[Footnote 34: So Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 5.] [Footnote 35: Cp. Pelham, ch. iii. Ihne, who argues that the narratives concerning the Etruscan kings are no more trustworthy than those as to their predecessors, recognises that Pliny's record of the humiliating conditions of peace imposed on the Romans by Porsenna "would not have been made if the fact of the subjugation of Rome by an Etruscan king had not been incontestable" (_Early Rome_, p. 79; cp. pp. 85-86).] [Footnote 36: Cp. Mérimée, _Études sur l'histoire romaine_, t. i, _Guerre sociale_, 1844, p. 352 _sq._; Mommsen, B. ii, ch. i (i, 265).] [Footnote 37: Cicero (_De Officiis_, ii, 12) and Sallust (cited by Augustine, _De Civ. Dei_, iii, 16) preserved the belief (accepted by Niebuhr) that the oppression of the poor by the rich had been restrained under the kings. Cp. Mahaffy (_Problems in Greek History_, pp. 81-83; Social _Life in Greece_, 3rd ed. p. 83) and Wachsmuth (_Hist. Antiq. of the Greeks_, Eng. tr. i, 416) as to Greek despots. And see Schwegler, _Römische Geschichte_, ii, 203, as to the weakness of Rome through class-strifes after the expulsion of the kings.] [Footnote 38: Greenidge, pp. 47-48; Mommsen, i, 72.] [Footnote 39: Greenidge, pp. 147, 262, 273.] [Footnote 40: Niebuhr, _Lect._ xxv, 3rd Eng. ed. p. 134. So Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 80; and also Schwegler, ii, 200. Mommsen takes the traditional view. Cp. Shuckburgh (_History of Rome_, p. 71), who remarks that the battle was at least not a decisive victory. Meyer (_Geschichte des Alterthums_, ii, 812) gives no verdict.] [Footnote 41: The demand for the admission of plebeians to the consulate was thus met on the patrician plea that religion vetoed it. Only in 367 was it enacted that one of the two consuls should always be a plebeian.] [Footnote 42: Plebeians first admitted to the Quæstorship, 421 B.C.; to the Military Tribuneship, 400; to the Consulate, 367; to the Dictatorship, 356; to the Censorship, 351; to the Prætorship, 337. This left the patricians in possession of the important privilege of membership of the sacred colleges. But that, in turn, was opened to plebeians in 300 or 296.] [Footnote 43: _De Officiis_, i, 22, 30.] [Footnote 44: _Ad Atticum_, i, 19.] [Footnote 45: _De Officiis_, ii, 21.] [Footnote 46: See Long, _Decline of the Roman Republic_, iv, 272-76, for some interesting details; and refs. in Mérimée, _Guerre Sociale_, p. 22.] [Footnote 47: Livy, iv, 25.]