The plebeians won the right to form their own assembly called the Plebeian Assembly, as opposed to the Assembly of patricians, and it was later called the Tribal Assembly. The first Roman code of laws, the Twelve Tables, was written in 450 B.C. under plebeian pressure, and it gave the plebeians a degree of protection against unfair and oppressive patrician officials. Rome was still ruled by the upper class, a ruling oligarchy of patricians and wealthy plebeians who used bribes to control the Assembly and the Senate, the latter a bastion of aristocratic power. Over two centuries of class struggle, Rome forged a constitutional system based on civic needs rather than religious mystery.
The Greeks were the beginning of political thought, and the form political thought took from the beginning was related to the rationalism of the Greek mind. One of the primary conditions for the development of political thought in Greece was a sense of the value of the individual, and this also meant that one of the issues that had to be addressed was the proper relationship between the individual and the collective, between the individual and the state:
That sense had its manifestation as much in practice as in theory; and it issued into action in the shape of a practical conception of free citizenship of a self-governing community--a conception which forms the essence of the Greek city-state (Barker 2).
The classical features of Greek democratic tradition was an emphasis on disbursing political power among all citizens, and the participation of all citizens was seen as essential both to the well-being of the state and the citizen himself--these constitute the two prongs of citizenship. This tradition is embodied in aspects of the political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.
Rome created the first great world-state and developed an empirewide system of law and citizenship. The only important Roman discussions of the state which have s...