Cicero Select Orations Author:Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge, Marcus Tullius Cicero Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ROMAN REPUBLIC.1 I CITIZENS AND CITIZENSHIP. a. The Patricians and Plebeians. 6. The Senatorial Order. c. The Equestrian Order. textit{d. The ... more »Commons. textit{e. The Libertini. /. The Municipal Towns and Colonies. a. textit{The Patricians and Plebeians. 1. Rome was a republic, but all its citizens did not enjoy the same civil rights. At first there were no class distinctions. The citizens, known as patricians, all alike had a share in the management of the state. Afterward the strangers who had flocked to Rome, or had been transferred thither from conquered cities, created a new class known as plebeians. They had no civil rights, but were oppressed and arrogantly governed by/ the patricians. 2. As the plebeians increased in numbers, wealth, and importance, they rebelled against the ruling class and demanded more civil rights. The history of the first centuries of Roman civil government is the history of the struggle between these two parties, the patricians striving to retain their ancestral powers, the plebeians slowly but surely wresting them away. The issue of the contest was that after 300 B.c. the plebeians could fill any 1 See Gow's textit{Companion to School Classics; Mommsen's textit{Ro'mitches Staatsrecht, Becker and Marquardt, textit{Romiiche Altertiimer, Vol. II. of the offices, civil or religious, and had the exclusive right to some of them. 3. Citizens possessing all the rights of citizenship were called textit{cives optima iure. Each citizen was thought of as a textit{caput or political unit. From this conception arose such terms as textit{deminutio capitis, poena capitis, etc., which refer not to capital punishment as we understand it, but to loss of citizenship and penalty involving it. After the Social War (90 B.c.) all fr...« less