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Rome’s Genucia Law mandated that one elected consul should always be plebeian1, a step that had been debated, and rejected, just two decades earlier. This was likely because many plebeians anticipated that the lure of higher office would be used to split wealthier plebeians from the poor, and make them join forces with the patricians.
The plebeians were right. In 356 BC, the first plebeian to be dictator – Quintus Publilius Philo – mandated that at least one censor should always be plebeian. In the end, the fears of a split plebeian constituency came true as a new patrician-plebeian aristocracy led by people like Philo himself was created by the power-sharing arrangements facilitated by the new laws, and enriched by slavery, the main war spoil.
Power in the new state was put firmly in the hands of senate, rather than consuls with their short one-year terms, and reinforced with the proviso, adopted in this era, that the senate had the right to veto a law before it was voted by the tribes in the comitia populi or tribal assembly. The senate, now filled with wealthy plebeians, had no place for fading aristocrats unable to keep up with the times: illustrious patrician clans like the Horatii, Lucretii and Menennii disappear from inscriptions by the mid-Fourth Century BC. Some like the Sergii and Iulii that would produce Gaius Julius Caesar vanish for a long time: they would only reappear two centuries later.
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