nd
clearly aware that their conflict would steadily continue--the old
burgesses and the --metoeci-- --who, like the English Whigs and
Tories in 1688, were for a moment united by the common danger which
threatened to convert the commonwealth into the arbitrary government
of a despot, and differed again as soon as the danger was over.
The old burgesses could not get rid of the monarchy without the
cooperation of the new burgesses; but the new burgesses were far from
being sufficiently strong to wrest the power out of the hands of the
former at one blow. Compromises of this sort are necessarily limited
to the smallest measure of mutual concessions obtained by tedious
bargaining; and they leave the future to decide which of the
constituent elements shall eventually preponderate, and whether they
will work harmoniously together or counteract one another. To look
therefore merely to the direct innovations, possibly to the mere
change in the duration of the supreme magistracy, is altogether to
mistake the broad import of the first Roman revolution: its indirect
effects were by far the most important, and vaster doubtless than
even its authors anticipated.

The New Community

This, in short, was the time when the Roman burgess-body in the
later sense of the term originated. The plebeians had hitherto been
--metoeci-- who were subjected to their share of taxes and burdens,
but who were nevertheless in the eye of the law really nothing but
tolerated aliens, between whose position and that of foreigners proper
it may have seemed hardly necessary to draw a definite line of
distinction. They were now enrolled in the lists as burgesses liable
to military service, and, although they were still far from being on
a footing of legal equality--although the old burgesses still remained
exclusively entitled to perform the acts of authority constitutionally
pertaining to the council of elders, and exclusively eligible to the
civil magistracies and priesthoods, nay even by preference entitled to
participate in the usufructs of burgesses, such as the joint use of
the public pasture--yet the first and most difficult step towards
complete equalization was gained from the time when the plebeians no
longer served merely in the common levy, but also voted in the common
assembly and in the common council when its opinion was asked, and the
head and back of the poorest --metoikos-- were as well protected by
the right of appeal as those of the