The ancient chronology for the establishment of the Republic provides the most satisfactory context for the political developments of the early fifth century, the emergence of the plebeian movement which sought to assert and defend the rights of some or all nonpatricians. The concept of the citizen community was central and found expression in a variety of forms: in the particular character assumed by social relationships between men of different status. The origin and development of plebeian rights may have been the subject of a comparatively strong oral tradition, but one continuously modified and elaborated to suit later political or historiographical preoccupations. Two fifth-century episodes occupy a key role in the assertion of plebeian prerogatives: the First Secession saw the emergence of the plebs as a political force, and the Second Secession, which secured the restoration of the tribunate with enhanced powers.

There is one reputedly fifth-century document of which numerous fragments survive and which purports to offer important contemporary evidence for Roman social and economic structures in this period. This is the Twelve Tables, the law-code assigned to circa 450 BC. The compilation of the Tables is attributed to two ten-man commissions (decemviri legibus scribundis) which replaced the consulship as the chief magistracy in 451 and 450 BC. To the limited extent that later writers concerned themselves with economic matters they saw early republican Rome as essentially a farming community. Early Rome practised settled agriculture based on a prevalence of comparatively small-scale, privately owned farms which provided the fundamental resource of the great majority of the citizen body. Hence not only does the primacy of the family unit reflect this pattern of economic activity but the entire structure of kin-group classification and the regulation of kin prerogatives show a pre-eminent concern with the transmission of property.