The Timpson Lyceum · History of Rome – Titus Livius (2025)

Consuls vs Tribunes – Lecture 12 (History of Rome)

Overview

With the Tribunes of the Plebs now permanent, the Conflict of the Orders became a running institutional duel between the patrician consuls and the plebeian tribunes. This lecture examines the powers and — just as important — the limits of the new office, and how a body armed only with the word no reshaped Roman politics. The tribunes could not command armies, pass laws binding on patricians, or act beyond the sacred boundary of the city; inside it, however, their veto (intercessio) and their sacrosanctity made them nearly immovable obstacles.

The struggle plays out through a gallery of hardening confrontations. Coriolanus, the war hero, is tried by the tribunes for threatening to starve the plebs, goes into exile, and returns at the head of a Volscian army — stopped at the gates only by the pleas of his mother. Spurius Cassius introduces the first agrarian law and is executed for supposedly aspiring to kingship, but the idea of land redistribution outlives him and becomes the tribunes' new cause. The patrician Appius Claudius discovers the fatal flaw in the tribunate — that one tribune can veto another — and turns it into a weapon; the plebeian Volero Publilius answers with the Lex Publilia, moving tribunician elections to the tribes. Underlying every episode is a simple, brutal logic: because the tribunes could only block, and because a single veto sufficed, Roman government worked only when the orders chose to let it.

Key Concepts

• The tribunate's core power: the veto (intercessio) — A tribune could interpose to block any magistrate's act, any law, or any levy he judged contrary to plebeian liberty. His power was almost entirely negative — the power to say no — but it could be aimed at nearly anything.
• Sacrosanctity — The veto had teeth because the tribune's person was inviolable: to strike, obstruct, or ignore a tribune carrying out his office was a capital offense, sworn to the gods. Enforcement ultimately rested on the plebs' willingness to defend him.
• Ius auxilii and provocatio (appeal) — A tribune could shelter a pleb against a magistrate, and the people's right of appeal meant the assembly, not the magistrate, decided guilt in capital cases — so plebs increasingly ignored consular decrees, confident their fellow citizens would acquit them.
• Concilium plebis and plebiscita — Tribunes summoned the plebeian council to elect tribunes and pass measures. At first these bound only plebeians and were voted by wealth-weighted centuries, keeping wealthy plebs (and thus patrician influence) dominant.
• Limits of the office — Tribunician power existed only within the pomerium. Outside the city, imperium — military command — ruled, and the tribune had none. The number of tribunes grew over time, 2 → 5 → 10, so several could act in several places at once.
• Tribunes vetoing tribunes — When one tribune vetoed a levy, colleagues vetoed his veto, exposing a structural weakness: the college could paralyze itself. Appius Claudius seized on this — "even one is sufficient against all" — realizing patricians need only win over a single tribune to block the rest.
• Coriolanus (Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus) — Won his surname storming the Volscian town of Corioli. In the grain shortage after the secession he demanded the plebs surrender the tribunate as the price of cheap food; put on trial, he refused to appear, was exiled (491 BC), and defected to the Volsci.
• Coriolanus's march on Rome — Leading a Volscian army with the chieftain Attius Tullius, he took town after town — sparing patrician land to sow suspicion — and camped at the gates. Embassies and priests failed; only his mother Veturia and wife Volumnia turned him back. The Volsci killed him for withdrawing.
• The agrarian law and Spurius Cassius (486 BC) — Consul Cassius proposed dividing conquered public land three ways (public, plebs, allies). Suspected of buying support to make himself king — and after proposing to refund the plebs' grain payments — he was tried and executed. But land redistribution became a permanent tribunician demand.
• Public land (ager publicus) and "possession" — Conquered land was legally public, but wealthy patricians developed and farmed it for generations, claiming a de facto ownership ("possession"). The agrarian law aimed to convert such public land into private plebeian holdings — hence patrician resistance.
• The tribunes' leverage cycle — Tribunes would block the levy to force the agrarian law; when war compelled a levy, they let it pass, then prosecuted the returning consuls for any military failure. Precedent, once set, made this a repeatable weapon.
• The Fabii and the Cremera (477 BC) — The Fabian family held the consulship seven straight years and privately waged Rome's war against Veii from a fort on the Cremera. Lured into an ambush, all 306 fighting Fabii were killed save one boy left behind to continue the line.
• Lex Publilia (471 BC) — After the plebeian Volero Publilius resisted a demeaning levy, he became tribune and carried a law shifting tribunician elections from the wealth-weighted centuries to the tribes — stripping patricians of their power to hand-pick "friendly" tribunes.
• Appius Claudius (the son) and decimation — Appointed consul to kill the Lex Publilia, he later led an army that refused to fight for him against the Volsci and broke in a rout. He punished the survivors by decimation — executing one man in ten by lot — the first Roman use of the practice.

Worked Example

The veto as a logical gate — why one tribune could stop everything. Model the tribunes' decision as a Boolean circuit. Let there be $n$ tribunes, and let each tribune $i$ either interpose a veto ($v_i = 1$) or stay his hand ($v_i = 0$).

1. Passage requires unanimous restraint. A measure survives only if no tribune vetoes it. Writing $a_i = 1 - v_i$ for tribune $i$'s assent, the measure passes exactly when

$\text{pass} = a_1 \wedge a_2 \wedge \cdots \wedge a_n = \prod_{i=1}^{n} a_i = 1.$

This is a logical AND over all tribunes: every one must assent.

1. A single veto blocks. Equivalently, the measure is stopped whenever any tribune vetoes:

$\text{block} = v_1 \vee v_2 \vee \cdots \vee v_n = 1 \iff \sum_{i=1}^{n} v_i \ge 1.$

A logical OR over vetoes — one dissenter is enough. If even one $v_i = 1$, then $\prod_i a_i = 0$ and the action dies.

1. Count the outcomes. With $n$ tribunes each free to veto or not, there are $2^{n}$ possible configurations, but exactly one — all $v_i = 0$ — permits passage. As the college grew:

$n = 2:\ \tfrac{1}{2^{2}} = \tfrac{1}{4}, \qquad n = 5:\ \tfrac{1}{2^{5}} = \tfrac{1}{32}, \qquad n = 10:\ \tfrac{1}{2^{10}} = \tfrac{1}{1024}.$

Enlarging the tribunate $2 \to 5 \to 10$ made the fraction of "all-clear" states collapse, so the body became an ever more powerful brake on action.

1. Appius Claudius's exploit. To block a populist measure, patricians did not need to control the assembly or a majority of tribunes — they needed only to secure one tribune willing to set $v_i = 1$. The cost of obstruction was thus $1$ captured tribune out of $10$, not $10$; a single purchased veto flips the whole $\prod_i a_i$ to $0$.

2. Why the gate held: sacrosanctity. The circuit only works if a veto cannot be overridden by force. Sacrosanctity supplied that: any attempt to physically ignore a tribune's $v_i = 1$ carried the death penalty. The veto was, in effect, a hardware interlock the consuls could not switch off — which is why a magistrate with 12 lictors could still be stopped cold by one unarmed tribune. $\blacksquare$

Summary

• The tribunate was a purely negative office: its power was the veto within the pomerium, backed by sacrosanctity, plus the people's right of appeal — but it commanded no armies and bound no patricians.
• Structurally, a measure passed only under a logical AND of all tribunes' assent, so a single veto (an OR over dissent) blocked it — which let Appius Claudius neutralize the college by capturing just one tribune.
• Coriolanus embodied patrician contempt for the tribunate: tried, exiled (491 BC), and turned enemy, he was stopped at Rome's gates only by his mother's plea.
• Spurius Cassius's agrarian law (486 BC) cost him his life but launched land redistribution as the tribunes' enduring cause, pursued by blocking the levy and prosecuting failed consuls.
• The era's cost is written in the 306 Fabii at the Cremera (477 BC) and in Appius Claudius's decimation of his own mutinous army — while the Lex Publilia (471 BC) freed tribunician elections from patrician control by voting through the tribes.