The Making of Plebeian Secessions in Roman Historiography

Abstract

The early two centuries of the Roman Republic were filled with conflicts between the patricians and the plebeians. From 494 BC onwards, the Roman plebs used several social crises to force the patrician Senate to satisfy their demands, withdrawing from Rome to a sacred mount. The secessio plebis has been considered in scholarship a revolutionary movement of the people. However, the dissonance between the objectives declared by the plebeians and the obtained results of the secessions suggests that the idea of secessio may have originated in the later republican historiography. The mons sacer to which the plebeians temporary resettled is identified with the Alban Mount rather than with an unknown mountain in the Sabine country. A prototype of the plebeian withdrawal from Rome was the annual celebration of the Feriae Latinae, during which newly elected consuls accompanied by soldiers and large masses of people visited the sanctuaries of Jupiter on the Alban Mount. The pontifical chronicles also recorded withdrawals of plebeians for the establishment of a new settlement or a tribe. The foundation of a tribe or a colony in Latium required a consultation with Jupiter Latiaris on the Alban Mount, but the same act outside Latium did not need an approval of the deity. That was why the last, failed, secession is recorded as occurring on the Janiculum, apparently, the site where Roman people resettling to a new northern colony gathered in 287 BC. Roman historians used the evidence for archaic customs to sustain the thesis of the Struggle of the Orders in the early Republic.