Patricians conceded formal reforms while retaining final authority in Rome.
Evidence
The Conflict of the Orders, in which the plebeians sought political equality with the patricians, lasted between 494 and 287 BCE. In this protracted conflict, the patricians were occasionally forced to give some concession to the plebeians, but always sought to retain the final authority. Thus the provisions for economic reform in laws like Lex Licinia Sextia (367 BCE) and Leges Genuciae (342 BCE)—ceiling on the ownership of land by a single person, ban on lending that carried interest, etc.—were largely ignored by the patricians. In his Mahad speech, Ambedkar gives a very interesting account of how the positions of ‘tribunes’, constituted to protect the rights of the plebeians, were held exclusively by patricians in the beginning. Even when later laws stipulated that one of the two tribunes must be a plebeian, the patricians retained the power to reject an elected plebeian tribune through the authority of the oracle at Delphi (always a patrician). — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 1052
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to Ambedkar’s cast-economy argument about nominal concessions leaving power intact; parallels reservation debates if reader mines that vein.