The Comic History of Rome

Appius Claudius was now called upon, as the surviving partner of P. Valerius, to redeem the pledge given by the latter; but Appius, with a chicanery worthy of Chancery in its best, or rather in its worst days, pleaded the death of his colleague as a bar to the suit, declaring that both consuls must be joined in it, though he knew all the while that a bill of revivor for the purpose of including the deceased consul was quite impossible. During these unhappy differences between the two orders, many of the leading plebeians were murdered at the instigation of the patricians, who, however, were rapidly cutting their own throats; for violence, while it thinned the body, added to the stoutness of heart of the popular party. The tribunes were increased in number from five to ten; and, somewhat later, a still higher point was gained for the plebeians by limiting to a couple of sheep and thirty beeves the fines to which they were liable. These exactions were, however, enforced with such rigour that the tenderest lamb was allowed no quarter if a fine had been incurred, and the smallest stake in the country – if the stake happened to be beef – was seized without remorse if the owner had become subject to a penalty.

It was many years before the Bill of Terentillus – which has been specially noted – was at length taken up, when the patricians graciously consented to a change in the laws, and offered the benefit of their services into the bargain, by taking upon themselves to determine the sort of change that was required. Hitting, by anticipation, on the modern expedient for delaying useful measures, the patricians appointed a select committee to inquire into law reform, and, by way of rendering the chances of legislation still more remote, they ordered the members to proceed to Athens, where, under the enervating influence of Attic associations, they were likely to go to sleep over the subject of their labours. The special commissioners became, no doubt, so thoroughly Greek in all their ideas, that, even the preparation of their report was deferred until the Greek Kalends.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH.

FROM THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE DECEMVIRATE TO THE TAKING OF VEII

The Romans, being at peace abroad, began to think of improving the means of quarrelling among themselves at home, and a desire for law reform became general. Three senators had been sent to Athens to collect information, but what they picked up in Greece was so thoroughly Greek to them, that they were obliged to get it translated into Latin by one Hermodorus, an Ephesian refugee, before they could understand a word of it.18 As one job naturally leads to another, it was arranged that three commissioners having been employed in cramming, the process of digesting should be entrusted to ten more, who were called the Decemviri. These were appointed from the patricians, after a struggle on the part of the plebeians to get five selected from their own order; but, with a laudable regard to public order, they withdrew their opposition. The especial object for which the Decemviri had been appointed was to frame a new code of laws, but it seems to have been always understood that the practical purpose of a commission is to delay an object, quite as much as to further it. Lest the Decemviri should proceed too rapidly with the work they had been specially chosen to do, arrangements were made for distracting their attention from it by throwing on them the whole business of Government. Had they been modern commissioners of inquiry, they would have needed no excuse for delay; but, with a stubborn resolution to get through their task, they surmounted, or avoided, the obstacles they might have been excused for stumbling at. Instead of making their administrative duties an interruption to their legislative labours, and urging the necessity for attending to both as a plea for the performance of neither, the commissioners took the sovereignty in rotation for five days at a time, and as ten rulers acting all at once would have kept nothing straight, this arrangement for obtaining the strength of unity was altogether a judicious one. At the expiration of their year of office the Decemviri had completed a system of laws, which was engraved on ten tables; – a proof of the industry of the Government of the day, for in these times it would be hopeless to expect ten tables from those who might be, at the same time, forming a cabinet.

Though the Decemviri had done enough to win the public favour, they had left enough undone to afford a pretext for the prolongation of their powers. It was suggested that though the ten tables were very good as far as they went, there was room for two more; and to give an opportunity for this small sum in addition being completed, the continuance of the decemviral form of government was agreed upon. As the time for the election approached, the most disgraceful election intrigues were practised, and in order to disqualify Appius Claudius – one of the former Decemviri – the patricians put him in the chair, or elected him president, on the day of the nomination of the candidates. Appius had for some time been acting the character of the "people's friend," and he had shown himself a consummate actor, for, being a tyrant by nature, he must have been wholly indebted to art for appearing otherwise. Having been called upon to preside, he opened the business of the day by proposing nine names of little note – including five plebeians – and then, with an air of frankness, he suggested himself as a fit and proper person to complete the number. The people – surprised and amused at the coolness of the proposition – proceeded to elect the very candid candidate, who, being joined with a number of nonentities, formed the unit to the ten of which the rest composed the cipher. Soon after their election, the new Decemviri proceeded to complete the twelve tables – and as they formed the origin of the Civil Law, embodying principles which the best jurists have been unable to improve – we will spread these tables before the student, and ask him to sit down with us for a few moments over them.

We cannot promise him any other than a dry repast, with little or nothing to whet his curiosity; and unless his appetite for information is extremely vigorous, there will be little to suit his taste on those plates of bronze or ivory – the material is immaterial, and has been variously described – on which the provisions we are about to serve up were originally carved.

The first table coincided in some respects with our County Courts Act, and furnished a cheap mode of bringing a defendant into court by a simple summons, though if he refused to walk, a mule, an appropriate type of obstinacy, was to be provided for him.

By the second table, it was justifiable to kill a thief in the night; but a person robbed in the day was to have the thief as his slave; a privilege equal to that of being allowed to take into your service, as your page, the urchin who has just picked your pocket. Such an exploit would no doubt indicate a smart lad, and, in order to make him literally smart, the Roman law, in the spirit of our Juvenile Offenders Act, ordered the knave a whipping.

The third table was in some respects an interest table; for it prohibited the taking of more than 12 per cent. on a loan; but if a debtor did not pay within thirty days, he might be bound with chains; an arrangement by which his exertions to get out of difficulty must have been grievously fettered. Having been made to enter into these unprofitable bonds for sixty days, the debtor, if his creditors were more than one, might have been divided between them; but human nature must have found it difficult, under such circumstances, to declare a dividend.

The fourth table seems hardly to have a sound leg to stand upon; for it gave a father the right of life and death over all his children, together with the privilege of selling them. To prevent a parent from pursuing a disgraceful traffic in a series of alarming sacrifices of his family stock, he was not permitted to sell the same child more than three times over, when the infant was permitted to go into the market on his own account, free of all filial duty.

The fifth table related to the estates of deceased persons; and if a freedman died without a will or a direct heir, the law provided for the distribution of his goods without providing for his family. Fallacious hopes among poor relations were checked by handing over to the patron all that remained; and thus the client may be said to have been subject to costs, even after the debt of nature had been satisfied.

In the sixth table, there is nothing worthy of remark; but the seventh guards against damage done by quadrupeds, and not only meets the old familiar case of the donkey among the chickens, but declares that any one wilfully treading on a neighbour's corn shall pay a suitable penalty.

Agriculture was protected by making it a capital offence to blast by incantation another's wheat; so that had the farmers of the day moaned over each other's ruined prospects as they have done in more recent times, performing a sort of incantation by singing the same old song of despair, they might have been liable to lose their heads in the literal as well as in the intellectual sense of which the phrase is susceptible. By the same table, a man breaking another's limb was exposed to retaliation; and a simple fracture was compensated by a simple fracture, though the parties were allowed to compound if they preferred doing so.

The eighth table was equivalent to a Building Act; and by providing a space of two feet and a half between house and house, it prevented collisions among neighbours; while the fruit dropping from one person's tree into another's garden, fell by law into the hands of the latter.

The purity of justice was provided for by the ninth table, which ordered the execution of a judge who accepted a bribe in the execution of his office. It inflicted the same penalty on a corrupt arbitrator, or – that greater traitor still – the wretch who should deliver up a Roman citizen to the enemy.

The tenth table might teach a lesson to our own enlightened age, in which it is too generally the custom to waste in hollow and costly ceremonies over the dead, much that might be made serviceable to the living. More than twenty centuries have passed since the Roman law-makers seeing how mourners might be caught by the undertakers in the traps and trappings of woe, limited to a certain sum the costs of a funeral. The outlay upon the "infernal deities," to whom sacrifices were made in those days, and to whom, therefore, we may compare the black job-masters of our own time, was also reduced to the very lowest figure. In measures of health the Romans were equally in advance of us; for we still accumulate our dead in the grave-yards of our towns, though by the laws of the twelve tables, burials within the city were prohibited.

The eleventh and twelfth tables have come down to us in such mere fragments, that it is difficult to make up an entire leaf from both of them put together. To the eleventh, is attributed the aristocratic provision against marriages between the patricians and the plebeians; but as the law could not always prevent a flame, it was at last found expedient to allow a match which was permitted five years later by the Lex Canuleia.19

Such is a brief account of the Laws of the Twelve Tables; which although cut up by the shears of time into very little bits, say much, in broken sentences, to the honour of their authors. Even as late as the days of Cicero, it was a part of a boy's education to learn these laws as a carmen necessarium– or necessary verse – though they were not necessarily in verse at all; for the better opinion is, that they were all in prose, and that they were, in fact, as free from rhyme as they were full of reason.

The Decemvirs had now completed their allotted task; but, though elected for a limited time, they seemed determined to remain in their offices after their office hours were fairly over. During the first Decemvirate the members had taken the Government alternately for twenty-four hours at a time, on the principle of every lucky dog having his day: but now the whole ten assumed, at once, the insignia of royalty. Unable to resist the fascination of the fasces, the Decemvirs were each of them preceded, when they walked abroad, by a bundle of those imposing sticks; the sight of which, at last, aroused public attention to the number of rods that might be in pickle for the backs of the people.

Murmurs at home were echoed by rumours of war abroad; the Æquians and Sabines had renewed their hostility; and the Decemvirs, who could not levy troops or money, summoned the country gentlemen from their seats out of town to their seats in the senate. Many honourable members protested strongly against the Government, but agreed to the necessary supplies; from which it seems that the practice of speaking one way and voting another is a very ancient one. The Decemvirs stuck to their places with an adhesiveness that might suggest a comparison with Roman cement, but for the fact that the adhesiveness is not uncommon in modern times, though the secret of the Roman cement has perished. Armies were despatched to meet the foe, the people having met the expenses, and Appius remained at home with one of his colleagues. The Roman forces abroad had to contend with internal as well as external enemies; for a venerable, but too garrulous soldier, one Dentatus, called also Siccius, was constantly declaring himself heartily sick of the tyranny of the Decemvirs. He had even talked of another secession of the plebs; and, to prevent him from taking himself off, a plan was formed to cut him off by a summary process. He received orders from his superior officer to go up the country, with a few others, and select a spot where a tent might be pitched, in the event of a pitched battle. His companions were assassins in disguise, who, on arriving at a lonely spot, threw off their masks, and appeared in their true features. They immediately fell upon the astonished Dentatus; who must have seen through his assailants before he died, for many were found perforated with the sword of the veteran.

While the rest of the Decemvirs were disgusting the people by their tyranny, Appius was proceeding to render himself one of those objects of contempt at which not only the Roman nose, but the nose of all humanity, was destined to turn up, and at which scorn was to point her imperishable finger-post.

A centurion, named Virginius, had an only daughter, named Virginia, whom her father, with a want of caution pardonable, perhaps, in a widower, permitted to go backwards and forwards alone through the public streets to a private day-school.20 The young lady, in all the playful innocence of sixteen, was in the habit of dancing and singing along the thoroughfare, when the smallness of her feet, and the beauty of her voice, struck the eye and ear of Appius. According to some authorities, Virginia was attended by a nurse-maid; but it is scarcely necessary to remark, that the same fatal fascination, which in military neighbourhoods attracts female attention from children that ought to be, to men that are, in arms, was no less powerful in the Via Sacra than in Rotten Row, – by the banks of the Tiber, than on the shores of the Serpentine. One morning, as Virginia was passing through the market-place, on her way to the seminary, with her tablets and school-bag – or more familiarly speaking, her slate and satchel – on her arm, a minion, under the dominion of Appius, seized an opportunity for seizing the maiden by the wrist. The nurse was either absent, or more probably talking to one of the officers on duty round the corner; for the fasces were as irresistible to the female servants of the day, as the honied words and oilskin capes of a similar class of officials at a much later period. Virginia screamed for assistance, and they only who have heard the cry of a female in distress, can imagine the shrillness of the shriek that rang through the market. Marcus – for such was the minion's name – was instantly surrounded by a circle of respectable tradesmen, who knew and desired to rescue Virginia. The smith, though he had other irons in the fire, left his bellows to deal Marcus a blow; the butcher, with uplifted cleaver, was preparing a most extensive chop; and the money-changer was just on the point of paying off the ruffian in a new kind of coin, when he declared Virginia to be his slave, and announced himself as the client of the dreaded Appius. At this formidable name, the smith's work seemed to be done, the butcher became a senseless block, and there was a sudden change in the note of the money-changer.

The officer on duty, who had arrested the attention of the nurse, being at length called away by some trifling charge, had left her at leisure to look after the more precious charge with which she had been entrusted. As those usually talk the loudest who do the least, the remonstrances of the female attendant were, no doubt, vehement in proportion to her neglect; and, indeed, the confusion created by the shrieks of the nurse was rather calculated to draw off the attention of the crowd from Virginia herself, who was carried away by Marcus, with an intimation that he should at once take the case before a magistrate. Among the other consequences of the neglect of the maid, was an attachment that had sprung up between the day-school miss and a young gentleman, named Icilius. This impetuous youth, having heard of what had happened, proceeded to the court at which the case was about to come on, and which was presided over by the tyrant Appius. Icilius prayed for an adjournment, on the ground of the absence of the young lady's father; and it was found impossible to resist the application of such an earnest solicitor. This point having been conceded, the friends of Virginia applied for her admission to bail; and there was such a general tender of securities among the throng, that Appius felt he could not calculate on his own security if he refused the request that had been made to him. The next morning the matter again came on, in the shape of a remanded case; and Virginius, who had been on duty with his regiment the day before, was now present at the hearing.

Had there been in those days the same love of the horrible that has prevailed in our own times, the startling incident of a girl killed by her own father, would have probably come down to us, through the medium of the fullest reports, amplified by "other accounts," and a long succession of "latest particulars." We must, however, on the present occasion, be satisfied with the merest summary; for the Romans, in the time of Appius, were equally destitute of relish for the details of the spilling of blood, and of "family Sunday newspapers," whose respectable proprietors are always ready to avail themselves of a sanguinary affair, with an eagerness that seems to show that they look upon blood as essential to the vitality of a journal, and involving the true theory of the circulation. It remains only to be told, that Virginius, after taking leave of his daughter, and finding her escape from the power of Appius impossible, stabbed her with a knife, snatched up from a butcher's stall, and, brandishing the weapon in the air, threatened perdition to the tyrant. Appius, at the sight of the blood-stained steel, felt his heart fluttering, as if affected by magnetic influence; and losing, for the time, his own head, he offered ten thousand pounds of copper for that of Virginius.21

It is the common characteristic of a moving spectacle to strike every one motionless; and the guards of Appius, when ordered to seize Virginius, found themselves fixed to the spot by so many stirring incidents. In vain did Appius call upon his clients and his lictors to do their duty. Among all his numerous attendants there was not a sole but shook in its shoe, while the tyrant trembled from head to foot with bootless anger. Urged at length by the commands of Appius, the officers attempted to clear the spot, when a severe scuffle ensued, and the authorities were assailed with all sorts of missiles. The market-place supplied abundance of ammunition. Ducks and geese flew in all directions. Some of the lictors found calves' heads suddenly lighting on their shoulders. Others, who were treated, or rather maltreated, with oysters, suffered severely from an incessant discharge of shells, and many received the entire contents of a Roman feast, ab ovo usque ad malum, – from the assault and battery of the egg, to the malum in se of a well-aimed apple. The stalls of the dealers in vegetables were speedily cleared of their contents; and a trembling lictor, smothered – like a rabbit – in onions, might be seen, trying to creep away unperceived, while others, who were receiving their desert in the form of fresh fruit, fled, under a smart shower of grape, from the fury of the populace. At length, the stock of the market being exhausted, the assailants had recourse to stones; and Appius, feeling that he was within a stone's throw of his life, entreated the lictors to remove him from the scene of danger. Four of the stoutest of his attendants, hoisting his curule chair on to their shoulders, made the best of their way home, where Appius at length arrived, with the apple of his eye damaged by a blow from a pear, his mouth choked with indignation and mud, his lips blue with rage and grape juice, his robe caked with confectionary, and his head, which had been made spongy with the loaves thrown at it, affected with a sort of drunken roll.22 Such is the melancholy portrait which historical truth compels us to draw of the unhappy Appius, for whom, however, no pity can be felt, even though his case and his countenance presented many very sad features. The assault in the market-place must have rendered it difficult for an artist of the day to have taken his likeness, after the carrots, whirling about his head, had settled in his hair, the rich oils having given to his Roman nose a touch of grease, and the eggs thrown by the populace, who continued to egg each other on, having lengthened his round cheeks into an oval countenance.

Having gained his palace, the wretched tyrant ran up stairs, in the hope that he might save himself by such a flight; but he was overtaken, and thrown into gaol, where he, who had hitherto been permitted to do precisely as he pleased, was allowed just rope enough to hang himself; a process, it is believed, he performed, though the subject is so knotty, that we are not prepared to disentangle it.

Virginius had returned to the camp, where the soldiers, having heard of the fall of the decemvir, proceeded to hit him, as usual, when down, renouncing the authority of Appius and his colleagues. The valour of the insurgents was, however, of a negative kind; for in times of danger they seemed to think absence of body better than presence of mind, and their policy was to secede from the city. They withdrew to the Sacred Mount, where ambassadors from the Senate were sent after them, to see if matters might not be arranged; when the popular chiefs, with a sort of one-sided liberality, in which some friends of freedom are too apt to indulge, asked an amnesty for themselves, and the immediate putting to death of the whole of the late government. The ambassadors, not liking a precedent, which might be applied to succeeding administrations, of which themselves might form a part, suggested the propriety of trying the decemvirs first, and executing them, if necessary, afterwards. It was some time before the friends of freedom and justice could bring themselves to consent to the trial preceding the punishment; but upon being assured that the decemvirs would have little chance of escape, it was at length agreed to allow them the preliminary forms of a trial.

The plebeians having got the upper hand, became almost as intolerant as the tyrants they had displaced, – a common error, unfortunately, among the professing lovers of liberty. They demanded that the Tribunes should be restored, which was well enough; that the Tribunate should be perpetual, – which was an insolent and overbearing interference with the will of any succeeding generation; and, by way of climax, they required that any one suggesting the abolition of their favourite office should be burnt as a traitor. They were no doubt fully justified in having a will of their own, but they had no authority to entail that will upon a subsequent age; and least of all had they the right to make bonfires of those who were of a different way of thinking. It is true that, at such a moment, few are willing to put their lives literally at stake, by uttering their opinions; but these arbitrary pranks, so frequently committed in the name of freedom, account sufficiently for the frequent use of the words "more free than welcome." The truth is, that when Liberty becomes a notorious public character, she seems to disappear from private life; and, indeed, how is she to be found at home, if she is occupied out of doors, knocking off the hats of those who will not give her a cheer, or breaking the windows of those who will not illuminate in her honour?