individual
figure. The senator was supposed to be no worse and no better than
other senators, nor at all to differ from them. It was not necessary
and not desirable that any burgess should surpass the rest, whether by
showy silver plate and Hellenic culture, or by uncommon wisdom and
excellence. Excesses of the former kind were punished by the censor,
and for the latter the constitution gave no scope. The Rome of this
period belonged to no individual; it was necessary for all the
burgesses to be alike, that each of them might be like a king.

Appius Claudius

No doubt, even now Hellenic individual development asserted its claims
by the side of that levelling system; and the genius and force which
it exhibited bear, no less than the tendency to which it opposed
itself, the full stamp of that great age. We can name but a single man
in connection with it; but he was, as it were, the incarnation of the
idea of progress. Appius Claudius (censor 442; consul 447, 458), the
great-great-grandson of the decemvir, was a man of the old nobility
and proud of the long line of his ancestors; but yet it was he who
set aside the restriction which confined the full franchise of the
state to the freeholders,(50) and who broke up the old system of
finance.(51) From Appius Claudius date not only the Roman aqueducts
and highways, but also Roman jurisprudence, eloquence, poetry, and
grammar. The publication of a table of the -legis actiones-, speeches
committed to writing and Pythagorean sentences, and even innovations
in orthography, are attributed to him. We may not on this account call
him absolutely a democrat or include him in that opposition party
which found its champion in Manius Curius;(52) in him on the contrary
the spirit of the ancient and modern patrician kings predominated
--the spirit of the Tarquins and the Caesars, between whom he forms
a connecting link in that five hundred years' interregnum of
extraordinary deeds and ordinary men. So long as Appius Claudius took
an active part in public life, in his official conduct as well as his
general carriage he disregarded laws and customs on all hands with the
hardihood and sauciness of an Athenian; till, after having long
retired from the political stage, the blind old man, returning as it
were from the tomb at the decisive Moment, overcame king Pyrrhus in
the senate, and first formally and solemnly proclaimed the complete
sovereignty of Rome over Italy.(53) But the gi