No More Learning

Year after year, if
the narrative which has come down to us is to be trusted, they
continued to exert, to the full extent, their power of stopping
the whole machine of government. No curule magistrates could be
chosen; no military muster could be held. We know too little of
the state of Rome in those days to be able to conjecture how,
during that long anarchy, the peace was kept, and ordinary
justice administered between man and man. The animosity of both
parties rose to the greatest height. The excitement, we may well
suppose, would have been peculiarly intense at the annual
election of Tribunes. On such occasions there can be little doubt
that the great families did all that could be done, by threats
and caresses, to break the union of the Plebeians. That union,
however, proved indissoluble. At length the good cause triumphed.
The Licinian laws were carried. Lucius Sextius was the first
Plebeian Consul, Caius Licinius the third.

The results of this great change were singularly happy and
glorious. Two centuries of prosperity, harmony, and victory
followed the reconciliation of the orders. Men who remembered
Rome engaged in waging petty wars almost within sight of the
Capitol lived to see her the mistress of Italy. While the
disabilities of the Plebeians continued, she was scarcely able to
maintain her ground against the Volscians and Hernicans. When
those disabilities were removed, she rapidly became more than a
match for Carthage and Macedon.
During the great Licinian contest the Plebeian poets were,
doubtless, not silent. Even in modern times songs have been by no
means without influence on public affairs; and we may therefore
infer that, in a society where printing was unknown and where
books were rare, a pathetic or humorous party-ballad must have
produced effects such as we can but faintly conceive. It is
certain that satirical poems were common at Rome from a very
early period. The rustics, who lived at a distance from the seat
of government, and took little part in the strife of factions,
gave vent to their petty local animosities in coarse Fescennine
verse. The lampoons of the city were doubtless of a higher order;
and their sting was early felt by the nobility. For in the Twelve
Tables, long before the time of the Licinian laws, a severe
punishment was denounced against the citizen who should compose
or recite verses reflecting on another. Satire is, indeed, the
only sort of composition in which the Latin poets, whose works
have come down to us, were not mere imitators of foreign models;
and it is therefore the only sort of composition in which they
have never been rivalled. It was not, like their tragedy, their
comedy, their epic and lyric poetry, a hothouse plant which, in
return for assiduous and skilful culture, gave only scanty and
sickly fruits. It was hardy and full of sap; and in all the
various juices which it yielded might be distinguished the flavor
of the Ausonian soil. "Satire," said Quinctilian, with just
pride, "is all our own. " Satire sprang, in truth, naturally
from the constitution of the Roman government and from the spirit
of the Roman people; and, though at length subjected to metrical
rules derived from Greece, retained to the last an essentially
Roman character. Lucilius was the earliest satirist whose works
were held in esteem under the Caesars. But many years before
Lucilius was born, Naevius had been flung into a dungeon, and
guarded there with circumstances of unusual rigor, on account of
the bitter lines in which he had attacked the great Caecilian
family. The genius and spirit of the Roman satirists survived the
liberty of their country, and were not extinguished by the cruel
despotism of the Julian and Flavian Emperors. The great poet who
told the story of Domitian's turbot was the legitimate successor
of those forgotten minstrels whose songs animated the factions of
the infant Republic.

Those minstrels, as Niebuhr has remarked, appear to have
generally taken the popular side.