_principes_--had required a full suit of armour and it was only the richest who could afford it. Now the whole army had to be properly equipped, and this reacted upon the social and political system of the city. THE CONSTITUTION In ancient times a man’s rights as citizen depended entirely upon his duties as a soldier. The _comitium_ was the army, and the preponderance of voting power went to the rich who could afford a panoply. Now the soldiers were equalised and therefore the citizens claimed equality. We cannot put much faith in Livy’s story of the struggle between the two orders for political equality; the details, which include elaborate reports of the speeches delivered, are clearly free compositions based upon much later controversies between the republicans and democrats of Livy’s own earlier days. There is a great deal of confusion and contradiction in the accounts of the various legislative measures by which the plebeians were gradually admitted to equality with the patricians. But the story of the Secession of the Plebs--there are two such stories, but probably that is the result of duplication--is so distinctive and peculiarly Roman that it scarcely seems like an invention. To put it shortly, the plebeians won their rights by means of that very modern weapon--a strike. Being refused the rights for which they were agitating, they refused to join the citizen levy, but marched out under arms to the neighbouring Sacred Mount, and threatened to set up a new Rome of their own there. The political instinct was healthy and strong among them: the plebeians formed themselves into a second corporation organised like the patricians. Where the patricians had their two consuls with two prætors under them, the plebeians had their two tribunes and two ædiles. Where the patrician army had its _comitium_ meeting in groups called “curies,” the plebeians had their assembly meeting in tribes. So the new magistracies and the new meetings became part and parcel of the Roman republic. The tribunes were protected not so much by laws as by an oath: their persons were declared sacred, and they had the right to thrust their sacred persons between the plebeian offender and the consul’s lictor who came to arrest him, thus expressing the ultimate sovereignty of the army of Roman citizens. That is, in broad outline, how the story of political equality at Rome has come down to us. But it must not be supposed that even now the Roman republic was in anything but externals like the Greek democracy. The Roman _comitia_ never debated like the Athenian _ecclesia_. They assembled to listen to such speeches as the magistrates or their invited friends might choose to make upon topics which had previously been selected, discussed and decreed by the senate; they were there to ratify the senate’s decisions with “Yes” or “No.” Even then they did not vote as individuals; each “century,” each “cury,” or each “tribe,” according to the form of meeting summoned,