ABSTRACT
In Rome when the century opens the long struggle between patrician and plebeian is drawing to its close. The other two forms of comitia were the legislative and elective bodies. Roman life, both public and private, was largely dominated by a spiritual element which the Roman called mos majorum, a term which may be literally translated ancestral custom, with the usual misleading results of literal translation. The mass of the citizens of Rome was very different in nature to that of a Greek state. The prolonged nature of the campaigning brought into being a new method of dealing with the consulship. At the beginning of the First Punic War Rome was faced by the difficulty of fighting a power of great naval strength which could only be assailed by sea. The average Roman of the days before Rome acquired an extra-Italian empire was devoted to the land he cultivated and to the life on it.
