Conflict of The Orders - Fact or Legend?

Fact or Legend?

The traditional account was long accepted as factual, but it has a number of problems and inconsistencies, and almost every element of the story is controversial today; some scholars, such as Richard E. Mitchell, have even argued that there was no conflict at all, the Romans of the late Republic having interpreted events of their distant past as if they were comparable to the class struggles of their own time. The crux of the problem is that there is no contemporaneous account of the conflict; writers such as Polybius, who might have met persons whose grandparents participated in the conflict, do not mention it, while the writers who do speak of the conflict, such as Livy or Cicero, report fact and fable equally readily, and invariably assume that there were no fundamental changes in Roman institutions in nearly 500 years.

For instance, the fasti report a number of consuls with plebeian names during the 5th century, when the consulate was supposedly only open to patricians, and explanations to the effect that previously-patrician gentes somehow became plebeians later are difficult to prove. Another point of difficulty is the apparent absence of armed revolt; as the history of the late Republic shows, similar types of grievances tended to lead to bloodshed rather quickly, yet Livy's account seems to entail debate mostly, with the occasional threat of secessio. None of this is helped by our basic uncertainty as to who the plebs actually were; many of them are known to have been wealthy landowners, and the "lower class" label dates from the late Republic.