the world did not cease to echo to the tramp of conquering legions,
and the victorious soldier became a more and more important factor in
the State, still military matters no longer, as in the Samnite and
Punic wars, absorb the attention, dwarfed as they are by the great
social struggle of which the metropolis was the arena. In treating of
the first half of those hundred years of revolution, which began
with the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus and ended with the battle of
Actium, it is mainly the fall of the Republican and the foreshadowing
of the Imperial system of government which have to be described.
[Sidenote: In order to understand the times of the Gracchi it is
necessary to understand the history of the orders at Rome.] But, in
order to understand rightly the events of those fifty years, some
survey, however brief, of the previous history of the Roman orders is
indispensable.

[Sidenote: The patres.] When the mists of legend clear away we see a
community which, if we do not take slaves into account, consisted
of two parts--the governing body, or patres, to whom alone the term
Populus Romanus strictly applied, and who constituted the Roman State,
and the governed class, or clientes, who were outside its pale. The
word patrician, more familiar to our ear than the substantive from
which it is formed, came to imply much more than its original meaning.
[Sidenote: The clients.] In its simplest and earliest sense it was
applied to a man who was sprung from a Roman marriage, who stood
towards his client on much the same footing which, in the mildest form
of slavery, a master occupies towards his slave. As the patronus was
to the libertus, when it became customary to liberate slaves, so in
some measure were the Fathers to their retainers, the Clients. That
the community was originally divided into these two sections is known.
What is not known is how, besides this primary division of patres and