Secessio plebis
The secessio plebis ( Latin for the march of the common people ) was a weapon used by the plebeians in the Roman class struggles .
The plebeians are said to have left the city several times and thus paralyzed the economic life of Rome in order to emphasize their political and social demands.
The first secessio plebis supposedly took place in 494 BC. Instead of: The plebeians are said to have moved to Mons Sacer in order to enforce the establishment of the office of tribunes , which was successful. The office of the aediles is also said to have been established at that time. According to a legend handed down by Titus Livius , the former consul Agrippa Menenius Lanatus persuaded them to return by telling them the fable of the stomach and the limbs: Once there was a quarrel between the limbs of the human body and the stomach because the limbs do all the work performed while the stomach indulged in idleness. The limbs refused to feed him any more. However, because they themselves became debilitated, they realized that the stomach did an important job in nourishing the limbs. Likewise, the senate ruled by the patricians and the plebeians would need each other.
The second secessio plebis , this time on the Aventine , is said to take place in 450 or 449 BC. And had the adoption of the Twelve Tables , the abolition of the Decemvirate and the restoration of the tribunate to the success.
The third secessio plebis was conducted in 287 BC. On the Ianiculum . To end it, the dictator Quintus Hortensius enforced the Lex Hortensia , which resulted in the recognition of resolutions of the people's assembly as laws and full equality for plebeians.
Another possible secessio plebis could be 445 BC. With the result of the adoption of the Lex Canuleia , which from then on allowed marriages between patricians and plebeians, led to the Ianiculum. However, it is only hinted at by Florus .
Since when Rome was sacked by the Gauls under Brennus in 387 BC When all records were lost in the 2nd century BC, Livy could only fall back on oral traditions in his presentation of the first two secessiones , which he accordingly embellished in a fabulous way. In historical research, it is assumed on the one hand that the background to each was a strike by the lower classes, who on this occasion constituted themselves for the first time as a social unit (plebs from Latin plere - to fill, i.e. as much as the crowd). In the sense of a general strike, this strike could have referred to any economic activity - Livy reports that the first secessio was said to have resulted in famine - or to military service. On the other hand, massive conscientious objection is also likely. In Roman military tactics, at the latest in the army reform of the penultimate king Servius Tullius († around 535 BC), the transition from aristocratic individual combat to classis tactics took place, in which a closed phalanx of heavily armed infantrymen tried to formally roll down the enemy. With this upgrading of the infantry, consisting of ordinary people, who had to take care of their own equipment, the Romans, as well as all other peoples who introduced this method of fighting, also became more self-confident: they allowed themselves to be deprived of their rights by the patricians no longer offer economic exploitation. In the prehistory of the first secessio, Livy paints a horrific case of debt bondage as an example . For an interpretation of the first secessio 494 BC BC as resistance to the recruitment speaks also that it took place against the background of an external military threat from the Latins . Others assume that the concrete strike movements began with a symbolic procession to a sanctuary such as the Temple of Ceres on the Aventine, from which the myth developed that the entire plebs left the city area as one.
Ancient sources
- Titus Livius, Ab urbe condita
- Dionysius of Halicarnassus , Rhomaike Archaiologia
- Florus, Epitoma de Tito Livio bellorum omnium annorum DCC libri duo
literature
- Géza Alföldy : Roman social history. Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden 1975, ISBN 3-515-02045-4 ( Scientific Paperbacks, Social and Economic History 8).
- Jochen Bleicken : The people's tribunate of the classical republic. Studies of its development between 287 and 133 BC Chr. Beck, Munich, 1955 ( Zetemata 13, ISSN 1610-4188 ) (2nd revised edition ibid. 1968).
- Dietmar Kienast : The political emancipation of the plebs and the development of the army in early Rome. In: Bonner Jahrbücher. 175, 1975, ISSN 0068-0060 , pp. 83-112.
Individual evidence
- ^ Livius II 32-33; Dionysius of Halicarnassus VI 45-90; Florus I 17; De viris illustribus urbis Romae 18
- ↑ According to the early Roman historian Lucius Calpurnius Piso Frugi , however, it was the Aventine. See Livius II 32
- ^ Livius III 50-54; Dionysius of Halicarnassus XI 43-44; Florus I 17; De viris illustribus urbis Romae 21
- ^ Livius, Epitome XI; Pliny the Elder , Naturalis historia XVI 15; Aulus Gellius , Noctes Atticae XV 27
- ↑ Florus I 17