adjusted accordingly-with consular powers(1) and
consular duration of office should be elected by the centuries.
The proximate cause was of a military nature, as the various wars
required a greater number of generals in chief command than the
consular constitution allowed; but the change came to be of essential
importance for the conflicts of the orders, and it may be that
that military object was rather the pretext than the reason for
this arrangement. According to the ancient law every burgess or
--metoikos-- liable to service might attain the post of an officer,(2)
and in virtue of that principle the supreme magistracy, after having
been temporarily opened up to the plebeians in the decemvirate, was
now after a more comprehensive fashion rendered equally accessible to
all freeborn burgesses. The question naturally occurs, what interest
the aristocracy could have--now that it was under the necessity of
abandoning its exclusive possession of the supreme magistracy and of
yielding in the matter--in refusing to the plebeians the title, and
conceding to them the consulate under this singular form?(3) But,
in the first place, there were associated with the holding of the
supreme magistracy various honorary rights, partly personal, partly
hereditary; thus the honour of a triumph was regarded as legally
dependent on the occupancy of the supreme magistracy, and was never
given to an officer who had not administered the latter office in
person; and the descendants of a curule magistrate were at liberty to
set up the image of such an ancestor in the family hall and to exhibit
it in public on fitting occasions, while this was not allowed in the
case of other ancestors.(4) It is as easy to be explained as it is
difficult to be vindicated, that the governing aristocratic order
should have allowed the government itself to be wrested from their
hands far sooner than the honorary rights associated with it,
especially such as were hereditary; and therefore, when it was obliged
to share the former with the plebeians, it gave to the actual supreme
magistrate the legal standing not of the holder of a curule chair, but
of a simple staff-officer, whose distinction was one purely personal.
Of greater political importance, however, than the refusal of the
-ius imaginum- and of the honour of a triumph was the circumstance,
that the exclusion of the plebeians sitting in the senate from
debate necessarily ceased in respect to those of their