence of general gatherings among relatives, at which measures were taken that were mandatory for all, says the news of Cicero that after the betrayal of one of the Manlies, this family forbade anyone from his relatives to be named after him. A certain and important sign of patricianism is the existence of clients in every kind, that is, obedient people bearing the same generic name; taking part in the family cult and having the right to a place in the family grave. According to one single report from Livy about Claudius, one can think that the patricians endowed clients with plots of land; there is no doubt that the patricians helped them in court, hence the later special meaning of the word client, and that, for their part, the clients, by analogy with the vassals of the Middle Ages, provided monetary assistance to the patron in certain cases determined by custom - they ransomed him from captivity and from unpaid debts. Outside of this close association of patricians with clients stood the plebeians; as a result, there was no connubium between patricians and plebeians, that is, marriages between them were not considered legal. Whether there was another kind of legal separation between them, as Niebuhr thought, is harder to say; for example, were marriages by confarreatio (the rite of communion of the bride and groom with spelt grains) a patrician form, and marriage by coemptio (the rite of an imaginary purchase) a plebeian form? Moscow professor. univ. Kryukov in the 40s (who wrote his research in German under the name "Pellegrino") even suggested a religious difference between patricians and plebeians. There was a time when the plebeians also stood outside the political organization of the patricians, that is, they were not full-fledged R. citizens. Only by the law of Licinius and Sextius, in 367 BC. e., one of the consular places was given to the plebeians. That the plebeians were at first excluded from the senate may be inferred from the formula of the address of the presiding magistrate to the senators, patres conscripti, i.e. proper patres et conscripti, or "patricians and enlisted." The plebeians did not participate in the election of the interrex either. That the plebeians were not part of the most ancient popular assembly, Niebuhr deduced from the fact that the plebeians were not assigned to the curiae (Mommsen holds a different opinion). This is confirmed by the fact that, along with the popular assembly of curiae (comitia curiata), another later appears - according to military hundreds (comitia centuriala), in which citizens were distributed on the basis of a property qualification, and then a third, purely plebeian (comitia tributa), by tribes or volosts into which the R. territory was divided.
Niebuhr also assumed that the plebeians were outside the economic organization of ancient Rome, since they were deprived of the right to use public land - ager publicus (see below). Niebuhr's theory of the origin of the plebeians is based on this complete disunity and dualism of patricians and plebeians: he saw in the patricians the indigenous inhabitants of ancient Rome, which developed on 7 hills from Sinoikism, that is, a voluntary merger of the two communities that arose there, Latin and Sabine, and in the plebeians - the fruit of the first expansion of Rome, that is, the landowners of the communities adjacent to Rome, who by force of arms joined it or voluntarily moved there. Be that as it may, the struggle of the plebeians with the patricians on political, legal and economic grounds constitutes the internal history of Rome; but since it strongly affected the history of the R. magistracy and the people's assembly, it is more convenient to consider it in connection with these issues. The critical moment of the struggle is the departure of the plebeians to the sacred mountain (mons sacer) in the vicinity of Rome, attributed to 493, with the intention of settling there; the last link in the struggle is secession, the third in a row, settled by the law of the dictator Hortensius in 287 BC. e. Its result is the political equality of the plebeians, expressed in the equation of the plebiscite with the law, that is, in the right of the plebeian popular assembly to issue decrees that have the force of a general law and are therefore binding on the patricians. Even earlier, the plebeians were granted the right to hold all magistracies, as well as priestly offices (lex Ogulvia, 302 BC), except for some that did not have political significance. In the field of civil relations, the equality of plebeians with patricians was ensured by the law of the tribune Canuleus, who established as early as 445 BC. e. connubium between both estates. The economic struggle early loses its purely estate character in Rome, due to the emergence of a plebeian aristocracy, in solidarity with the patricians. The Law of Hortensia, concluding the struggle of the plebeians against the patricians, coincides with the end of the conquest of Italy by Rome, causing a new dualism, namely, Roman citizens and allies.
This dualism at first was not associated with any discord: the allies did not seek closer rapprochement, content with the benefits that an alliance with Rome provided them; their merchants could now, under the protection of Rome, freely trade all over the world, and their soldiers could acquire land and booty in the wars of Rome. But this gradually changed. Under the autocracy of R., his power made it increasingly difficult for the allies to feel, and when, from the time of the Gracchi, the era of the distribution of land and bread, and popular amusements (panem et circenses) began in R., the right of Roman citizenship became a bait for the allies. After the attempts of the Roman tribunes (K. Gracchus and Livy Drusus) to satisfy their desire were in vain, the allies took up arms in 88. Seeing the danger, the Romans hurried, by the law of Julius, to divide the allies and give citizenship to those of them who had not yet rebelled (the Etruscans); but the Samnites and highlanders of southern Italy managed to arm themselves and in a two-year bloody war fought with Rome no longer for the right of citizenship, but for their independence. How deeply, however, the political idea of Rome - a federation of cities, under the authority of a city common to all citizens - was rooted in the minds of the Italics, is evident from the fact that the allies decided to create a new Rome in southern Italy and chose for this the town of Corfinium, renamed Italy: its the forum was to serve as a general forum, the senate - the general senate, and the consuls and praetors (according to the number of Roman ones) - the general supreme magistrates. Rome was forced to call all its forces under the banners, put at the head of their best commanders, Maria and Sulla - and still end with a concession. The Law of Plautia and Papirius granted Roman citizenship to anyone who laid down their arms within 60 days. Italics - with the exception of part of the Samnites, who continued to resist until their extermination - became part of Rome, but from the same time the fall of devastated Italy begins. The dualism between Romans and Latins or allies in Italy disappeared (with the exception of the inhabitants of Transpadanian Gaul, who received citizenship only from Julius Caesar in 49); but in the Roman state, as a result of the conquests, another dualism was already revealed. Roman Italy was surrounded by provinces, and the strife between the Romans and the provincials (Peregrines) was much deeper than between the Romans and the Latins. Nevertheless, this dualism began to gradually smooth out and went out without that terrible shock, which was the allied war. This happened because a common state power was established over the Romans and Peregrines.
The process of rapprochement took place in two ways: the emperors gave the right of citizenship to certain individuals or categories of persons (for example, Caesar gave citizenship to all doctors and teachers of sciences in Rome; by decrees of subsequent emperors, the right of citizenship was given as a privilege to encourage the construction of houses and ships, for marriages rich in children, etc. . p.), or citizenship was granted to entire cities and regions. (Fictitious) Latinism played an important role in this. When the Italian Latins merged with the Romans, the latter began to grant certain cities in Gaul the right of former Latin colonies. Latinism thus became a transitional stage to Roman citizenship; in this sense, Vespasian granted the whole of Spain Latin law. Finally, Caracalla gave all free people of the empire the right of Roman citizenship; in orbe romano qui sunt, cives romani effecti sunt. However, one should not exaggerate the political significance of this measure: when the province rose to the level of Rome, Italy turned into a province. Her privileges - freedom from land tax and from military service - disappeared; self-government of its cities was subordinated, as in the provinces, to the imperial bureaucracy. The supreme power of the Roman citizens passed to the Roman emperor, the Roman citizen from the lord of the herds to the subjects, like a provincial. In the Roman Empire, only one dualism survived, but not exclusively Roman - between master and slave.
Formation of the republic and empire
Imperial power, which completes the political development of Rome, was not a foreign element for him; it is rooted in its original organization. Polybius, who was well acquainted with the structure of Rome in the house of Scipio, defined this structure as a government mixed from the monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, meaning by this the interaction of the magistracy, the senate and the popular assembly. All three of these elements go back in Rome to the prehistoric era, when it was ruled by kings. The royal period is not directly accessible historical research, but royal power so strongly influenced Roman institutions that it can be studied in its reflection. Until later times, two offices were preserved in Rome, which were closely connected with the royal power: rex sacrificulus, who brought in the republican era those sacrifices that lay in the duties of the king, and interrex, elected by patrician senators from among them, when, due to an accidental disaster, the succession of power was interrupted and there was no official under whose chairmanship the election of new supreme magistrates could take place. In addition, the royal power was preserved in the attributes and in the very nature of the magistracy, which replaced the kings. The consuls are nothing more than the holders of royal power divided and reduced to the limits of one year: regio imperio duo sunto, says Cicero in his essay on the state (De republica). The rods and axes of the lictors who passed from the king to the consul served as the symbol of the "imperium": this is the power to order, punish and execute. It is characteristic of a people who have achieved dominion over the world that, having expelled the tsar, he retained his power not as an executive power, in the sense of the theoreticians of the 18th century, but as an administrative, governing power, limiting it to short duration and collegiality; soon the Romans began even, in case of need, to strengthen it by the temporary abolition of collegiality (dictatorship). Further history state organization Rome consists in the limitation and fragmentation of the magistracy and in the development, to its detriment, of the power of the senate and the popular assembly.
Thus, Valery Poplicola's law de provocatione dates back to the very beginning of republican history, forbidding a magistrate to flog and execute a citizen (outside of military service) in addition to provoking a convict to a popular assembly. The main changes in the position and composition of the R. magistracy occurred under the influence of the struggle of the plebeians with the patricians. Here in the first place is the emergence of the plebeian tribunate (tribuni plebis) - at first there were 2, at the end 10 - attributed by tradition to the departure of the plebeians to the sacred mountain: this there was a special plebeian magistracy, along with the patrician and in opposition to it. Estate dualism was thus introduced into the magistracy itself. The R. tribunate has played such an outstanding role in R. history and acquired such worldwide fame that its name and concept have penetrated even deeper into the ideas of civilized peoples than the consulate. In R. history, the tribunate is the most original political institution ; its historical development marks the growth and triumph of the plebs, and then the development and fall of R. democracy. The initial position of the tribunes was modest and their role was insignificant. Their duty was to intercede (auxilium ferre) for individual plebeians against the severity or injustice of the patrician magistrates, in recruitment or at trial. The means provided to them for this consisted in the right to suspend the consular order (veto), and for the exercise or protection of this right they were given not power (imperium) or material force, but only a defensive weapon - "immunity", by analogy with other sacred , that is, persons and objects consecrated to the deity (sacrosanctitas). Relying on this shield, the strongest among the Romans, the tribunes soon went over to the offensive, assuming an ever larger role for themselves. From intercessors for individual plebeians, they became leaders and guardians of the interests of the entire estate, accused and punished its enemies and passed laws useful to it; having become the head of the plebeian assemblies, they rose with them, and when the plebeians were identified with the R. people, the tribunes became the magistrates of the people. Once upon a time they sat modestly on their benches at the doors of the Senate, listening to its debates; in the end, they received the right to convene the senate and carry out their policy in it. All attempts at reform are associated with their name; the development of demagogy in Rome is also connected with it. Arising out of opposition against the "imperium", the tribunate became a footstool for the emperor, who combined the consul's imperium and the potestas of the inviolable tribune. The plebeians, however, were not satisfied with the important advantages that the tribunate brought them, and sought participation in the empire. An interesting but dark episode along the way is the decemvirate (451 BC). In Livy, the goal of the decemvirate is set to determine the consular power by precise laws, and then another goal is indicated - the compilation of written laws; Greek historians writing about Rome speak of equalizing the rights of patricians and plebeians (Dio Cassius) or granting them "common laws" (Dionysius). The historical result of the activities of the decemvirs is the drafting of the laws of the 12th table. But since under the decemvirs there were neither consuls nor tribunes, and plebeians are mentioned in the second decemvirate, Niebuhr believed that the decemvirate was established as a permanent general government institution, which should have included both patricians and plebeians, with the abolition of others estate magistrates. In any case, after the decemvirate (445), an important change took place in the direction indicated by Niebuhr: the senate was given the right to replace consuls with consulartribunes, that is, military tribunes (legion commanders) with consular power, of which there were more than 2 (3 and up to 6) and among which could be plebeians. In fact, however, the plebeians began to fall into the consular tribunes only from 400, then only until 395, and then in 379. At the same time and for the same purpose, the number of quaestors was doubled (from 2 to 4), that is military treasurers. The introduction of consular tribunes was, in addition, the reason for the creation of a new magistracy, elected every five years - censors, whose duty, separated from the consular power, was to compile lists of citizens by property (qualification) and a list of senators. Since this duty gave the censors an important moral authority, censorship, in the course of time, became the most honorary magistracy. Finally, the law of Licinius and Sextius (387-367) restored the consulate as a permanent magistracy, giving the plebeians one of the consular seats. At the same time, the judicial function was separated from the consulate, given to a special official - the praetor - and at first inaccessible to the plebeian. With the increase in the number of court cases, the number of praetors was doubled; one of them (praetor urbanus) was in charge of the affairs of the citizens, the other (peregrinus) of the affairs of the allies; with the advent of the provinces, the number of praetors began to increase until it was determined by Sulla at 10, and the number of quaestors at 20. At the same time, the plebeians were provided, like patrician (curule) aediles, with two positions of plebeian aediles. Within 30 years of acquiring the consulate, dictatorship (356), censorship (351), and finally praetorship (337) became available to the plebeians. The further development of the R. magistracy took place under the influence not of class struggle, but of the world position occupied by Rome. As the number of provinces increased, the Romans found it inconvenient to correspondingly increase the number of praetors (who had the right to a seat in the Senate) and resorted to prorogation, that is, to extending the power of consuls and praetors for a year, sending them to the provinces as proconsuls and propraetors. On provincial soil, the power of these officials became completely different. The proconsul not only takes the place of the king in the provinces in relation to the people "taxable" to Rome: he also loses the characteristic features of the R. magistracy in relation to Roman citizens. In Rome, the consul is limited by the power of a comrade; the provocation to the people and the tribune's veto turned his military "imperium" into a civil power. In the provinces, the power of the proconsul is single, unlimited and indivisible. He is in one person a military commander, a ruler, a chief judge, and in a certain sense a legislator, since he issues a praetorian edict for the provinces, that is, establishes the principles that he intends to follow in the administration of justice. Since he is entrusted with the protection of the province, and the senate is far away, he can start an offensive war without the knowledge of the senate; since, for the purpose of maintaining the army, he has been given extensive powers to collect the necessary provisions and fodder from the provincials, then in his hands is the ruin of the province or its individual cities. Extortions and gifts already permitted by law or custom (aurum coronarium - a golden wreath offered by cities) can enrich him; what about the unlawful? However, no matter how great the authority and role of the R. magistracy, the supreme power in the republican era belonged not to her, but to the Senate and the R. to the people: the formula S. P. Q. R. (Senatus populusque romanus) is a symbol of this power. Both of these institutions could not but benefit from the abolition of royal power. From the deliberative assembly under the kings, the senate becomes the ruling one; this is especially facilitated by the manner in which it was drawn up according to the law of Ovinius (the date of the publication of this law is unknown), by virtue of which the former magistrates could not be bypassed in the compilation of the list of senators by the censor. This prevented antagonism between the magistracy and the senate. The consul and praetor knew that at the end of their term they would become members of the senate. This also determined the class composition of the senate: at first a purely patrician institution, it becomes, since the plebeians acquire the right to the consulate and praetorship, the focus and body of the new aristocracy - the nobility, the nobility, descended from persons who have acquired nobility, that is, fame (nosco ), occupying a curule position. Since the offices of magistrates were elective, the senate became, in a certain sense, a representative assembly: it consisted of the highest statesmen of Rome, who owed their elevation to the vote of the popular assembly. The way in which the Senate was composed also explains its political experience, that ability to govern, which the ambassador of King Pyrrhus aptly characterized, saying that the Senate seemed to him an assembly of kings. The R. Senate was an aristocratic corporation that took in everything that was put forward to the top of political life; the political tradition of the past lived in it, supported by ancestral tradition, but constantly tested personal experience and familiarity with state practice. The legislature and the holder of supreme power was the people's assembly. The Senate conclusion (senatus consultum) never had the force of law (lex), which belonged only to the decision of the people's assembly (comitia - actually gatherings). Estate dualism influenced the organization and history of the comitia even more than it did the senate; it, as well as the conservatism of Rome, explains the significant fact that in Rome there were not one, but three popular assemblies: two purely estates and one general. The oldest of them - according to the curia - was purely patrician and, together with the patricians, lost, over time, any real meaning: it atrophied, ceased to be a meeting of citizens and turned into an institution, the presence of officials - curions, which was in charge of only tribal affairs: arrogation (transition from generation to generation), the approval of wills, etc. Until later, it retained only one, albeit formal, but politically important function - the transfer of power to the magistrate elected in the comitia, through the lex curiata de imperio. Even during civil war between Pompey and Caesar, the failure to observe this formality had important political consequences. The second popular assembly in Rome, centuriate - by military hundreds - marks the characteristic militant organization of Rome: the original identity of the people and the army. The centuriate people's assembly is nothing more than an army lined up in hundreds to answer the commander's question whether there will be war, or whether to elect such and such a commander for the next year? The place in the military system was determined by weapons, and weapons - by property. According to property, Roman citizens were divided into 5 classes, not counting the horsemen, who made up a special category of 18 hundreds. The definition that has come down to us of both the property qualification for each class and the number of hundreds in each of them, the tradition of referring to the times of Servius Tullius, to whom the very institution of the centuriate assembly is attributed, may not be with more reason than the construction of the so-called Servian wall. The definition of the qualification in money points to a later era than the time of the kings, since even in the early republican era court fines were determined by the number of heads of large or small livestock. Later, the people's assembly appeared according to the tribes of the centuriate, the exact time and reason for its occurrence are unknown to us. This is a plebeian assembly, led by tribunes, while a centuriate assembly was led by a curule (patrician) magistrate, consul or praetor. In view of the late news of tributcomitia presided over by consuls and praetors, some modern scholars have come to the unlikely assumption that, in addition to the well-known plebeian tributcomitia, there were also special tributcomitia with the participation of patricians. In the relationship of the tributary assembly to the centuriate assembly, a remarkable political dualism is manifested, which penetrated into the state structure of Rome due to the special position of the plebeians in the state system: the centuriate comitia represent the whole people, populus, the tributary - plebs. The plebs, gaining more and more importance, become a people in the political sense of the word, that is, equated with populus. This equation finds expression in the fact that the decree of the plebs, plebiscitum, is given, by the decree of the centuriate comitia, the meaning of a law binding on all citizens, ut quod tribatim plebs jussiset populum teneret (lex Valeria Horatia, 449 BC.) Principle this was confirmed by the law of Publius (339 BC) - ut plebiscita omnes Quiriles tenerent, and the law of Hortensius (284) - ut quod plebs jussisset omnes Qairites teneret. Whether these three laws are identical and why, in this case, triple legalization was needed, or whether they are different in meaning, as Niebuhr wittily explained in one of his hypotheses, we do not know. In any case, in the historical epoch, the comitia comitia tributae took their place in legislative terms along with the centuriates and differed from them only in the sphere of competence: the solution of military issues was naturally left to the assembly that had been in charge of them from time immemorial and was under the leadership of the magistrates with the “imperium”. In the judiciary, the advantage of that popular assembly, to which, according to the ancient law, the provocation was directed, was also preserved: the law of the decemvirs formally retained the right to decide the issue of life or death of a citizen for the centuriate assembly, denoting it with the expression maximus comitiatus. The electoral activity was more extensive at the centuriate assembly, but the tributcomitia elected tribunes, whose importance grew more and more. Converging in meaning, these two assemblies of the people also drew closer formally, as a result of the transformation that the centuriate committees underwent in the democratic sense, probably around 241 BC, that is, after the number of tribes reached its maximum - 35. This transformation represents a compromise between the principle of centuriate comitia, that is, the distribution of citizens according to property, and the principle of tributary comitia, that is, the distribution of citizens according to the place of residence, and the first principle makes a significant concession to the second. The identity of the military system with the political one had already disappeared by that time; consequently, the provision of 80 centuries to the first class (so that with the addition of 18 centuries of equestrians it had a majority of votes in the comitia - 98 to 95) lost its meaning in the face of the more democratic spirit of the tributcomitia. In view of this, each of the five classes was given an equal number of centuries or votes, namely 35, corresponding to the number of Roman tribes, and each centuria was also divided into two - for citizens over and under 45 years old. As for the question of the powers of the R. of the people's assemblies, Rubino, in his remarkable study (), proved that the role of the people's assembly under the tsars was insignificant. The tsar collected comitia not so much in order to get a law from them, but in order to enlist their support. After the abolition of tsarist power, the importance of the people's assembly increased: it more often had to apply its suffrage to the cause; the entrapment law made him the supreme judge of the life and death of the citizens; Finally, with the complication of political life began to develop and the legislative power of the comitia. In the latter respect, however, they were for a long time under the guardianship of the senate, which was expressed in two institutions - patrum auctoritas and senatus auctoritas. The first dates back to the time of the patrician senate and represents the right of the senate to approve, approve, the decisions of the people's assembly (however, according to Niebuhr and his school, patrum auctoritas should be understood as the consent of the patricians given by them in the curia assembly). Senatus auctoritas corresponds to the Greek expression probouleuma and denotes the right of the Senate to give its prior consent to the introduction of a bill by the magistrate into the popular assembly, and therefore to refuse this consent. When the comitia were freed from these restrictions, we do not know; on this issue, as well as on the significance of the mentioned institutions, there are many conflicting opinions in the scientific literature. In any case, the popular assembly in Rome, even when it became powerful and autocratic, retained its former forms, which made it dependent on the magistrate who convened it. It never had the right to assemble of its own accord; it had neither legislative initiative nor freedom of debate; it only answered questions put to it by the presiding magistrate (rogation); the clerical work itself was furnished with such religious formalities that easily gave rise to a decision, with the help of the priestly college, illegal. Private meetings of the people, concilia and cautiones, had a freer character, at which debates were also allowed; but even these preparatory assemblies, which did not decide anything, were convened only by the magistrate, and served for him as a means of inciting and directing the people in the direction he desired. Finally, neither the centuriate comitia, after their transformation in the democratic sense, nor even the tributary comitia were democracies in the full sense of the word, since it was not individual votes of citizens that were taken into account, but the number of centuries or tribes who spoke in one sense or another, and the voice of the elected by lot of the centuria or tribe (praerogativa) was almost always decisive. No wonder the fenced-in place on the Field of Mars, where citizens were called to vote, was called ovile (sheep pen). As a result of the worldwide growth of Rome, the decisions and decrees of the Roman comitia acquired more and more worldwide significance; but it was precisely in this era that the composition of the R.'s national assembly changed significantly and its moral and state significance decreased, under the influence of a deep shock in the economic life of R. people, in connection with its political growth.
Economy
The influence of the growth of Rome on its economic life. R. historians portrayed the first Romans as shepherds and vagabonds, but history from the very beginning knows the Romans only as settled peasants. The Roman, both patrician and plebeian, is a type of peasant, tenacious and greedy for the land: the typical hero of ancient Rome is Cincinnatus, the dictator taken from the plow. Therefore, the land question is the basis of R. history: because of the land, the Romans are at war with their neighbors, they bring more and more new settlements to the acquired land; because of the earth the forum is agitated; agrarian law is the sore spot of republican Rome, the science of the surveyor (agrimeusor) is its national science. One of the most important and other merits of Niebuhr was the elucidation of the question of ager pablicus and of agrarian laws. If the socialists of the XVIII century. (Babeuf) flaunted the name of Gracchus, because they saw in the agrarian laws of the Romans a means of combating private landed property. Only thanks to the elucidation of the concept of "public field" did the history of land relations and laws receive correct coverage. Niebuhr found the ager publicus in the region of Dithmarschen (in Holstein), where the historian spent his childhood; later studies have indicated its existence almost everywhere. Ager publicus was the Roman name for public land, as opposed to private land. R. the state used its land in a threefold way: it gave away its plots at auction for pastures, or allocated small allotments from it to citizens (originally 2 yugers - half a dozen) into private ownership (assignatio), or, finally, provided citizens to occupy separate plots (occupatio ), for perpetual use. Such loans could be inherited or sold, plantings and buildings could be made on them, but they did not enter the Kvirite property and differed from it legally by the term possessio. Thanks to allotments of public land, the colonies were withdrawn to the cities that already existed before, the number of R. citizens constantly grew, and Rome grew stronger; but landownership has been undermined in Rome since ancient times, as in Greece, by the dangerous calamity of indebtedness. The debt law of the ancient Romans, like that of other peoples, was extremely severe; the person of the debtor and often his family served as security for the creditor. We can judge the enormous significance of debt obligations in ancient Rome not with the help of historians who used it to depict dramatic scenes, but on the basis of the laws of the XII tables, the most lengthy and archaic passages of which determine the fate of an insolvent debtor. According to the verdict of the judge, the creditor takes him to his house; the law determines exactly the weight of the chain that can be put on him, the amount of food that should be given to him; sets deadlines for when it should be brought to the forum, in case relatives or clients want to buy it; finally, it gives the creditor the right to sell him into slavery, but not otherwise than across the Tiber, that is, into the country of the Etruscans, and not on Roman soil and not in the country of friendly Latins. Providing for the case of a dispute between several creditors, the law resolves it literally in the same harsh, symbolic formulas as Scandinavian law: the creditor who cuts off more or less the part following from the body of the debtor is released from liability (Si plus ve minus ve secuerit se ( sine) fraude esto). Debt obligations, however, were not always resolved by the specified reprisal, but also led to the establishment of a long-term relationship between the creditor and the debtor (like bondage). These relations are little known to us, for they were already forbidden by the Petilius law, in 326 BC. e. Debts, however, continued to weigh heavily on the Roman landowners, as is evident from the frequently mentioned measures against usurers for violating the growth laws; so on a penalty, recovered from usurers, was built by the aedile Prince. Flavius bronze temple of Concordia on the forum, with the designation of the time of construction - "204 after the consecration of the temple of Capitoline Jupiter" (the oldest known to us mention of this era). In addition to debts, R. small landownership suffered from slavery, which forced out free labor. In ancient R., the number of slaves was apparently very limited, as can be inferred from the names of slaves - Quintipar, Marcipar, that is, puer (small) of Quintus or Mark. But as the Roman soldiers began to seize the regions of the barbarians outside Italy, the slaves became cheaper and began to appear more often on the market, as a result of which the large landowners ceased to give a small neighbor work on their land. Traditional history refers the law that determined the quantitative ratio of bonded and free workers to 367 BC. e. Having multiplied in Rome, the slaves not only began to recapture the wages of the peasants from the peasants, but, entering the ranks of the citizens of the peasants through the liberation of their masters, they significantly changed the composition and character of the peasants of the people. Already in 312 BC. e. the question of the placement of freedmen in all tribes or only in 4 urban ones worries Rome. At the very time when R.'s legions are giving Rome dominion over the world, in the heart of Rome, the conquered slaves are gaining more and more influence on its fate. Nothing contributed so much to the perversion of the Roman demos as the ease of liberation and the acquisition by slaves of the right of R. citizenship. Already the destroyer of Carthage, Scipio Aemilian, considered himself entitled to contemptuously reproach the crowd at the forum with the fact that he had recently brought her to Rome in chains. But the Roman wars in an even more direct way undermined the core of the peasantry of the people—the peasantry; Assuming ever larger dimensions, moving away from Rome and becoming longer and longer, the wars tore the soldier away from his land for a long time. Livy, in one of his dramatic stories, brings the centurion Sp. Ligustin, the owner of a plot of land in one yuger, who spent 22 years in military service far from the inherited field. However, a certain balance between the decline from the war and the increase in the settled peasant population was maintained as long as the Romans were able to produce allotments in Northern Italy. When, by the middle of the 2nd century, the supply of free public land was depleted, the dispossession of Roman citizens went even faster. By this time there is a change in the agriculture of the Romans, which was fatal for small landownership. As a result of the expansion, under Roman rule, of trade relations in the Mediterranean Sea, grain began to be brought in masses to Italy not only from Sicily, but from Numidia and Egypt; this competition killed agriculture in Italy and forced landowners to open arable land and bring in cattle. We know about this change from the words of Cato, who was an excellent owner, and to the question, what is the most profitable way of farming? answered - bene pascere (good cattle breeding); and then? poor cattle breeding; and then? arable farming (arare). First of all, the peasants, who did not find income from the landowners and did not have the opportunity, due to the insignificance of the plots, to go over to cattle breeding, had to suffer. They had to sell their allotments - and in this you need to look for the source of those latifundia, which Pliny said that they ruined Italy. As the core of the R. people - the agricultural class - thins out, the commercial activity of the Romans develops. Ancient Rome knew only a bulky copper coin, and only from the time of the unification of Italy and the subjugation of the Greek trading cities in the south of the peninsula began to mint a silver coin. The development of trade led to the accumulation of capital, which resulted in a change in the meaning of the word equites. Horsemen were formerly called the most sufficient citizens who served on their own horse; in the second century, the word denotes a class of capitalists engaged in trade and farming in the provinces, in contrast to the senatorial aristocracy, which the law of Claudius 219 ad. BC e. he forbade trading in his own name and keeping ships, with the exception of only coastal ships for transporting products of his own economy to the capital.
culture
The influence of the growth of Roman dominion on the culture and public spirit of the Romans. Simultaneously with the economic upheaval in Rome, an even more important cultural and moral upheaval was taking place. The rapid growth of Rome directly and without transition brought the simplicity and rudeness of the Romans face to face with Hellenic learning and the refined luxury of the East. In the field of religion, the Romans had long been under the influence of the South Italian Greeks; now the deities of the East began to penetrate into Rome. Even before the second Punic war, the consul Aemilius Paulus had, by order of the senate, personally begin to destroy the temples of Isis and Serapis, since no one dared to break open their doors. The Senate banned, under fear death penalty , the secret cult of Bacchus, and for the violation of this prohibition, hundreds of people died at the hands of the executioner in Italy - especially many women who participated in night bacchanalia. The new pantheon relegated to the background the primitive R. gods who held ancient Roman piety. Together with east. gods and superstitions in Rome was a doctrine that equally undermined faith in both old and new gods: the work of Euhemerus, explaining the gods and heroes by flat rationalism, was one of the first books translated into Latin. At the same time, stage performances borrowed from the Greeks exposed the antics of the gods, borrowed from naive myths, to ridicule. The family life of the Romans, based on unconditional paternal authority, had undergone significant changes even earlier. Already the decemvirs found it possible to emancipate, that is, to independently place adult sons, through a fictitious sale into slavery by the father. At the same time, the woman, whom ancient law always subordinated to the guardianship (manus) of her father or husband, was given the opportunity to marry without personal and property subordination to her husband and his relatives, through the so-called trinoctium, that is, a three-day stay away from home. The liberation of a woman in property terms indicates that the time of dowry has passed for the Romans, when in a sufficient household one could find only one silver thing - a salt shaker, from which salt was sprinkled on a sacrifice to the gods. A few years later, after the conquest of Italy, one of Sulla's ancestors, Cornelius Rufinus, a former dictator and twice consul, was crossed out by the censor from the list of senators because he had silver dishes worth 10 fn. weight. An old saying condemned the hostess who bought in the market what she could get from her garden; each farm baked its own bread, there were no bakeries in the city. Only during the war with Syria, R. did the generals become acquainted, according to Livy's story, with the art of cooking; 100 years later, Lucullus has gained worldwide fame for his exquisitely sumptuous dinners. The rapid enrichment of the Romans caused luxury, and luxury developed a passion for enrichment; on this basis, two national traits of the Romans assumed monstrous proportions - lust for power and greed. Already in the second Punic war, the degate of Scipio, Pleminius, who commanded in southern Italy, so shamelessly plundered the allied cities and even their temples that the senate was forced to send a whole commission south, sending Pleminius, in chains, to Rome. The provincials could have been treated more unceremoniously: for example, the propraetor of Spain, Sulpicius Galba, attacked the peaceful Lusitan tribe by surprise, asking him for land, and sold 30,000 of them into slavery. Power gave wealth; therefore all avenues to power seemed suitable. In Rome, a special class of laws appeared - leges de ambitu - designed to restrain the ambition of candidates for the magistracy. The very history of these laws, with their increasing severity, indicates the growth of evil and the futility of the struggle against it. The most ancient of these laws are still marked by the naivety of morals; the first law forbade standing on the forum in a bleached (Candida) toga, in contrast to the usual one (hence the name of the candidate); then the law of Petilia in 358 forbids visiting the surrounding villages and towns in order to recruit votes, the law of Menia prohibits electoral clubs, the law of Bebia of 181 - agents (divisores) who distributed money between voters. But bribery is on the rise; in vain, the Aurelius law of 70 threatens a candidate who has resorted to bribery with deprivation for 5 years of the right to be elected to office. To bribe voters, there was another, indirect way: the organization of games for the people, which became more and more expensive, longer and more frequent.
- (lat. patricii, from pater father). 1. In ancient Rome, a person who belonged to the original Roman families that made up ruling class and holding public lands in their hands; ant. plebeian. 2. In the Middle Ages in German cities, a person ... ... Wikipedia
- - neglect of the ceremony; ignoring the rules of decency; liberty; excessive swagger, going beyond the boundaries of politeness, reaching arrogance; shamelessness; familiarity; obscenity; impudence. See also * Amicochism (from French ... ... Wikipedia
D. as a poetic genus Origin D. Eastern D. Antique D. Medieval D. D. Renaissance From Renaissance to Classicism Elizabethan D. Spanish D. Classical D. Bourgeois D. Ro ... Literary Encyclopedia
ANCIENT GREECE- the territory in the south of the Balkan Peninsula (see also the articles Antiquity, Greece). The history of DG covers the period from the beginning. II millennium BC at the beginning. I millennium AD Geography and ethnography Phaistos disk. 17th century BC (Archaeological Museum in Heraklion, ... ... Orthodox Encyclopedia
Europe- (Europe) Europe is a densely populated, highly urbanized part of the world named after a mythological goddess, forming together with Asia the continent of Eurasia and having an area of about 10.5 million km² (about 2% of the total Earth area) and ... Encyclopedia of the investor
State- (Country) The state is special organization society, ensuring unity and integrity, guaranteeing the rights and freedoms of citizens Origin of the state, features of the state, form state government, a form of state ... ... Encyclopedia of the investor
- (lat. Germania, from Germans, German Deutschland, literally the country of Germans, from Deutsche German and Land country) a state in Europe (with its capital in Berlin), which existed until the end of the Second World War 1939 45. I. Historical outline ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia
Democracy- (Democracy) The concept of democracy, the emergence and forms of democracy Information about the concept of democracy, the emergence and forms of democracy, the development and principles of democracy Contents The term "democracy" comes from the Greek word ... ... Encyclopedia of the investor
Kingdom of Belgium, state in the West. Europe. State in Belgium (French Belgique, Flemish Belgie) was proclaimed in 1830, named after the state formed in 27 BC. e. Rome. prov. Belgica (Gallia Belgica), which was called by the Celts, a tribe of whites. ... ... Geographic Encyclopedia
ANCIENT ROME
---------------------
On the hilly bank of the Tiber, 25 km. from its fall into
Tyrrhenian Sea, in the IX century. BC. pastu settlements arose
khov and landowners. Gradually the settlements merged
walled and became the city of Rome.
Subsequently, a legend appeared that Rome was founded
twins Romulus and Remus, fed by a she-wolf. Romans
believed this legend and led their reckoning from fictitious
date of the founding of the city.
According to this legend, the Trojan Aeneas, the son of the goddess Aphrodite and
mortal Anchises, survived the destruction of Troy. Together with sy-
Mr. Askaniy Aeneas fled and after long wanderings came
was to the shores of Latium (hilly plain along the lower
Tiber). At that time, Latinus, the king of the local tribe, ruled there. He
friendly accepted Aeneas and married his daughter Lavi-
niyu. After the death of Aeneas, Ascanius founded new town ALBU
LONG and began to reign there. According to another version of the legend,
Askaniy (or Yul - that was his name in other versions of the legends)
was the son of Aeneas and Lavinia.
A few generations after Yul, Numi became king.
torus But he was overthrown from the throne by his younger brother Amulius. Daughter Well-
Mitor Rhea Sylvia he gave to the priestesses who took an oath
celibacy. However, Rhea gave birth to two twins from the god Mars,
for which she was condemned to death by Amulius. Gemini king
ordered to be thrown into the Tiber. But the slaves to whom it was entrusted
but, they left the basket with the twins in a shallow place. to cry
The she-wolf came running to the twins and fed them her milk.
Soon the children were found by the royal shepherd Faustul. He brought them to
mine and gave it to his wife Larentzia to raise. Gemini
named Romulus and Remus. After all, the mystery of origin
brothers' brotherhood was revealed, they killed Amulius and restored to
the throne of his grandfather Numitor. They themselves decided to establish a new
city in the places where they were found. Romans name Roma
(Rome) produced on behalf of Romulus.
Romulus is credited with organizing the Roman community. He created
gave the Senate of 100 "fathers", established the insignia of the supreme
power, divided the people into 30 curiae, arranged a refuge for
fugitives, in order to increase the population of the city in this way.
After Romulus, the senate elects Numa Pompey as king of the Romans.
liya. He is credited with the religious structure of Rome: the creation
nie priestly colleges, calendar, etc.
The next two kings were Tullus Hostilius and Ankh Mar-
tions. According to legend, in the reign of Ancus Marcius, he crossed to Rome
poured a rich and energetic man who took the name Lucius
Tarquinia Prisca. After Ankh's death, he was elected king.
Tarquinius waged successful wars with his neighbors, increased the number
senators for another 100 people, established public games,
began to drain the swampy parts of the city.
The next king was the son of Priscus - Lucius Tarquinius Horus -
smoke. Servius Tullius became his successor.
This period of Roman history is called the period of the seven
The most ancient settlement of Rome lived in clans, which were managed
lyali elders. The genus was originally a
a united collective bound by a common origin, a common
ownership of the land, as well as the veneration of ancestors.
Over time, on the territory belonging to the clans,
there were people who were not included in any of them. These were liberated
slaves or their descendants, foreigners, artisans and merchants
govtsy, people expelled for violation of tribal customs,
forcibly relocated from conquered cities. These
the settlers in Rome were called plebs. The original
leniya, who lived in childbirth, was called patric and ts and ya m and.
Returning to the question of the origin of the Roman estates
Viy, you can take as a basis his "complex theory":
Patricians and indeed were indigenous civilians
tribute. They were a full-fledged "Roman na-
Clients were in direct contact with them,
who received from them land, livestock, enjoyed their protection
that in court, etc. For this they had to serve in the military
detachments of their patrons, to help them with money,
perform various tasks;
Plebe and stood outside the tribal organization of the patricians
ev, i.e. did not belong to the "Roman people", did not have
access to communal land and were deprived of political rights.
Patricians have become a closed group of nobility, contrary to
rising to the broad masses of the plebeians.
The Roman patrician community was a
active city-state with typical features of a "military
mocracies."
The bearer of supreme power was the tribal assembly.
It solved the most important issues in the life of the community: it announced
war, together with the Senate chose the king, was engaged in important
major court cases, etc.
The second organ of democracy was the council of elders, the senate.
(the word senatus comes from senex - old man). Its members on
were called "fathers" - patres.
According to legend, Romulus appointed the first 100 senators.
Tullus Gostilius added another 100, and Tarquinius brought them up
number up to 300.
Between the death of the old king and the election of a new
the community was ruled by senators in turn.
The first reforms of "military democracy" were carried out by Servius Tul-
liy. He divided all the free population of Rome - and the patricians
and plebeians - into 5 property categories or classes:
The first class enrolled persons who had wealth
not less than 100,000 ass (ass is a copper coin,
initially weighing 1 pound, its value for the early peri-
ode to the history of Rome has not been established);
In the second, 75,000 asses;
in the third, 50,000 asses;
In the fourth - 25.000;
In the fifth - 12.500.
Those with less wealth were "below class"
and were called "proletarians" - proletarii - from the word proles
(offspring), i.e. people who had only children.
The property status also determined the place of soldiers in
formation of the legion. The richest citizens of the 1st class served in
cavalry and were called in the s and d n and k a m i. Other members
of this class were to have full heavy weapons
infantryman and stand in the front ranks of the legion.
Citizens of other classes had light weapons,
took a seat in the back rows. Warriors of the Y class were in
the system is lightly armed, and the proletarians in the ranks are not at all
Servius Tullius allowed the plebeians into the army, endowing them
certain political rights through the organization of
howling form of the people's assembly. Both estates took part in it.
wiya. It was called centuria t n y m o r and -
Centuria (hundred), being a military tactical unit,
the most important functions of the old assemblies have been eliminated - the declaration of war,
election of officials, court, etc.
At that time, these reforms were progressive
noah form of management.
The fall of military democracy in Rome, as evidenced
data of scientists, occurred at the end of YI - beginning of Y centuries. BC.
in the form of the violent overthrow of the last king and the transfer
chi his powers to two elected officials. They could
get out only from the patricians and were called k on s u l a -
m i. Thus the transition to the Republic was made.
After the fall of the tsarist government and the formation of the republic
both classes - patricians and plebeians - found themselves face to face.
For more than two centuries there has been a fierce
fight between them. In general, the debate revolved around three questions:
equalization in political rights, debt bondage and
access to public land. The Plebeians succeeded in
the first decades of the ninth century BC. achieve significant
wars in the form of an independent organization of the plebeian
tires. By the middle of this century, they had achieved the second major
nogo success - writing laws. Shortly thereafter the plebeian
the poor achieved the virtual destruction of the debt
The main result of the struggle between the plebeians and patricians was
la liquidation of the oligarchic republic of the patricians as a
life of tribal relations and the creation, in principle, of democratic
of a slave-owning state, a polis. From this point
from the point of view of the struggle of the plebeians with the patricians was a revolution of pro-
against the tribal system and ended with its destruction.
The old tribal nobility of the patricians was replaced by a new one
know. In the course of the class struggle, a gradual merger took place.
nie rich part of the plebeians with the top of the patriciate.
The external history of Rome in the royal period, as well as
its inner history contains many still obscure
moments and can be restored only in general terms.
Rome continued to clash with its neighbors. The results of the external
her policies Y in. BC. were large enough. Rome
lived his main enemy in southern Etruria and significantly
greatly enlarged their territory. Thanks to the alliance with the Latin
he managed to stop the onslaught from the east. The most important -
Rome, whose territory was relatively large and continuous
noah, received a significant strategic advantage in
compared with their neighbors, whose possessions were scattered
In the struggle for Italy, which lasted about three centuries,
the former small community on the Tiber turned out to be the winner.
By the 60s of the III century. BC. all Italy of the times of the republic
faces from the Rubicon River to the Strait of Messina, entered its own
a kind of federation, headed by Rome, capable of
fight with the most powerful powers of the Mediterranean
The next period of Roman history begins with great
conquests of Rome (approximately 264-241 BC), starting from I
Puntian war and ending with the destruction of Carthage and Corinth.
From a series of wars, Rome emerged as a first-class military power.
howl, the equal of which was no longer in the Mediterranean region.
The urgency of the problems associated with the state structure of Ancient Rome is increasing today, and the topic of the essay under consideration, the systematization of knowledge and ideas about the various manifestations of human development, to a certain extent, will help to orient in modern spiritual life, its state and development trends.
The “Rome” community has now developed into a whole state, the “Roman Republic”, whose inhabitants (apart from national-tribal, property and other differences) are primarily divided into personally free and personally not free. The personally free are divided into citizens and foreigners.
The main stronghold of the nobility and the governing body of the republic was the senate. There were usually 300 senators. The right to appoint senators belonged first to the king, and then to the consuls. Under the law of Ovinius (last quarter of the 4th century), this right passed to the censors. Every five years, the censors revised the list of senators, could delete from it those who, for one reason or another, did not correspond to their appointment, and enter new ones. The Law of Ovinius established "that the censors, under oath, elect the best of all categories of magistrates to the senate." We are talking about former magistrates up to and including quaestors.
Senators were distributed by rank. In the first place were the so-called "curule senators", that is, former magistrates who held a curule position: former dictators, consuls, censors, praetors and curule aediles; then came the rest: former plebeian aediles, tribunes of the people and quaestors, as well as senators who had not held any magistracy in the past (there were few of them). First on the list was the most respected senator, called princeps senatus (first senator). The order of voting was determined by belonging to one or another category. The latter happened either by stepping aside, or by means of a personal questioning of each senator. All extraordinary magistrates, such as dictators, could convene and preside over the senate, and consuls, praetors, and later people's tribunes from ordinary ones.
Before the outbreak of civil wars, the senate enjoyed great authority. This is mainly due to its social composition and organization. Initially, only the heads of patrician families could enter the senate. But already very early, probably from the beginning of the Republic, plebeians began to appear in the Senate. As they conquered the higher magistracies, their number in the Senate began to increase rapidly. In the III century. the vast majority of senators belonged to the nobility, that is, to the ruling caste of Roman society. This created the cohesion of the Senate, the absence of internal struggle in it, the unity of its program and tactics, provided it with the support of the most influential part of society. There was a close unity between the senate and the magistrates, since every former magistrate ended up in the senate, and the new officers were actually chosen from the same senators. Therefore, it was unprofitable for magistrates to quarrel with the senate. Magistrates came and went, as a rule, on an annual basis, while the senate was a permanent body, the composition of which basically remained unchanged (massive replenishment of the senate with new members was a very rare occurrence). This gave him continuity of tradition and great administrative experience.
The range of affairs directed by the Senate was very wide. Until 339, as mentioned above, he had the right to approve the decisions of the people's assembly. After that year, all that was required was prior approval by the Senate of bills submitted to the comitia. Under the Law of Menia, the same procedure was established in relation to the candidacies of officials.
The Senate, in the event of a difficult external or internal state of the state, declared a state of emergency, that is, a state of siege. This was done most often through the appointment of a dictator. From the 2nd century practice includes other forms of imposing a state of siege. One of them was that the senate passed a resolution: "Let the consuls watch that the republic does not suffer any damage." By this formula the consuls (or other officials) were given extraordinary powers, similar to those of a dictator. Another way to concentrate executive power was to elect one consul. This method, however, very rarely, was used in the 1st century.
The Senate was in charge of military affairs. He determined the time and number of recruitment into the army, as well as the composition of the contingents: citizens, allies, and so on. The Senate passed a resolution on the dissolution of the troops, under its control, the distribution of individual military formations or fronts between military leaders took place. The Senate set the budget for each military leader, assigned triumphs and other honors to victorious commanders.
All foreign policy was concentrated in the hands of the Senate. The right to declare war, conclude peace and treaties of alliance belonged to the people, but the Senate carried out all the preparatory work for this. He sent embassies to other countries, received foreign ambassadors, and generally was in charge of all diplomatic acts.
The Senate managed finances and state property: drew up a budget (usually for 5 years), established the nature and amount of taxes, controlled the payoffs, supervised the minting of coins, and so on.
The Senate had supreme oversight of the cult. He instituted festivals, instituted thanksgiving and purifying sacrifices, in the most serious cases interpreted the signs of the gods, controlled foreign cults and, if necessary, forbade them.
The members of all permanent judicial commissions until the time of the Gracchi consisted of senators. It was not until 123 that Gaius Gracchus handed over the courts to the horsemen (this name then meant wealthy merchants and usurers).
In the event that the posts of the highest magistrates, who had the right to preside over the popular assembly to select consuls, were vacant or these magistrates could not arrive at the time of the elections in Rome, the senate declared an "interregnum". This term has been preserved since the tsarist era. One of the senators was appointed "inter-tsar" to preside over the consular electoral committees. He performed his position for five days, after which he appointed his successor and transferred his powers to him. He appointed the next, and so on, until consuls were elected in the centuriate comitia.
Thus, the Senate was the highest administrative body of the republic, and at the same time it had supreme control over the entire life of the state.
Both large estate classes of the previous period, patricians and plebeians, continued to exist even now, and their mutual struggle for political rights was the most characteristic phenomenon in the life of the Roman community of the period of the Republic. Already under Servius Tullius, according to legend, the plebeians, initially disenfranchised, received some rights, such as the right to land ownership, the right to legal marriage and commerce among themselves, a limited right to litigation, the right to vote and serve military service. Thus, they became citizens without rights, and the desire for full legal equality with the patricians, especially in the right to occupy the highest government positions, led to an intensification of their struggle with the patricians, to complete equalization of rights. According to the laws of Lucius Sextius (366 BC), the plebeians gained access to the highest secular, and according to the law of Ogulna (300 BC) to the highest spiritual positions, in addition to the previously received right to legal marriage with patricians. Thanks to the expansion of the state, the size of the plebs also increased significantly.
Thus, both estates merged into one concept of the "Roman people". However, the exercise of the right to occupy the highest public office, due to the costly pre-election campaign and the lack of remuneration for the office, was available only to wealthy citizens. As a result, from the patricians and wealthy plebeians, a bureaucratic, serving nobility (nobiles) was gradually formed, standing in contrast to the less prosperous plebs.
The administration of the Roman community during the Republican period was based on the will of the people. Therefore, all the most important issues of governance were decided on the basis of one or another expression of the will of the community, "the people of Rome." He owned:
legislative power - the right to issue laws;
judicial power - the right to prosecute;
electoral power - the right to elect magistrates;
decisive power - in matters of peace and war.
The decisions of the people under points a) and d), as having the force of law, were called "laws of the people" or "people's commands." The people themselves, as the bearer of supreme power, were invested with a certain greatness, and crimes against the community were considered insulting to the greatness of the Roman people. The fasces of the magistrates present in the assembly bowed before the people's assembly, as a symbol of their admiration for the "greatness of the people."
The people exercised their rights in popular assemblies, usually in the so-called comitia (from Latin - “converge”), that is, in meetings of full-fledged citizens convened and led by an official (for example, a consul or praetor) who had the right to do so, at which they (in their political divisions according to curiae, centuries or tribes) decided by voting the next questions proposed for decision.
All Roman citizens (who had the right to vote) had the right to participate in comitia and vote, wherever they were - in Rome, the province or the colony. In accordance with the representatives of the Roman community who participated in the meetings, the comitia were subdivided into the Curate comitium, the Centuriate comitium and the Tribute comitium.
Free meetings (not according to political divisions) or gatherings convened by a secular or ecclesiastical official should be distinguished from the comitia, where the people did not vote, but usually listened to reports and messages or discussed some important issues, especially those that were in line in the next comitia. All those present could speak at these meetings. They usually met at the Forum, and those convened by a clergyman at the Capitol.
The reason for the fall of the republic is that it was a state form that developed on the basis of a city-state and which could not provide for the interests of wide circles of slave owners within a vast empire. Under these conditions, the ruling classes saw the only means of maintaining their power in a dictatorship based on the army. There are many more reasons for the fall of the republic S.I. Kovalev believes that: “The main and most common reason was the contradiction between the political form of the republic in the 1st century. BC e. and its social class content. While this form remained old, its content has changed significantly.
The Roman Empire differed from the republic in the very organization of the ruling class. In connection with the territorial growth of the Roman Republic, the state was transformed from an organ representing the interests of the largest Roman landowners and slave owners, which was the republic, into an organ representing the interests of the ruling classes of the entire Roman state.
This involved the involvement of slave-owning circles not only in Italy, but also in the provinces, in the leadership of the state, and in the future - the equalization of Italy and the provinces.
Under Caesar and Augustus, only the foundations for the development of the Roman Empire were laid. The difference between the parts of the empire was still enormous. All disparate areas united political power and were held by his military might.
The monarchical reform of Augustus, as it were, closed the circle of development of the state system of Rome: monarchy - republic - monarchy. Just as the republican magistracy is a fragmentation of the unified power of the tsar, so the power of the emperor is again the gathering (concentration) of the republican magistracies in the person of the sovereign, in the form of a new, extraordinary magistracy.
In fact, the monarchy was restored after the Battle of Actium (31 BC), when the entire military force was concentrated in the hands of Augustus, and legally - in 27, when Octavian received from the Senate the title "Augustus" (venerable, sacred ) the supreme leadership and supervision of all affairs, the right to control the actions of other authorities, the management of some provinces and the main bosses over the entire army.
On this basis, the power of the Roman emperors gradually grew, up to Diocletian (285-305 AD), when it becomes a monarchy in the strict sense of the word. All power was concentrated in the hands of one person, and the Senate and the people no longer played any state role. The power of the emperor was lifelong, but not dynastic, hereditary: the emperor could only indicate to the state the person to whom he wished to transfer power after death, appointing him the heir to his personal property and property. Such could be a person adopted by the sovereign. The emperor could accept him as a co-emperor and pass on the title "Caesar", awarding him with various honors necessary to establish his reputation, especially in the army.
The emperor had the right to renounce power himself. As a "magistrate" he could be removed by the Senate, but, relying on the army, he did not fear this removal. In any case, the removal of emperors has always been an act of violence.
The powers of the emperor were composed of military power, which was the main pillar of his influence. It was given to him by the Senate and the army, and as the commander-in-chief of the Roman army, the emperor resembled a republican proconsul, since the military forces were in the provinces, the rulers of which were proconsuls.
As consul, censor and tribune of the people, the emperor had the opportunity to:
take an active part in legislation, leading the Senate and comitia; but along with their decisions, the personal orders of the emperor, issued on the basis of his law (edicts, decrees, mandates, constitutions, etc.), also acted;
participate in legal proceedings: draw up lists of jurors, manage processes, especially military and criminal ones, and the emperor's court was the highest authority;
participate in the election of magistrates, and the emperor checked the legal capacity of candidates, recommended his own (Caesar's candidates), which almost equaled the appointment, appointed some officials himself, especially governors in the imperial provinces;
as a censor - to draw up lists of estates, especially the Senate, thus subjecting it to his personal influence;
exercise supreme supervision and leadership in all state affairs, internal and external, manage the state economy and finances, mint coins, etc. Censorial supervision of morality was also within the competence of the emperor;
to exercise their power in the provinces, where emperors could appoint their officials to manage local communities, often to the detriment of their former autonomy.
The emperor also possessed spiritual power. As the supreme pontiff and a member of all the main priestly colleges, the emperor had supreme supervision over the cult and over the property of the spiritual colleges and temples.
In addition to the magistrates of the republican type dependent on the emperor, he appointed a number of special officials for various branches of government: to manage the provinces of the procurators, the legates of Augustus; for individual parts of the management curators, prefects. Of the latter, the following were especially important: the prefect of the city - the mayor and the city judge; the prefect of the praetorians - the head of the praetorians, a very influential dignitary after the emperor; the prefect, who was in charge of the provisions part of Rome, and others. These ranks usually received maintenance from the imperial treasury and were often appointed from senators or horsemen, sometimes (lower positions) from imperial scapegoats.
Here is how J. God characterizes the state of Rome of this time: “In the II century. the decline of Roman morality is especially noticeable; the weakening of patriotic feelings, which ceased to be a source of civic virtues, replaced by the desire for personal well-being, "bourgeois virtues" that coexisted with greed, the kingdom of money, debauchery, individualism. Lost ties with family."
The Senate continued its apparently honorable existence, legally it was even higher than the Emperor, who received his power from the Senate. However, in fact, a huge personal and military value The emperor was deprived of almost any independence by the Senate, especially since, by virtue of his censorship power, the emperor had the right to replenish the entire body of power, and as a tribune of the people, he could stop all decisions that were objectionable to him by his intercession. The Senate was still given oversight of the cult, the management of the treasury (state). However, when the state treasury merged with the imperial, this right was eliminated. The Senate also had the right to elect magistrates (where it, however, was also constrained by the candidates put forward by the emperor). He had the power of the judiciary as one of the highest courts, led by the emperor, as well as the right to manage the Senate provinces, etc. However, in fact, the decisions of the Senate were often only the approval of the will of the emperor.
The death of Rome also means the death of the great ancient culture as a whole. As T. Mommsen figuratively noted: “Historical night fell over the Greek-Latin world, and it was beyond human power to avert it, but Caesar nevertheless allowed the exhausted peoples to live out the evening of their development in tolerable conditions. And when, after a long night, a new historical day dawned and new nations rushed to new, higher goals, many of them gave a lush flower to the seed sown by Caesar, and many owe their national identity to him.
Based on the foregoing, we can conclude that throughout its existence, Ancient Rome went through development in its state development from the so-called royal period, when the king was the bearer of supreme power, it is during the royal period that the Roman community receives that characteristic appearance that so distinguishes it from other communities of the ancient world. Further, the Roman community develops into a Republic, some layers have rights, such as the right to land ownership, the right to legal marriage and commerce among themselves, a limited right to litigation, the right to vote and serve military service. The Republic is replaced by the Empire, in which the fragmented republican power is concentrated in the hands of the Emperor.
The formation of a kind of Roman statehood and culture in Italy, the creation of a world power covering the entire Mediterranean and Western Europe, and its long (about 4 centuries) existence, the birth within its boundaries of a syncretic Mediterranean ancient civilization as a prototype of the future European civilization, the emergence and spread here of a new world religion - Christianity - all this gives Ancient Rome a special place in world history.
1. Alferova I. V. Roman Antiquities: a brief essay. - Smolensk: Rusich, 2000, - 384 p.
2. Badak A. N. et al. History ancient world. Ancient Rome. - Minsk: Harvest, 2000. - 864 p.
3. Elmanova N. S. Encyclopedic Dictionary of a Young Historian. - M .: Pedagogy-Press, 1999. - 448 p.
4. Kovalev S. I. History of Rome. Publisher: Leningrad University, 1986. - 744 p.
5. Shtaerman E. M. Social foundations of the religion of Ancient Rome. – M.: Nauka, 1987. – 320 p.
Political rise of Rome
The growth of Rome takes place in three concentric circles corresponding to the three state forms.
In the internal structure of the Roman state, with the help of which a huge agglomeration of cities, regions and peoples was connected to the center, the Romans turned out to be remarkable architects who originally solved the problem of the transition from city to state. In its earliest period, the city of Rome (urbs) was also a state (civitas) - in other words, the Roman state had urban forms. If at this time the power of Rome extended over neighboring communities, then this happened either through the absorption of the community itself by Rome and the adoption of its citizens among Roman citizens, or through the destruction of a hostile city (Wei); despite the conquests, Rome remained the only city on its territory. But already very early, necessity forced the Romans to withdraw to the conquered land or even to the conquered cities, in order to strengthen their power, colonies of Roman citizens, who, constituting a military garrison there, remained citizens of Rome. As a precaution, Rome settled in the colonies at first no more than 300 citizens, so that the colony would not become dangerous for the metropolis. And since Rome at that time was a member of the Latin Union, then in the conquered areas - for example, in the territory of Wei - common colonies were also withdrawn from Roman and Latin citizens, called Latin colonies. The newly founded cities became, in turn, members of the Latin Union. B. 381 BC e. The Romans took an important measure in their consequences: having conquered the city of Tusculum, they attributed its citizens to the R. tribe, that is, they gave them the right to vote in the R. national assembly, but at the same time left Tusculum its city autonomy. The inhabitants of Tusculum thus became citizens of two cities: politically, they belonged to Rome, lived in its legions, voted in the forum, but independently managed their local city affairs, electing, for example, local magistrates.
The city, which was at the same time both in conjunction with Rome and in political subordination to it, was called municipium. Thus, Rome found a convenient formula for incorporating cities that merged with it politically, but retained their autonomy, which was so important for local interests and prosperity. The Romans did not immediately grant the rights of Roman citizenship to all municipalities: the inhabitants of the Etruscan city of Caere, alien in language and customs, they first gave only citizenship without the right to vote (cives sine suffragio) and thereby created a new category of cities; the citizens of such cities of the “Ceritan Law” were real municipes, that is, they carried duties without using their rights. According to Polybius, there were 100,000 citizens of this kind before the second Punic war, out of 173,000 full-fledged Roman citizens. Thanks to the municipalities, ager romanus, that is, "Roman land", could grow, embracing numerous, well-populated and freely governed cities, scattered throughout Italy and at the same time constituting one political body with R., since their citizens were in the tribes of the Roman people and only in the Roman forum could show their participation in R. democracy. Thus, Ager romanus, representing at the beginning of the republic a space of 98,275 hectares, by the beginning of lat. war tripled (309 thousand hectares); the dissolution of the Latin alliance and the transformation of many independent cities of the Latins into municipalities again doubled the size of the R. of the land (603 thousand); the unification of Italy, that is, the victory over the Samnites, Etruscans, Gauls of central Italy; brought the expanse of Roman land to 2,700,000 hectares; the reorganization of Italy after the victory over Hannibal added another 1,000,000 hectares; the conquest of northern Italian Gaul, colonization in it expanded the Ager romanas to 5,500,000 hectares, which is one third of the space of all of Italy (16 million hectares). Another cement that rallied R.'s power was the "treaty" (foedus), thanks to which the defeated city became R.'s ally. The formula of the agreement was different: if the agreement was concluded on the principle of equality (foedus aequum), then it provided the ally with complete autonomy. In fact, however, equality was accompanied by dependence on Rome: the allied city followed the policy of Rome, and not vice versa. The dependence was even greater when the formula majestalem populi romani comiter conservare was included in the contract, that is, the obligation to kindly observe the greatness (supremacy) of the Roman people. By means of such treaties, which assigned a special place to each of the allies, Rome connected with itself 135 free cities of Italy as allies (socii). The middle between Rome and the allies is occupied by lat. colonies (socii ac nomen lalinum - in Libya). After the termination of the lat. Union, the Romans began to withdraw colonies, whose citizens, unlike the former R. colonists, lost the right of R. citizenship and became citizens of the seven old Latin colonies, but for that they enjoyed full autonomy and retained the right to return to Rome and re-enroll in their tribe if they left a family member in the colony to process the allotment they received. With such colonies with a large number of citizens (from 3 to 6 thousand; even 20,000 colonists were brought to Venusia), Rome Latinized the southern and northern. Italy. All Latin colonies, including 7 old ones, were 35, with a space of 830,000 hectares. and with 85,000 citizens called up for military service (in 225, when only 28 colonies were withdrawn). The entire territory of the cities allied to Rome in Italy amounted to 10,500,000 hectares. - twice against the Roman; as for the military forces, the allies could put up to the aid of Rome (including the Latin colonies) almost twice as much (in 225 - 497,000, against 273,000). Thus, after the conquest of Italy by Rome, this country was a federation of cities, under the supreme dominion of one reigning city; it is a single state in terms of the cohesion of its parts and in the subordination of a single authority, but in its structure it has a municipal character, that is, it consists exclusively of cities that are not only self-governing, but also possessing a controlled territory. Upon the entry of Rome into the third concentric circle, its state. the structure had to change: Rome was no longer at war with cities, but with kings; the result of his victories was the acquisition not of allies (socii), but of subjects (dediticii or stipendiarii - taxable). Only in exceptional cases did the Romans grant freedom to cities with which they had previously been on friendly terms, by treaty; another similar category is represented by cities that were granted a privileged position (civitates liberae et immunes) not by mutual agreement, but by a decree of the senate or law. Most of the cities surrendered to the mercy of the Romans; according to the formula of surrender (deditio), they were returned the land and self-government, under the condition of various natural and monetary duties. Consequently, here, too, the city self-governing territory was an element of the state structure, under the supervision or authority of the regional Roman commander, who intervened in place of the king (for example, in Macedonia). But all this was possible until the Romans went beyond the limits of Greek and Phoenician culture, with its urban life. The position of the provinces in areas that did not know the urban culture was different. Here the Romans were the conductors of this culture, the great builders and organizers of cities, with the help of which they Romanized the barbarians. The arrangement of cities was carried out through the settlement of veterans, that is, soldiers who had served their time; other cities were formed from the camps of the Roman legions; the locals were also sometimes organized by the Romans into cities. Gaul, the Danubian regions, and especially Africa, were covered with a network of Roman colonies and municipalities; numerous inscriptions testify to this civilizing mission of the Romans, which is the best page in the history of Rome.
Patricians and plebeians
The expansion of the power of Rome, introducing more and more new elements into it, created two layers in the population - the dominant and the subservient. Such a dualism appears to us already in ancient, prehistoric Rome, manifesting itself in the antagonism between patricians and plebeians. The struggle between patricians and plebeians is a fact that dominates the history of the state structure, social life and legislation of ancient Rome, and therefore the question of their origin has always attracted the special attention of researchers. Antiquity has already given us two different answers to this question. Livy produces patricians from patres, that is, senators, and considers them to be the descendants of the first hundred senators appointed by Romulus; Dionysius, familiar from the history of Greek cities with the role of noble families, suggests the existence of such families from time immemorial in Rome. From the testimony of Livy, it can be seen that in the era of R. historiography, a clear idea of the nature of the ancient patriciate was already lost, but it was preserved to some extent among lawyers who (Gaius) found the definition: plebs gentem non habet (plebeians do not have a clan, that is, a generic life or building). Consequently, the main feature of a patriciate is his tribal system. What it consisted of, we have only late and fragmentary news about this (for example, from Cicero), from which, however, it is clear that the main sign of the tribal system in Rome, as in Greece, is the sacred connection between relatives, their belonging to a special religious cult, probably in connection with ancestor worship; this also includes the existence of a family grave on a site belonging to the family. All relatives have one common name (nomen gentilicium), which is preserved, even if the genus is divided into branches (Cornelii Rufi and Cornelii Scipiones). That a clan had patrimonial property in antiquity can be judged by later inheritance law; about the existence of general gatherings among relatives, at which measures were taken that were mandatory for all, says the news of Cicero that after the betrayal of one of the Manlies, this family forbade anyone from his relatives to be named after him. A certain and important sign of patricianism is the existence of clients in every kind, that is, obedient people bearing the same generic name; taking part in the family cult and having the right to a place in the family grave. According to one single report from Livy about Claudius, one can think that the patricians endowed clients with plots of land; there is no doubt that the patricians helped them in court, hence the later special meaning of the word client, and that, for their part, the clients, by analogy with the vassals of the Middle Ages, provided monetary assistance to the patron in certain cases determined by custom - they ransomed him from captivity and from unpaid debts. Outside of this close association of patricians with clients stood the plebeians; as a result, there was no connubium between patricians and plebeians, that is, marriages between them were not considered legal. Whether there was another kind of legal separation between them, as Niebuhr thought, is harder to say; for example, were marriages by confarreatio (the rite of communion of the bride and groom with spelt grains) a patrician form, and marriage by coemptio (the rite of an imaginary purchase) a plebeian form? Moscow professor. univ. Kryukov in the 40s (who wrote his research in German under the name "Pellegrino") even suggested a religious difference between patricians and plebeians. There was a time when the plebeians also stood outside the political organization of the patricians, that is, they were not full-fledged R. citizens. Only by the law of Licinius and Sextius, in 367 BC. e., one of the consular places was given to the plebeians. That the plebeians were at first excluded from the senate may be inferred from the formula of the address of the presiding magistrate to the senators, patres conscripti, i.e. proper patres et conscripti, or "patricians and enlisted." The plebeians did not participate in the election of the interrex either. That the plebeians were not part of the most ancient popular assembly, Niebuhr deduced from the fact that the plebeians were not assigned to the curiae (Mommsen holds a different opinion). This is confirmed by the fact that, along with the popular assembly of curiae (comitia curiata), another later appears - according to military hundreds (comitia centuriala), in which citizens were distributed on the basis of a property qualification, and then a third, purely plebeian (comitia tributa), by tribes or volosts into which the R. territory was divided.
Niebuhr also assumed that the plebeians were outside the economic organization of ancient Rome, since they were deprived of the right to use public land - ager publicus (see below). Niebuhr's theory of the origin of the plebeians is based on this complete disunity and dualism of patricians and plebeians: he saw in the patricians the indigenous inhabitants of ancient Rome, which developed on 7 hills from Sinoikism, that is, a voluntary merger of the two communities that arose there, Latin and Sabine, and in the plebeians - the fruit of the first expansion of Rome, that is, the landowners of the communities adjacent to Rome, who by force of arms joined it or voluntarily moved there. Be that as it may, the struggle of the plebeians with the patricians on political, legal and economic grounds constitutes the internal history of Rome; but since it strongly affected the history of the R. magistracy and the people's assembly, it is more convenient to consider it in connection with these issues. The critical moment of the struggle is the departure of the plebeians to the sacred mountain (mons sacer) in the vicinity of Rome, attributed to 493, with the intention of settling there; the last link in the struggle is secession, the third in a row, settled by the law of the dictator Hortensius in 287 BC. e. Its result is the political equality of the plebeians, expressed in the equation of the plebiscite with the law, that is, in the right of the plebeian popular assembly to issue decrees that have the force of a general law and are therefore binding on the patricians. Even earlier, the plebeians were granted the right to hold all magistracies, as well as priestly offices (lex Ogulvia, 302 BC), except for some that did not have political significance. In the field of civil relations, the equality of plebeians with patricians was ensured by the law of the tribune Canuleus, who established as early as 445 BC. e. connubium between both estates. The economic struggle early loses its purely estate character in Rome, due to the emergence of a plebeian aristocracy, in solidarity with the patricians. The Law of Hortensia, concluding the struggle of the plebeians against the patricians, coincides with the end of the conquest of Italy by Rome, causing a new dualism, namely, Roman citizens and allies.
This dualism at first was not associated with any discord: the allies did not seek closer rapprochement, content with the benefits that an alliance with Rome provided them; their merchants could now, under the protection of Rome, freely trade all over the world, and their soldiers could acquire land and booty in the wars of Rome. But this gradually changed. Under the autocracy of R., his power made it increasingly difficult for the allies to feel, and when, from the time of the Gracchi, the era of the distribution of land and bread, and popular amusements (panem et circenses) began in R., the right of Roman citizenship became a bait for the allies. After the attempts of the Roman tribunes (K. Gracchus and Livy Drusus) to satisfy their desire were in vain, the allies took up arms in 88. Seeing the danger, the Romans hurried, by the law of Julius, to divide the allies and give citizenship to those of them who had not yet rebelled (the Etruscans); but the Samnites and highlanders of southern Italy managed to arm themselves and in a two-year bloody war fought with Rome no longer for the right of citizenship, but for their independence. How deeply, however, the political idea of Rome - a federation of cities, under the authority of a city common to all citizens - was rooted in the minds of the Italics, is evident from the fact that the allies decided to create a new Rome in southern Italy and chose for this the town of Corfinium, renamed Italy: its the forum was to serve as a general forum, the senate - the general senate, and the consuls and praetors (according to the number of Roman ones) - the general supreme magistrates. Rome was forced to call all its forces under the banners, put at the head of their best commanders, Maria and Sulla - and still end with a concession. The Law of Plautia and Papirius granted Roman citizenship to anyone who laid down their arms within 60 days. Italics - with the exception of part of the Samnites, who continued to resist until their extermination - became part of Rome, but from the same time the fall of devastated Italy begins. The dualism between Romans and Latins or allies in Italy disappeared (with the exception of the inhabitants of Transpadanian Gaul, who received citizenship only from Julius Caesar in 49); but in the Roman state, as a result of the conquests, another dualism was already revealed. Roman Italy was surrounded by provinces, and the strife between the Romans and the provincials (Peregrines) was much deeper than between the Romans and the Latins. Nevertheless, this dualism began to gradually smooth out and went out without that terrible shock, which was the allied war. This happened because a common state power was established over the Romans and Peregrines.
The process of rapprochement took place in two ways: the emperors gave the right of citizenship to certain individuals or categories of persons (for example, Caesar gave citizenship to all doctors and teachers of sciences in Rome; by decrees of subsequent emperors, the right of citizenship was given as a privilege to encourage the construction of houses and ships, for marriages rich in children, etc. . p.), or citizenship was granted to entire cities and regions. (Fictitious) Latinism played an important role in this. When the Italian Latins merged with the Romans, the latter began to grant certain cities in Gaul the right of former Latin colonies. Latinism thus became a transitional stage to Roman citizenship; in this sense, Vespasian granted the whole of Spain Latin law. Finally, Caracalla gave all free people of the empire the right of Roman citizenship; in orbe romano qui sunt, cives romani effecti sunt. However, one should not exaggerate the political significance of this measure: when the province rose to the level of Rome, Italy turned into a province. Her privileges - freedom from land tax and from military service - disappeared; self-government of its cities was subordinated, as in the provinces, to the imperial bureaucracy. The supreme power of the Roman citizens passed to the Roman emperor, the Roman citizen from the lord of the herds to the subjects, like a provincial. In the Roman Empire, only one dualism survived, but not exclusively Roman - between master and slave.
Formation of the republic and empire
Imperial power, which completes the political development of Rome, was not a foreign element for him; it is rooted in its original organization. Polybius, who was well acquainted with the structure of Rome in the house of Scipio, defined this structure as a government mixed from the monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, meaning by this the interaction of the magistracy, the senate and the popular assembly. All three of these elements go back in Rome to the prehistoric era, when it was ruled by kings. The royal period is inaccessible to direct historical research, but royal power so strongly influenced Roman institutions that it can be studied in its reflection. Until later times, two offices were preserved in Rome, which were closely connected with the royal power: rex sacrificulus, who brought in the republican era those sacrifices that lay in the duties of the king, and interrex, elected by patrician senators from among them, when, due to an accidental disaster, the succession of power was interrupted and there was no official under whose chairmanship the election of new supreme magistrates could take place. In addition, the royal power was preserved in the attributes and in the very nature of the magistracy, which replaced the kings. The consuls are nothing more than the holders of royal power divided and reduced to the limits of one year: regio imperio duo sunto, says Cicero in his essay on the state (De republica). The rods and axes of the lictors who passed from the king to the consul served as the symbol of the "imperium": this is the power to order, punish and execute. It is characteristic of a people who have achieved dominion over the world that, having expelled the tsar, he retained his power not as an executive power, in the sense of the theoreticians of the 18th century, but as an administrative, governing power, limiting it to short duration and collegiality; soon the Romans began even, in case of need, to strengthen it by the temporary abolition of collegiality (dictatorship). The further history of the state organization of Rome consists in the limitation and fragmentation of the magistracy and in the development, to its detriment, of the power of the senate and the popular assembly.
Thus, Valery Poplicola's law de provocatione dates back to the very beginning of republican history, forbidding a magistrate to flog and execute a citizen (outside of military service) in addition to provoking a convict to a popular assembly. The main changes in the position and composition of the R. magistracy occurred under the influence of the struggle of the plebeians with the patricians. Here in the first place is the emergence of the plebeian tribunate (tribuni plebis) - at first there were 2, at the end 10 - attributed by tradition to the departure of the plebeians to the sacred mountain: this there was a special plebeian magistracy, along with the patrician and in opposition to it. Estate dualism was thus introduced into the magistracy itself. The R. tribunate has played such an outstanding role in R. history and acquired such worldwide fame that its name and concept have penetrated even deeper into the ideas of civilized peoples than the consulate. In R. history, the tribunate is the most original political institution; its historical development marks the growth and triumph of the plebs, and then the development and fall of R. democracy. The initial position of the tribunes was modest and their role was insignificant. Their duty was to intercede (auxilium ferre) for individual plebeians against the severity or injustice of the patrician magistrates, in recruitment or at trial. The means provided to them for this consisted in the right to suspend the consular order (veto), and for the exercise or protection of this right they were given not power (imperium) or material force, but only a defensive weapon - "immunity", by analogy with other sacred , that is, persons and objects consecrated to the deity (sacrosanctitas). Relying on this shield, the strongest among the Romans, the tribunes soon went over to the offensive, assuming an ever larger role for themselves. From intercessors for individual plebeians, they became leaders and guardians of the interests of the entire estate, accused and punished its enemies and passed laws useful to it; having become the head of the plebeian assemblies, they rose with them, and when the plebeians were identified with the R. people, the tribunes became the magistrates of the people. Once upon a time they sat modestly on their benches at the doors of the Senate, listening to its debates; in the end, they received the right to convene the senate and carry out their policy in it. All attempts at reform are associated with their name; the development of demagogy in Rome is also connected with it. Arising out of opposition against the "imperium", the tribunate became a footstool for the emperor, who combined the consul's imperium and the potestas of the inviolable tribune. The plebeians, however, were not satisfied with the important advantages that the tribunate brought them, and sought participation in the empire. An interesting but dark episode along the way is the decemvirate (451 BC). In Livy, the goal of the decemvirate is set to determine the consular power by precise laws, and then another goal is indicated - the compilation of written laws; Greek historians writing about Rome speak of equalizing the rights of patricians and plebeians (Dio Cassius) or granting them "common laws" (Dionysius). The historical result of the activities of the decemvirs is the drafting of the laws of the 12th table. But since under the decemvirs there were neither consuls nor tribunes, and plebeians are mentioned in the second decemvirate, Niebuhr believed that the decemvirate was established as a permanent general government institution, which should have included both patricians and plebeians, with the abolition of others estate magistrates. In any case, after the decemvirate (445), an important change took place in the direction indicated by Niebuhr: the senate was given the right to replace consuls with consulartribunes, that is, military tribunes (legion commanders) with consular power, of which there were more than 2 (3 and up to 6) and among which could be plebeians. In fact, however, the plebeians began to fall into the consular tribunes only from 400, then only until 395, and then in 379. At the same time and for the same purpose, the number of quaestors was doubled (from 2 to 4), that is military treasurers. The introduction of consular tribunes was, in addition, the reason for the creation of a new magistracy, elected every five years - censors, whose duty, separated from the consular power, was to compile lists of citizens by property (qualification) and a list of senators. Since this duty gave the censors an important moral authority, censorship, in the course of time, became the most honorary magistracy. Finally, the law of Licinius and Sextius (387-367) restored the consulate as a permanent magistracy, giving the plebeians one of the consular seats. At the same time, the judicial function was separated from the consulate, given to a special official - the praetor - and at first inaccessible to the plebeian. With the increase in the number of court cases, the number of praetors was doubled; one of them (praetor urbanus) was in charge of the affairs of the citizens, the other (peregrinus) of the affairs of the allies; with the advent of the provinces, the number of praetors began to increase until it was determined by Sulla at 10, and the number of quaestors at 20. At the same time, the plebeians were provided, like patrician (curule) aediles, with two positions of plebeian aediles. Within 30 years of acquiring the consulate, dictatorship (356), censorship (351), and finally praetorship (337) became available to the plebeians. The further development of the R. magistracy took place under the influence not of class struggle, but of the world position occupied by Rome. As the number of provinces increased, the Romans found it inconvenient to correspondingly increase the number of praetors (who had the right to a seat in the Senate) and resorted to prorogation, that is, to extending the power of consuls and praetors for a year, sending them to the provinces as proconsuls and propraetors. On provincial soil, the power of these officials became completely different. The proconsul not only takes the place of the king in the provinces in relation to the people "taxable" to Rome: he also loses the characteristic features of the R. magistracy in relation to Roman citizens. In Rome, the consul is limited by the power of a comrade; the provocation to the people and the tribune's veto turned his military "imperium" into a civil power. In the provinces, the power of the proconsul is single, unlimited and indivisible. He is in one person a military commander, a ruler, a chief judge, and in a certain sense a legislator, since he issues a praetorian edict for the provinces, that is, establishes the principles that he intends to follow in the administration of justice. Since he is entrusted with the protection of the province, and the senate is far away, he can start an offensive war without the knowledge of the senate; since, for the purpose of maintaining the army, he has been given extensive powers to collect the necessary provisions and fodder from the provincials, then in his hands is the ruin of the province or its individual cities. Extortions and gifts already permitted by law or custom (aurum coronarium - a golden wreath offered by cities) can enrich him; what about the unlawful? However, no matter how great the authority and role of the R. magistracy, the supreme power in the republican era belonged not to her, but to the Senate and the R. to the people: the formula S. P. Q. R. (Senatus populusque romanus) is a symbol of this power. Both of these institutions could not but benefit from the abolition of royal power. From the deliberative assembly under the kings, the senate becomes the ruling one; this is especially facilitated by the manner in which it was drawn up according to the law of Ovinius (the date of the publication of this law is unknown), by virtue of which the former magistrates could not be bypassed in the compilation of the list of senators by the censor. This prevented antagonism between the magistracy and the senate. The consul and praetor knew that at the end of their term they would become members of the senate. This also determined the class composition of the senate: at first a purely patrician institution, it becomes, since the plebeians acquire the right to the consulate and praetorship, the focus and body of the new aristocracy - the nobility, the nobility, descended from persons who have acquired nobility, that is, fame (nosco ), occupying a curule position. Since the offices of magistrates were elective, the senate became, in a certain sense, a representative assembly: it consisted of the highest statesmen of Rome, who owed their elevation to the vote of the popular assembly. The way in which the Senate was composed also explains its political experience, that ability to govern, which the ambassador of King Pyrrhus aptly characterized, saying that the Senate seemed to him an assembly of kings. The R. Senate was an aristocratic corporation that took in everything that was put forward to the top of political life; the political tradition of the past lived in it, supported by ancestral tradition, but constantly tested by personal experience and acquaintance with state practice. The legislature and the holder of supreme power was the people's assembly. The Senate conclusion (senatus consultum) never had the force of law (lex), which belonged only to the decision of the people's assembly (comitia - actually gatherings). Estate dualism influenced the organization and history of the comitia even more than it did the senate; it, as well as the conservatism of Rome, explains the significant fact that in Rome there were not one, but three popular assemblies: two purely estates and one general. The oldest of them - according to the curia - was purely patrician and, together with the patricians, lost, over time, any real meaning: it atrophied, ceased to be a meeting of citizens and turned into an institution, the presence of officials - curions, which was in charge of only tribal affairs: arrogation (transition from generation to generation), the approval of wills, etc. Until later, it retained only one, albeit formal, but politically important function - the transfer of power to the magistrate elected in the comitia, through the lex curiata de imperio. Even during the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, the impossibility of observing this formality entailed important political consequences. The second popular assembly in Rome, centuriate - by military hundreds - marks the characteristic militant organization of Rome: the original identity of the people and the army. The centuriate people's assembly is nothing more than an army lined up in hundreds to answer the commander's question whether there will be war, or whether to elect such and such a commander for the next year? The place in the military system was determined by weapons, and weapons - by property. According to property, Roman citizens were divided into 5 classes, not counting the horsemen, who made up a special category of 18 hundreds. The definition that has come down to us of both the property qualification for each class and the number of hundreds in each of them, the tradition of referring to the times of Servius Tullius, to whom the very institution of the centuriate assembly is attributed, may not be with more reason than the construction of the so-called Servian wall. The definition of the qualification in money points to a later era than the time of the kings, since even in the early republican era court fines were determined by the number of heads of large or small livestock. Later, the people's assembly appeared according to the tribes of the centuriate, the exact time and reason for its occurrence are unknown to us. This is a plebeian assembly, led by tribunes, while a centuriate assembly was led by a curule (patrician) magistrate, consul or praetor. In view of the late news of tributcomitia presided over by consuls and praetors, some modern scholars have come to the unlikely assumption that, in addition to the well-known plebeian tributcomitia, there were also special tributcomitia with the participation of patricians. In the relationship of the tributary assembly to the centuriate assembly, a remarkable political dualism is manifested, which penetrated into the state structure of Rome due to the special position of the plebeians in the state system: the centuriate comitia represent the whole people, populus, the tributary - plebs. The plebs, gaining more and more importance, become a people in the political sense of the word, that is, equated with populus. This equation finds expression in the fact that the decree of the plebs, plebiscitum, is given, by the decree of the centuriate comitia, the meaning of a law binding on all citizens, ut quod tribatim plebs jussiset populum teneret (lex Valeria Horatia, 449 BC.) Principle this was confirmed by the law of Publius (339 BC) - ut plebiscita omnes Quiriles tenerent, and the law of Hortensius (284) - ut quod plebs jussisset omnes Qairites teneret. Whether these three laws are identical and why, in this case, triple legalization was needed, or whether they are different in meaning, as Niebuhr wittily explained in one of his hypotheses, we do not know. In any case, in the historical epoch, the comitia comitia tributae took their place in legislative terms along with the centuriates and differed from them only in the sphere of competence: the solution of military issues was naturally left to the assembly that had been in charge of them from time immemorial and was under the leadership of the magistrates with the “imperium”. In the judiciary, the advantage of that popular assembly, to which, according to the ancient law, the provocation was directed, was also preserved: the law of the decemvirs formally retained the right to decide the issue of life or death of a citizen for the centuriate assembly, denoting it with the expression maximus comitiatus. The electoral activity was more extensive at the centuriate assembly, but the tributcomitia elected tribunes, whose importance grew more and more. Converging in meaning, these two assemblies of the people also drew closer formally, as a result of the transformation that the centuriate committees underwent in the democratic sense, probably around 241 BC, that is, after the number of tribes reached its maximum - 35. This transformation represents a compromise between the principle of centuriate comitia, that is, the distribution of citizens according to property, and the principle of tributary comitia, that is, the distribution of citizens according to the place of residence, and the first principle makes a significant concession to the second. The identity of the military system with the political one had already disappeared by that time; consequently, the provision of 80 centuries to the first class (so that with the addition of 18 centuries of equestrians it had a majority of votes in the comitia - 98 to 95) lost its meaning in the face of the more democratic spirit of the tributcomitia. In view of this, each of the five classes was given an equal number of centuries or votes, namely 35, corresponding to the number of Roman tribes, and each centuria was also divided into two - for citizens over and under 45 years old. As for the question of the powers of the R. of the people's assemblies, Rubino, in his remarkable study (), proved that the role of the people's assembly under the tsars was insignificant. The tsar collected comitia not so much in order to get a law from them, but in order to enlist their support. After the abolition of tsarist power, the importance of the people's assembly increased: it more often had to apply its suffrage to the cause; the entrapment law made him the supreme judge of the life and death of the citizens; Finally, with the complication of political life began to develop and the legislative power of the comitia. In the latter respect, however, they were for a long time under the guardianship of the senate, which was expressed in two institutions - patrum auctoritas and senatus auctoritas. The first dates back to the time of the patrician senate and represents the right of the senate to approve, approve, the decisions of the people's assembly (however, according to Niebuhr and his school, patrum auctoritas should be understood as the consent of the patricians given by them in the curia assembly). Senatus auctoritas corresponds to the Greek expression probouleuma and denotes the right of the Senate to give its prior consent to the introduction of a bill by the magistrate into the popular assembly, and therefore to refuse this consent. When the comitia were freed from these restrictions, we do not know; on this issue, as well as on the significance of the mentioned institutions, there are many conflicting opinions in the scientific literature. In any case, the popular assembly in Rome, even when it became powerful and autocratic, retained its former forms, which made it dependent on the magistrate who convened it. It never had the right to assemble of its own accord; it had neither legislative initiative nor freedom of debate; it only answered questions put to it by the presiding magistrate (rogation); the clerical work itself was furnished with such religious formalities that easily gave rise to a decision, with the help of the priestly college, illegal. Private meetings of the people, concilia and cautiones, had a freer character, at which debates were also allowed; but even these preparatory assemblies, which did not decide anything, were convened only by the magistrate, and served for him as a means of inciting and directing the people in the direction he desired. Finally, neither the centuriate comitia, after their transformation in the democratic sense, nor even the tributary comitia were democracies in the full sense of the word, since it was not individual votes of citizens that were taken into account, but the number of centuries or tribes who spoke in one sense or another, and the voice of the elected by lot of the centuria or tribe (praerogativa) was almost always decisive. No wonder the fenced-in place on the Field of Mars, where citizens were called to vote, was called ovile (sheep pen). As a result of the worldwide growth of Rome, the decisions and decrees of the Roman comitia acquired more and more worldwide significance; but it was precisely in this era that the composition of the national assembly of the republic changed significantly and its moral and state significance decreased, under the influence of a deep shock in the economic life of the republic of the people, in connection with its political growth.
Economy
The influence of the growth of Rome on its economic life. R. historians portrayed the first Romans as shepherds and vagabonds, but history from the very beginning knows the Romans only as settled peasants. The Roman, both patrician and plebeian, is a type of peasant, tenacious and greedy for the land: the typical hero of ancient Rome is Cincinnatus, the dictator taken from the plow. Therefore, the land question is the basis of R. history: because of the land, the Romans are at war with their neighbors, they bring more and more new settlements to the acquired land; because of the earth the forum is agitated; agrarian law is the sore spot of republican Rome, the science of the surveyor (agrimeusor) is its national science. One of the most important and other merits of Niebuhr was the elucidation of the question of ager pablicus and of agrarian laws. If the socialists of the XVIII century. (Babeuf) flaunted the name of Gracchus, because they saw in the agrarian laws of the Romans a means of combating private landed property. Only thanks to the elucidation of the concept of "public field" did the history of land relations and laws receive correct coverage. Niebuhr found the ager publicus in the region of Dithmarschen (in Holstein), where the historian spent his childhood; later studies have indicated its existence almost everywhere. Ager publicus was the Roman name for public land, as opposed to private land. R. the state used its land in a threefold way: it gave away its plots at auction for pastures, or allocated small allotments from it to citizens (originally 2 yugers - half a dozen) into private ownership (assignatio), or, finally, provided citizens to occupy separate plots (occupatio ), for perpetual use. Such loans could be inherited or sold, plantings and buildings could be made on them, but they did not enter the Kvirite property and differed from it legally by the term possessio. Thanks to allotments of public land, the colonies were withdrawn to the cities that already existed before, the number of R. citizens constantly grew, and Rome grew stronger; but landownership has been undermined in Rome since ancient times, as in Greece, by the dangerous calamity of indebtedness. The debt law of the ancient Romans, like that of other peoples, was extremely severe; the person of the debtor and often his family served as security for the creditor. We can judge the enormous significance of debt obligations in ancient Rome not with the help of historians who used it to depict dramatic scenes, but on the basis of the laws of the XII tables, the most lengthy and archaic passages of which determine the fate of an insolvent debtor. According to the verdict of the judge, the creditor takes him to his house; the law determines exactly the weight of the chain that can be put on him, the amount of food that should be given to him; sets deadlines for when it should be brought to the forum, in case relatives or clients want to buy it; finally, it gives the creditor the right to sell him into slavery, but not otherwise than across the Tiber, that is, into the country of the Etruscans, and not on Roman soil and not in the country of friendly Latins. Providing for the case of a dispute between several creditors, the law resolves it literally in the same harsh, symbolic formulas as Scandinavian law: the creditor who cuts off more or less the part following from the body of the debtor is released from liability (Si plus ve minus ve secuerit se ( sine) fraude esto). Debt obligations, however, were not always resolved by the specified reprisal, but also led to the establishment of a long-term relationship between the creditor and the debtor (like bondage). These relations are little known to us, for they were already forbidden by the Petilius law, in 326 BC. e. Debts, however, continued to weigh heavily on the Roman landowners, as is evident from the frequently mentioned measures against usurers for violating the growth laws; so on a penalty, recovered from usurers, was built by the aedile Prince. Flavius bronze temple of Concordia on the forum, with the designation of the time of construction - "204 after the consecration of the temple of Capitoline Jupiter" (the oldest known to us mention of this era). In addition to debts, R. small landownership suffered from slavery, which forced out free labor. In ancient R., the number of slaves was apparently very limited, as can be inferred from the names of slaves - Quintipar, Marcipar, that is, puer (small) of Quintus or Mark. But as the Roman soldiers began to seize the regions of the barbarians outside Italy, the slaves became cheaper and began to appear more often on the market, as a result of which the large landowners ceased to give a small neighbor work on their land. Traditional history refers the law that determined the quantitative ratio of bonded and free workers to 367 BC. e. Having multiplied in Rome, the slaves not only began to recapture the wages of the peasants from the peasants, but, entering the ranks of the citizens of the peasants through the liberation of their masters, they significantly changed the composition and character of the peasants of the people. Already in 312 BC. e. the question of the placement of freedmen in all tribes or only in 4 urban ones worries Rome. At the very time when R.'s legions are giving Rome dominion over the world, in the heart of Rome, the conquered slaves are gaining more and more influence on its fate. Nothing contributed so much to the perversion of the Roman demos as the ease of liberation and the acquisition by slaves of the right of R. citizenship. Already the destroyer of Carthage, Scipio Aemilian, considered himself entitled to contemptuously reproach the crowd at the forum with the fact that he had recently brought her to Rome in chains. But the Roman wars in an even more direct way undermined the core of the peasantry of the people—the peasantry; Assuming ever larger dimensions, moving away from Rome and becoming longer and longer, the wars tore the soldier away from his land for a long time. Livy, in one of his dramatic stories, brings the centurion Sp. Ligustin, the owner of a plot of land in one yuger, who spent 22 years in military service far from the inherited field. However, a certain balance between the decline from the war and the increase in the settled peasant population was maintained as long as the Romans were able to produce allotments in Northern Italy. When, by the middle of the 2nd century, the supply of free public land was depleted, the dispossession of Roman citizens went even faster. By this time there is a change in the agriculture of the Romans, which was fatal for small landownership. As a result of the expansion, under Roman rule, of trade relations in the Mediterranean Sea, grain began to be brought in masses to Italy not only from Sicily, but from Numidia and Egypt; this competition killed agriculture in Italy and forced landowners to open arable land and bring in cattle. We know about this change from the words of Cato, who was an excellent owner, and to the question, what is the most profitable way of farming? answered - bene pascere (good cattle breeding); and then? poor cattle breeding; and then? arable farming (arare). First of all, the peasants, who did not find income from the landowners and did not have the opportunity, due to the insignificance of the plots, to go over to cattle breeding, had to suffer. They had to sell their allotments - and in this you need to look for the source of those latifundia, which Pliny said that they ruined Italy. As the core of the R. people - the agricultural class - thins out, the commercial activity of the Romans develops. Ancient Rome knew only a bulky copper coin, and only from the time of the unification of Italy and the subjugation of the Greek trading cities in the south of the peninsula began to mint a silver coin. The development of trade led to the accumulation of capital, which resulted in a change in the meaning of the word equites. Horsemen were formerly called the most sufficient citizens who served on their own horse; in the second century, the word denotes a class of capitalists engaged in trade and farming in the provinces, in contrast to the senatorial aristocracy, which the law of Claudius 219 ad. BC e. he forbade trading in his own name and keeping ships, with the exception of only coastal ships for transporting products of his own economy to the capital.
culture
The influence of the growth of Roman dominion on the culture and public spirit of the Romans. Simultaneously with the economic upheaval in Rome, an even more important cultural and moral upheaval was taking place. The rapid growth of Rome directly and without transition brought the simplicity and rudeness of the Romans face to face with Hellenic learning and the refined luxury of the East. In the field of religion, the Romans had long been under the influence of the South Italian Greeks; now the deities of the East began to penetrate into Rome. Even before the second Punic war, the consul Aemilius Paulus had, by order of the senate, personally begin to destroy the temples of Isis and Serapis, since no one dared to break open their doors. The Senate banned, under pain of death, the secret cult of Bacchus, and for violating this prohibition, hundreds of people died at the hands of the executioner in Italy - especially many women who participated in night bacchanalia. The new pantheon relegated to the background the primitive R. gods who held ancient Roman piety. Together with east. gods and superstitions in Rome was a doctrine that equally undermined faith in both old and new gods: the work of Euhemerus, explaining the gods and heroes by flat rationalism, was one of the first books translated into Latin. At the same time, stage performances borrowed from the Greeks exposed the antics of the gods, borrowed from naive myths, to ridicule. The family life of the Romans, based on unconditional paternal authority, had undergone significant changes even earlier. Already the decemvirs found it possible to emancipate, that is, to independently place adult sons, through a fictitious sale into slavery by the father. At the same time, the woman, whom ancient law always subordinated to the guardianship (manus) of her father or husband, was given the opportunity to marry without personal and property subordination to her husband and his relatives, through the so-called trinoctium, that is, a three-day stay away from home. The liberation of a woman in property terms indicates that the time of dowry has passed for the Romans, when in a sufficient household one could find only one silver thing - a salt shaker, from which salt was sprinkled on a sacrifice to the gods. A few years later, after the conquest of Italy, one of Sulla's ancestors, Cornelius Rufinus, a former dictator and twice consul, was crossed out by the censor from the list of senators because he had silver dishes worth 10 fn. weight. An old saying condemned the hostess who bought in the market what she could get from her garden; each farm baked its own bread, there were no bakeries in the city. Only during the war with Syria, R. did the generals become acquainted, according to Livy's story, with the art of cooking; 100 years later, Lucullus has gained worldwide fame for his exquisitely sumptuous dinners. The rapid enrichment of the Romans caused luxury, and luxury developed a passion for enrichment; on this basis, two national traits of the Romans assumed monstrous proportions - lust for power and greed. Already in the second Punic war, the degate of Scipio, Pleminius, who commanded in southern Italy, so shamelessly plundered the allied cities and even their temples that the senate was forced to send a whole commission south, sending Pleminius, in chains, to Rome. The provincials could have been treated more unceremoniously: for example, the propraetor of Spain, Sulpicius Galba, attacked the peaceful Lusitan tribe by surprise, asking him for land, and sold 30,000 of them into slavery. Power gave wealth; therefore all avenues to power seemed suitable. In Rome, a special class of laws appeared - leges de ambitu - designed to restrain the ambition of candidates for the magistracy. The very history of these laws, with their increasing severity, indicates the growth of evil and the futility of the struggle against it. The most ancient of these laws are still marked by the naivety of morals; the first law forbade standing on the forum in a bleached (Candida) toga, in contrast to the usual one (hence the name of the candidate); then the law of Petilia in 358 forbids visiting the surrounding villages and towns in order to recruit votes, the law of Menia prohibits electoral clubs, the law of Bebia of 181 - agents (divisores) who distributed money between voters. But bribery is on the rise; in vain, the Aurelius law of 70 threatens a candidate who has resorted to bribery with deprivation for 5 years of the right to be elected to office. To bribe voters, there was another, indirect way: the organization of games for the people, which became more and more expensive, longer and more frequent.
patricians- (lat. patricii, from pater father). 1. In ancient Rome, a person who belonged to the original Roman families, who constituted the ruling class and held public lands in their hands; ant. plebeian. 2. In the Middle Ages in German cities, a person ... ... Wikipedia
impudence- - neglect of the ceremony; ignoring the rules of decency; liberty; excessive swagger, going beyond the boundaries of politeness, reaching arrogance; shamelessness; familiarity; obscenity; impudence. See also * Amicochism (from French ... ... Wikipedia
Drama- D. as a poetic genus Origin D. Eastern D. Antique D. Medieval D. Renaissance D. From Renaissance to Classicism Elizabethan D. Spanish D. Classical D. Bourgeois D. Ro ... Literary Encyclopedia
ANCIENT GREECE- the territory in the south of the Balkan Peninsula (see also the articles Antiquity, Greece). The history of DG covers the period from the beginning. II millennium BC at the beginning. I millennium AD Geography and ethnography Phaistos disk. 17th century BC (Archaeological Museum in Heraklion, ... ... Orthodox Encyclopedia
Europe- (Europe) Europe is a densely populated, highly urbanized part of the world named after a mythological goddess, forming together with Asia the continent of Eurasia and having an area of about 10.5 million km² (about 2% of the total Earth area) and ... Encyclopedia of the investor
State- (Country) The state is a special organization of society, ensuring unity and integrity, guaranteeing the rights and freedoms of citizens. The origin of the state, signs of the state, form of state government, form of state ... ... Encyclopedia of the investor
Germany- (lat. Germania, from Germans, German Deutschland, literally the country of Germans, from Deutsche German and Land country) a state in Europe (with its capital in Berlin), which existed until the end of the Second World War 1939 45. I. Historical outline ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia
Democracy- (Democracy) The concept of democracy, the emergence and forms of democracy Information about the concept of democracy, the emergence and forms of democracy, the development and principles of democracy Contents The term "democracy" comes from the Greek word ... ... Encyclopedia of the investor
Belgium- Kingdom of Belgium, state in the West. Europe. State in Belgium (French Belgique, Flemish Belgie) was proclaimed in 1830, named after the state formed in 27 BC. e. Rome. prov. Belgica (Gallia Belgica), which was called by the Celts, a tribe of whites. ... ... Geographic Encyclopedia
