to the senate; nor was there
need for such a regulation, because the consuls themselves belonged to
the nobility. On the other hand probably from the outset the consul
was in virtue of his very position practically far less free, and
far more bound by the opinions of his order and by custom, in the
appointment of senators than the king. The rule in particular, that
the holding of the consulship should necessarily be followed by
admission to the senate for life, if, as was probably the case at
this time, the consul was not yet a member of it at the time of
his election, must have in all probability very early acquired
consuetudinary force. In like manner it seems to have become early
the custom not to fill up the senators' places immediately on their
falling vacant, but to revise and complete the roll of the senate on
occasion of the census, consequently, as a rule, every fourth year;
which also involved a not unimportant restriction on the authority
entrusted with the selection. The whole number of the senators
remained as before, and in this the -conscripti- were also included;
from which fact we are probably entitled to infer the numerical
falling off of the patriciate.(14)

Conservative Character of the Revolution

We thus see that in the Roman commonwealth, even on the conversion of
the monarchy into a republic, the old was as far as possible retained.
So far as a revolution in a state can be conservative at all, this one
was so; not one of the constituent elements of the commonwealth was
really overthrown by it. This circumstance indicates the character
of the whole movement. The expulsion of the Tarquins was not, as the
pitiful and deeply falsified accounts of it represent, the work of a
people carried away by sympathy and enthusiasm for liberty, but the
work of two great political parties already engaged in conflict, and
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 necessari