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chapter seven A Roman Balance h a selection of extant enumerations of Roman males carried out by the Roman censors highlights the principal outcome of incorporating new citizens into the Roman state during the third through first centuries. In 204, 214,000 men were counted; in 154, 324,000 men; and in 115, 394,336 men. The number then increased to 910,000 in the enumeration of 70, following the grant of citizenship to all Italians twenty years before, and almost astronomically to 4,063,000 in the enumeration of 28.1 Although it is only with the census enumerations of the late first century that we see a significant citizen population increase unmistakably owed to in-migration, it is possible to view incorporation at all times as part of a Roman strategy to maintain the male population, which was prone to high levels of mortality in war. The results clearly are that the Roman male population was on the whole steady and even experienced a slight increase over time until the dramatic increases following the grant of citizenship to all Latins and Italians in 90.2 No wonder the Romans were able to send thousands of men to war, year in and year out, for nearly two hundred years. The degree to which the Romans were able to maintain a functioning, expanding society, during the fourth through first centuries, through the incorporation of new members was unrivaled in world history. Equally striking was the degree to which the harmony and growth of the Roman state rested on 285 deeply held assumptions shared by political leaders and people, chief among them the viability of the public lawmaking process as a flexible instrument for resolving social and political problems. Yet the stability that the Romans brought to their society in this fashion came at a cost to the small-scale world of Rome. Concurrent with the growing numbers of members in the highest and lowest classes, the original military basis of the classes slipped away, with consequences especially for Rome’s leadership. While the highest offices of consul and praetor were the traditional preserve of Romans belonging to a handful of noble clans, numerous lesser offices and positions, routine but essential, were held by members of Rome’s equestrian class. Primarily the economic managers of empire, equestrians also became officeholders and administrators. Most served as military tribunes and junior elected officeholders, as well as (after 149) jurors for the permanent courts. Some attained higher office as aediles and quaestors. A few came even to occupy the praetorship and consulate as new men (novi homines), that is, men whose immediate antecedents had not attained the office of praetor or consul. The presence in society of more men with political qualifications and aspirations was ominous. The tensions introduced in Roman society by its growing and increasingly diverse citizen population, particularly as regards traditional relationships linking Rome’s political leaders and the Roman people, proved almost insurmountable in the long run. In part 3 we explore the changes in Roman society that required new efforts to sustain the Roman understandings that gave public law its force and the role of public lawmaking in those efforts. Underlying our quest is the question that forms the subject of the present chapter: How did the Romans, numbering in the hundreds of thousands and experiencing a slow but steady inflow of members drawn from other communities in Italy, work to maintain the integrity of the Roman system? Our starting point and primary focus is the Roman leadership, whose members were drawn ever more frequently from families and communities outside Rome and whose experiences and circumstances were as a result considerably altered. an expanding leadership The requirements of a larger and more complex Roman state placed heavy demands on the political families of Rome. Imperial expansion, as we saw in the previous chapter, was accompanied throughout the period by an increase both in the number of offices in Rome and in temporarily appointed or elected commissions. More men were required in the ranks of Rome’s elected or appointed officials, especially at the junior levels, in all areas of government. At the same time as the number of administrative positions was growing, senatorial and 286 the laws of the roman people equestrian families were experiencing heavy losses in Rome’s continuous wars. During the early years of the Second Punic War in particular, after Hannibal’s entry into Italy, senators and their sons made up a high number of...

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