Lex Hortensia (287 BC): End of the Conflict of the Orders

The Lex Hortensia was a Roman law passed in about 287 BC under the dictator Quintus Hortensius, which made resolutions of the plebeian assembly binding on all Roman citizens. Passed to end the last secession of the plebs, it gave the plebeians full law-making power and is traditionally regarded as the end of the Conflict of the Orders, the two-century struggle between patricians and plebeians.

Background: the Conflict of the Orders

Soon after the founding of the Roman Republic, Roman society was split between the patricians, a hereditary aristocracy that monopolised high office, and the plebeians, the rest of the citizen body. Tradition records that in 494 BC the plebeians staged their first “secession”, withdrawing from the city and refusing military service until they were granted their own officials, the tribunes of the plebs.

Over the following centuries the plebeians won a written law code in the Twelve Tables, the right to marry patricians and, through the Licinian-Sextian laws of 367 BC, access to the consulship. By about 300 BC almost every office and priesthood was open to them.

One issue remained. The plebeians met in their own assembly, the concilium plebis, organised by tribes and presided over by a tribune. Its resolutions, called plebiscita, did not automatically bind patricians, or required approval by the patrician senators before they took effect.

The last secession

The immediate crisis of the 280s BC is poorly recorded, because Livy’s books for these years are lost. A short summary (Periocha) of his Book 11 says that after serious and prolonged unrest over debts, the plebs withdrew to the Janiculum, a hill across the Tiber, and were brought back by the dictator Quintus Hortensius, who died in office.

Debt was a pressing problem after decades of war against the Samnites, which had kept many small farmers away from their land. Hortensius was himself a plebeian, a sign of how far plebeian families had risen by this time.

The law

The core of the Lex Hortensia is described by later Roman jurists. The 2nd-century AD legal writer Gaius explains that patricians had once claimed not to be bound by plebiscites, until the Lex Hortensia established that plebiscites bound the whole people and so had the same force as laws. The antiquarian Laelius Felix, quoted by Aulus Gellius, gives a similar account.

Pliny the Elder adds two details: the law was passed in an oak grove called the Aesculetum, and it made market days (nundinae) available for legal business, perhaps so that country people visiting Rome could bring cases.

A puzzle for historians

Livy records two earlier laws that seem to have done the same thing: the Valerio-Horatian law of 449 BC and the Publilian law of 339 BC, which both declared plebiscites binding on all citizens. Historians have long debated why the Lex Hortensia was needed.

Explanations include the idea that the earlier laws were later inventions or exaggerations, that they required senatorial approval which the Lex Hortensia removed, or that each law widened plebeian powers step by step. There is no consensus, but the Lex Hortensia is generally accepted as the measure that settled the question.

Who was Quintus Hortensius?

Almost nothing is known about Quintus Hortensius beyond his dictatorship. He came from a plebeian family that does not appear among Rome’s leading office-holders before him, and the summary of Livy says he died during his term of office. No family link is recorded with the famous orator Quintus Hortensius Hortalus of the 1st century BC.

Consequences

The law transformed the plebeian assembly into a central institution of the Republic. Many of the most important laws of the next two centuries were plebiscites proposed by tribunes, from agrarian laws to the measures of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus in the 130s and 120s BC.

At the same time the patrician-plebeian distinction lost most of its political meaning. Rome was now led by the nobilitas, families of either order whose members had reached the consulship. In practice the tribunes, mostly drawn from this elite, usually worked with the Senate rather than against it.

Later conflicts tested the tribunes’ power. During Sulla’s march on Rome in 88 BC and his later dictatorship, he restricted the tribunes and required prior Senate approval for their bills, but these limits were reversed in 70 BC.

Timeline

• 494 BC: First secession of the plebs; tribunes of the plebs created (traditional date).
• 449 BC: Valerio-Horatian laws, said to make plebiscites binding.
• 367 BC: Licinian-Sextian laws open the consulship to plebeians.
• 339 BC: Publilian law on plebiscites.
• c. 287 BC: Last secession of the plebs to the Janiculum; Lex Hortensia passed under Quintus Hortensius.
• 133 BC: Tiberius Gracchus uses a plebiscite to pass his land law.
• 88 BC: Sulla begins to curb the tribunes’ legislative power.

Why it matters

The Lex Hortensia gave Rome’s plebeian assembly full legislative power and closed two centuries of social conflict. It created the constitutional framework of the middle Republic, in which tribunes could pass laws for the whole state, a power that later reformers and generals would use to reshape Rome.