Rome

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Rome

the Volscians, and founded various colonies
in Italy. But his tyrannical conduct made
him unpopular, and he was exiled.

2. The Republic (509-265 B.C.).—The Ro-
mans at the commencement of this period
were arranged in gentes or clans, composed of
families (families), all supposed to be related
and bearing the same name. The paterfamilias
was the unit of Roman life; the heads of the

mitia centuriata of the Campus Martius, the
populus expressed its will. The Upper House
was the Senatus (originally composed of
senes, old men of the patricians, the heads of
the families). It was also known as the Con-
script Fathers. The senate solemnly conferred
the sole executive power of the state on the
king and afterwards on the consuls. The
kingship, elective, conferred the powers of

© Publishers Photo Service.

Rome.

Upper, Monument to Victor Emmanuel and Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; Lower,
Castel Sant Angelo (Hadrian's Tomb) and the Ponte S. Angelo Across the Tiber.

families of the original gentes formed the or-
iginal patricians, their descendants, the great
Patrician Order; gentes formed later con-
sisted of the Plebes (originally 'the many'),
who possessed no political rights until they
won them under the early republic.

A popular assembly, the comitia curiata,
assembled in the comitium, the Lower House;
by it, and by the Servian institution, the co-

punishment and death, symbolized by the
fasces or rods and axes borne before the Ro-
man ruler by twelve lictors, The king (or the
inter-rex) appointed his successor.

For over two centuries the history of
Rome is chiefly the struggle of the patrician
and plebeian orders. Poverty and the custom
by which the debtor became the slave (nexus
or addictw) of his creditor led in 494 to the