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When we consider this situation, it is not surprising that the leading features of the first period of development of the Roman constitution (494-287 B.C.) were an attempt to limit the power of the magistrates, and a struggle of the Plebs for equality with the Patriciate. The two struggles do not run on parallel lines but are interwoven at every point, since the magistracy represented the Patriciate. Nor do they represent merely an effort to weaken or to obtain political privilege; in their earlier stages the motive of the Plebs is not ambition, but defence. Their first efforts have the negative object of the protection of rights, not the positive design of an attempt to share in a political power which was closed to their order.

Tradition represents the earliest social struggles of the Plebs as centring round two questions—the possession of the public land, and the law of debtor and creditor. They were no doubt closely connected, for assignment of land meant relief of debt, but the agitation that gathered round the public land was directed by individuals, was merely occasional, and led to no permanent results; it is less a part of constitutional than of political history, and its true nature is obscured by the fact that we cannot say how far the annalists have transferred to this early period the circumstances of the agrarian agitation of a later day. But the early mode of assignment of the public land deserves consideration; for, as one of the undoubted grievances of the Plebs, it may have been one of the motives that led to the first great political reform. Land conquered from the enemy was sometimes assigned to poorer citizens in small allotments by the state (ager assignatus); in later times it was sometimes sold by the state through its quaestors (ager quaestorius); and in both these cases it became private property. But, in the early Republic, the custom was growing up of leaving a great portion of conquered land—especially such as was fit only for pasturage or had been devastated in war—as state domain (ager publicus), and of allowing it to be held in usufruct (occupatio) by squatters who paid to the state for their privilege a proportion of the produce (vectigal), a tithe or a fifth. Large portions of such ager publicus had probably been originally a part of the king’s domains, and had been held by his clients, who would, of course, have been members of the lower class of the Plebs. But under the new conditions of things it was all the property of the state; and the theory was started, or confirmed, that in this case Patricians alone could be its occupants,[348] a privilege that had probably originated with the assumption that only the conquerors of the land could share in the spoils of war.[349] This privilege—comprehensible but legally absurd in that it involved the theory that clients of the state must belong to a particular order—could no longer be upheld on the same grounds, for Plebeians now marched to battle and could justly claim a share in the prizes of war. But the maintenance of this principle, even if justly carried out, could not have wholly solved the social problem. The Proletariate, who had no share in winning the prize, would have still been justly excluded; but it would at least have benefited the small plebeian farmer, and perhaps it was he that had most need of benefit.