Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1827 edition. Excerpt: ... chapter xxviii. the first secession, and the tribuneship of the people. While Tarquinius lived, internal peace and harmony prevailed at Rome, because the senate feared the people; but scarcely had the grave closed upon the man whose pretensions might prove alarming, if espoused by an oppressed party in hope of improving their condition, when all this gentleness disappeared 33. The Patricians exercised every species of oppression which avarice and pride could suggest; and the people were the more exasperated by the sense of tyranny, because the previous kindness now lost all its merit, and proved itself only the result of fear and policy. The word " People," which our language must adopt in the history of the civil commotions of Rome, in order to designate the Plebeians, excites in our mind, as the word Sij/xoG with the Greeks, essentially false and erroneous ideas, both on account of Plebi cui ad earn diem summa ope inservitum erat, injuria a primoribus fieri coepere. Livius, ii. c. 21. its complexity, and because the peculiar notion, expressed by the Latin terra, is not even once comprised in the wider signification of the word itself. The Greeks understood it originally of the freemen, who were unable to trace their pedigree to heroes and kings34; afterwards, in the oligarchies, those who were excluded from the sovereignty by insufficiency of property. In the democracies, the word generally signified the mass of the populace who had no possessions, although they shared the supreme authority. But as the latter abused this power partly of their own accord, and partly as instruments, the term became justly detested, and every attempt to procure greater import