THE CONFLICT BETWEEN PATRICIANS AND PLEBEIANS
Patricians also claimed to have exclusive rights over the religious life of Rome, a central aspect of communal life. It is true that priestly offices long remained the prerogative of the patriciate, and claims to secular offices also rested on a religious foundation. Roman kings and the magistrates who succeeded them possessed as a mark of their office the right to take the auspices (auspicium), rites by which an officeholder sought the approval of the gods to take up his office for the first time and, while serving, divine consent for all of his official actions. Patricians regarded the auspices as their own possession. In later centuries, in the rare instances when both consuls died in office, the auspices were thought in some way to return to the patricians.
A patrician senator was then chosen as interrex for five days, followed by others in turn until one was able to arrange the election of new consuls. Roman historians believed that the interrex was a regal institution, with interreges serving between the death of one king and the installation of his successor. The name itself—“between kings”—would seem to confirm this belief. The plebeians are much more shadowy than the patricians. Plebeians certain¬ly far outnumbered patricians, but they need not have encompassed all of the inhabitants of Rome outside the patrician group: It remains possible, for example, that the clients of the great families counted as neither patricians nor plebeians. The Roman plebs was not a very homogenous group, since it contained individuals with a range of statuses and roles in the city.
Some were not even poor, although most probably were. In the fifth and early fourth centuries, plebeians were able to supply leaders from their own ranks, so that some plebeians clearly had standing in the community. As a result, the mass of plebeians may not have been very unified in its concerns. Matters of land distribution and of debt would probably have concerned the poor more than the well-to-do, while access to office may have interested the leaders of the plebeians more than the bulk of their fol-lowers. In these circumstances, the plebeian leadership may have been more capable of mustering followers at times when debt, high food prices, and poverty were proving especially burdensome. Roman historians later believed that the plebeians’ main weapon was the “secession,” a kind of strike in time of war, and that their major successes derived from this. In a secession, plebeian members of an army would withdraw to a hill outside of Rome, choose their own leaders, and refuse to cooperate with the magistrates of the city until their grievances had been addressed.
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