The Roman Republic
Across the Tiber, on a farm of about four acres — three football fields side by side — a Roman senator was digging a ditch. Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus came from one of Rome's oldest patrician families, and he worked his own land with his own hands, because a Roman believed honest labor was beneath no one. On a morning in 458 BC, messengers from the Senate climbed the path to his field. Cincinnatus set down his tools and sent for his toga — a Roman did not receive the Senate's word in his work clothes. Properly dressed, he heard the news: Rome was handing this farmer total power.
Key Terms
- Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
- A patrician senator found digging a ditch on his own four-acre farm when messengers arrived from the Senate in 458 BC — he sent for his toga before he would hear their news.
- Res Publica
- The new name Romans gave their government after 509 BC, meaning "the people’s thing" — the property of the whole citizen body, not one royal family.
- Rex
- The Latin word for king, so hated after 509 BC that for 500 years calling a Roman by it nearly accused him of a crime.
- Consul
- One of two top officials who shared Rome’s highest office, elected for a single year, each holding the power to cancel the other’s orders.
- Roman Forum
- The open-air public space in Rome where thousands of citizens gathered to argue and vote aloud on their own laws.
- Cicero
- The Roman thinker who wrote a whole book called On the Republic, defining the state as belonging to everyone who shared its laws, not to a king or one family.
- Patricians
- Rome’s old, wealthy families, who could trace their lineage back to the city’s founding generation and made up about 10 percent of citizens.
- Plebeians
- The other 90 percent of Rome’s citizens — farmers, workers, and merchants who had to live by laws they were not allowed to read.
- Nexum
- A harsh form of debt bondage in which a creditor could legally bind a debtor who could not pay in up to 15 pounds of iron fetters for 60 days.
- Secessio Plebis
- A citywide walkout in 494 BC in which the plebeians simply left Rome, taking their labor and their swords with them, until the patricians agreed to bargain.
- Twelve Tables
- Rome’s first written laws, posted in public around 451 BC so that every Roman — not just the patricians — could finally read the rules.
- Tribune of the Plebs
- One of ten officials elected to protect the common people, considered sacrosanct because harming him counted as a crime against the gods.
- Intercessio
- The single word a Tribune could shout in the street to instantly halt a magistrate’s arrest of a citizen, backed by nothing but the law.
- Dictator
- An emergency office in the Roman Republic that gave one trusted man absolute command for a strict maximum of six months, then required him to step down.
- Imperium
- The full legal power to command armies and enforce the law, granted in total to Rome’s emergency office-holder for up to six months.
- Mount Algidus
- The hill where a Roman army was surrounded by an enemy people in 458 BC, forcing the Senate to name an emergency dictator.
- Aequians
- The enemy people who trapped a Roman army on a hill in 458 BC, and who were later forced to march beneath a low frame of spears in defeat.
- Lictors
- Attendants who carried the bundled rods that stood for the power to punish; a consul was escorted by 12, but a dictator by twice that many.
- Under the Yoke
- A public sign of defeat in which a beaten enemy was made to stoop beneath a low frame of spears after Cincinnatus reversed the trap at Mount Algidus.
- Lex Hortensia
- A law passed in 287 BC that made decisions of the plebeian assembly binding on every Roman, patrician and plebeian alike.