Union of the plebeians.

The tribunician movement appears to have mainly originated in social rather than political discontent, and there is good reason to suppose that some of the wealthy plebeians admitted to the senate were no less opposed to that movement than the patricians. For they shared in the privileges against which the movement was mainly directed; and although in other respects they found themselves treated as inferior, it probably seemed to them by no means an appropriate time for asserting their claim to participate in the magistracies, when the exclusive financial power of the whole senate was assailed. This explains why during the first fifty years of the republic no step was taken aiming directly at the political equalization of the orders.

But this league between the patricians and wealthy plebeians by no means bore within it any security for its permanence. Beyond doubt from the very first some of the leading plebeian families had attached themselves to the movement-party, partly from a sense of what was due to the fellow-members of their order, partly in consequence of the natural bond which unites all who are treated as inferior, and partly because they perceived that concessions to the multitude were inevitable in the issue, and that, if turned to due account, they would result in the abrogation of the exclusive rights of the patriciate, and would thereby give to the plebeian aristocracy the decisive preponderance in the state.

[The views embodied in the text at pages 292 et seq., regarding the political position of Appius the Decemvir have been abandoned by Dr. Mommsen, since the preparation of his third edition, in favour of those which he has briefly in. dicated in the note at page 292, and which are fully illustrated in the subjoined disquisition read by him at the sitting of the Academy on the 4th March, 1861. I have given it almost entire.—TR.]

The patrician clan of the Claudii played a leading part in the history of Rome for some five hundred years. Our object in this inquiry is to make some contribution towards a proper estimate of its political position.

We are accustomed to regard this Claudiau gens as the very incarnation of the patriciate, and its leaders as the champions of the aristocratic party and the conservatives in opposition to the plebeians and the democrats; and this view, in fact, already pervades the works which form our authorities. In the little, indeed, which we possess belonging to the period of the republic, and particularly in the numerous writings of Cicero, there occurs no hint of the kind; for the circumstance, that Cicero in one special instance (ad Fam. iii. 7, 5), when treating of the persons of Appius and Lentulus, uses Appietas and Lentulitas—as what they were—superlative types of the Roman nobility, by no means falls under this category. It is in Livy that we first meet with the view which is now current.

Antiochus the Great

In the kingdom of Asia the diadem of the Seleucidse had been, worn since 531 by king Antiochus the Third, the great-great-grandson of the founder of the dynasty. He had, like Philip, begun to reign at nineteen years of age, and had displayed sufficient energy and enterprise, especially in his first campaigns in the East, to warrant his being without ludicrous impropriety addressed in courtly style as “the Great.” He had succeeded—more, however, through the negligence of his opponents and of the Egyptian Philopator in particular, than through any ability of his own—in restoring in some degree the integrity of the monarchy, and in reuniting with his crown, first, the eastern satrapies of Media and Parthyene, and then the separate state which Achseus had founded on this side of the Taurus in Asia Minor. A first attempt to wrest from the Egyptians the coast of Syria, the loss of which he sorely felt, had, in the year of the battle of the Trasimene Lake, met with a bloody repulse from Philopator at Eaphia; and Antiochus had taken good care not to resume the contest with Egypt, so long as a man—even though he were but an indolent one—occupied the Egyptian throne. But, after Philopator's death (549), the right moment for crushing Egypt appeared 205. to have arrived; and with that view Antiochus entered into concert with Philip, and had thrown himself upon CœleSyria while Philip attacked the cities of Asia Minor.