The tendencies of plebeian emancipation were almost all in favour of the upper classes; that it never was a democratic movement or one led by democratically-minded men is most strikingly evidenced by the utter indifference shown by the leaders to the economic evils under which the masses laboured, and which they used as instruments to further their ambition. Solon abolished slavery for debt at a single stroke; to the Roman it is a sacred thing, an expression of _Romana fides_; while the Greek προστάτης struggled for others, the Roman patron fought for himself. But continued pressure caused some tentative efforts to be made in the latter half of the fourth century to mitigate the curse of debt. A _lex Marcia_ of 352 B.C. gave the debtor the right of summary arrest (_manus injectio_) of the usurer, to recover the fourfold penalty for the illegal interest;[494] while in 326 an attempt was made to give the future masters of the world the mastery over their bodies. In 313 a _lex Poetilia_ was passed forbidding the imprisonment of _nexi_ who could swear that they had reasonable hopes of ultimately satisfying their creditors;[495] it therefore abolished most contracts on the security of the person; although the _addictio_ and imprisonment of debtors by order of the court continued through the Republic and into the Empire. But if the harshness of the law was one evil, ignorance of its forms was another almost equally great. An accident supplied the remedy. The pontiff Appius Claudius had reduced the forms of action to writing; but the book meant for the guidance of the pontiffs was immediately revealed to the profane eyes of the people by his clerk, one Cn. Flavius, a freedman’s son. The fraudulent secretary also posted up a tablet containing a list of court days (_dies fasti_) on which the _legis actio_ was possible.[496] The _penetralia_ of the pontifical college had now become the property of the masses, and although the chief pontiffs still furnished for centuries the highest names to Roman law, they professed the science openly,[497] and secular teaching soon tore the veil from the hidden features of jurisprudence.
But, apart from these minor benefits, the mass of the Plebeians did not share to any very large extent in the triumph of their order. The true reason of the individual Roman being thus thrust into the background can only be given by a review of the causes, soon to be treated, which moulded both the theory and practice of the developed Roman constitution. It must suffice here to trace the painfully inadequate results which were secured by these centuries of agitation by a glance at the distribution of power in the Roman state, at the date of the war with Pyrrhus, or the outbreak of the struggle with Carthage.