Lucius Sextius Lateranus becomes Rome’s first plebeian consul

Story: 366 B.C.E.  |  Last updated: January 14, 0001

For centuries, Rome’s highest office had been the exclusive preserve of one class. The two consuls who led the republic each year were always patricians — men born into the aristocratic families who controlled the Senate, the priesthoods, and the law. In 366 B.C.E., that barrier fell, at least in name, when Lucius Sextius Lateranus took office as one of Rome’s two consuls, becoming the first plebeian to hold the position in recorded Roman history.

Key facts

• Plebeian consul Rome: Lucius Sextius Lateranus was elected consul for 366 B.C.E. following a decade of political struggle, becoming what the historian Livy called “the first of the plebeians to attain that honour.”
• Leges Liciniae Sextiae: The laws that made his election possible — co-authored with fellow tribune Gaius Licinius Stolo — also capped individual ownership of public land and restructured debt repayment, addressing economic grievances alongside political ones.
• Decemviri sacris faciundis: The same legislative push abolished a two-man patrician priesthood guarding the sacred Sibylline Books and replaced it with a ten-member college, five patricians and five plebeians — extending the reform from politics into religion.

Ten years in the making

The road to 366 B.C.E. began in 375 B.C.E., when Lucius Sextius and Gaius Licinius Stolo were first elected tribunes of the plebs. They arrived with a package of three laws. One restructured debt so that interest already paid would be subtracted from the principal. Another capped individual use of public land at 500 iugeras — roughly 300 acres — and limited how many cattle a single person could graze on common land. The third, and most contested, required that one of Rome’s two annual consuls be a plebeian.

The patricians refused to let the bills come to a vote. In response, the two tribunes used their power of veto to block the election of military tribunes — the consular substitutes who governed in some years — for five consecutive years. Rome’s political machinery ground nearly to a halt.

Year after year, Sextius and Licinius were reelected to the tribunate. By 368 B.C.E., the Senate appointed the celebrated general Marcus Furius Camillus as dictator to force a resolution. He resigned under unclear circumstances. The Plebeian Council passed the debt and land laws but again rejected the consulship provision. The two tribunes threatened not to stand for reelection unless all three measures were voted on together — a form of political leverage that finally worked.

In 367 B.C.E., returned to office for a tenth time, Sextius and Licinius saw all three laws pass. Later that year, Camillus — now dictator again to repel a Gallic incursion — returned to Rome to find the patrician senators refusing to ratify the election of Sextius as consul. The standoff nearly provoked another plebeian secession, the dramatic withdrawal of the common people from the city that had forced concessions before. Camillus brokered a compromise: the patricians would recognize the first plebeian consul, and in return the plebeians would accept a new patrician-only magistrate, the praetor, to administer justice in the city.

What the plebeian consul Rome moment looked like in practice

Lucius Sextius’s actual year in office was, by Livy’s account, quiet. There were rumors of Gallic movement and unrest among Rome’s allies, the Hernici, but the patrician senators decided not to act — partly, Livy suggests, to deny the plebeian consul a military command. Three new patrician magistrates were installed that year: one praetor and two curule aediles. The plebeians were unhappy. The compromise that had made Sextius’s election possible had also created new patrician offices alongside it.

Still, the symbolic weight was enormous. A man without patrician blood now held the fasces — the bundle of rods and axes that represented Roman executive power. That had not happened before, or not in the way Livy and his tradition told it.

Lasting impact

The Leges Liciniae Sextiae opened a slow but real process of political integration in Rome. Over the following generations, plebeians gained access to the praetorship, the censorship, the dictatorship, and the major priesthoods. The Conflict of the Orders — the long struggle between Rome’s two classes — moved gradually toward a new Roman aristocracy defined not purely by birth but by office-holding. Families who produced consuls became the nobilitas, and plebeian families who reached the consulship entered that circle alongside their patrician counterparts.

The debt and land provisions of the laws also mattered. Caps on public land use, however imperfectly enforced, established a principle that would resurface repeatedly in Roman political life — including in the much later, and more turbulent, campaigns of the Gracchi brothers in the second century B.C.E. The idea that the state had an interest in limiting the concentration of common resources did not disappear.

The reform of the Sibylline priesthood was quieter but equally significant. Religious authority in Rome was deeply political. Extending it to plebeians was not a ceremonial gesture — it shifted who had standing to interpret the sacred texts that could authorize or forbid major state actions.

Rome’s later republican system — with its interlocking offices, its checks on individual power, and its formal accommodation of different social groups — was shaped in part by what Sextius and Licinius built across those ten stubborn years.

Blindspots and limits

The triumphant narrative requires some scrutiny. Modern historians, including T.J. Cornell, have noted that for twelve years after the law passed — from 355 to 343 B.C.E. — both consuls were patricians, suggesting the requirement was not enforced or was openly ignored. Cornell and others also argue that it may have been the later Lex Genucia of 342 B.C.E., not the Lex Licinia Sextia, that truly institutionalized power-sharing between the orders. On this reading, Lucius Sextius’s election, while real, becomes “rather less impressive” as a structural breakthrough.

There is also the matter of who the plebeians were. The tribunes who fought for these laws, and the men who eventually held the consulship, were members of wealthy plebeian families with the resources and connections to pursue office. The debt relief provisions addressed the conditions of poorer Romans more directly, but the political gains largely benefited an emerging plebeian elite — not the small farmers and debtors whose economic precarity had fueled the broader conflict.

Livy wrote from a distance of more than three centuries, and the historical record for this period is thin and contested. The story of Lucius Sextius may be accurate in its broad outline, or it may be partly a later construction. What is harder to dispute is that Rome’s class structure did, over time, become more permeable — and that this struggle was part of how that happened.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Lucius Sextius

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