usal would have led to civil
warfare. A great cause of discontent on the part of the plebs was the
indebtedness of the poorer landholders, caused in great part by their
enforced absence from their lands upon military service and the burden of
the _tributum_ or property tax levied for military purposes. Their
condition was rendered the more intolerable because of the operation of
the harsh debtor laws, which permitted the creditor to seize the person of
the debtor and to sell him into slavery.

Evidence that discontent was rife at Rome may be found in the tradition of
three unsuccessful attempts to set up a tyranny, that is, to seize power
by unconstitutional means, made by Spurius Cassius (478), Spurius Maelius
(431), and Marcus Manlius (376), patricians who figure in later tradition
as popular champions.

*The tribunes of the plebs (466 B. C.), and the assembly of the tribes.*
The first success won by the plebeians was in securing protection against
unjust or oppressive acts on the part of the patrician magistrates. In
466, they forced the patricians to acquiesce in the appointment of four
tribunes of the plebs, officers who had the right to extend protection to
all who sought their aid, even against the magistrate in the exercise of
his functions.(2) The tribunes received power to make effective use of
this right from an oath taken by the plebeians that they would treat as
accursed and put to death without trial any person who disregarded the
tribune's veto or violated the sanctity of his person. The character of
the tribunate and the basis of its power reveal it as the result of a
revolutionary movement and as existing in defiance of the patricians. The
tribunes were elected in an assembly in which the voting units were
tribes, and the number of the tribunes (four) suggests that this assembly
was at first composed of the citizens of the four city regions or tribes,
and that it was the city plebs who were responsible for the establishment
of the tribunate. In this assembly we have the origin of the _comitia
tributa_ or Assembly of the Tribes.

The origin of these tribes is uncertain, but by the middle of the fifth
century the Roman state was divided into twenty or twenty-one districts,
each of which with the citizens resident therein constituted a _tribus_.
Four of these were located in the city: the remainder were rural. In the
preceding chapter we have seen how the number of the tribes was increased
with the incor