Brevi note per una conciliazione delle fonti sui fatti del 494 a.C.: alle radici del potere tribunizio

In the doctrine of the last century the use of the literary sources on the birth of the plebeian power in the early roman republic has been often object of ideological mystification: this article is an attempt to exploit the coherence of those sources in their own purity, starting, in particular, from the narration of Livius and Dionysius on the facts of 494 B.C. These Authors describe clearly the revolutionary atteinement of tribunes’ power: the menace of a military mutiny determinates patrician’s decision to give to plebs the right of choosing their own political delegates with restricted faculty (primarily, the ius auxilii), but the crucial and ingenious invention of the plebs secluded on the Sacer mons is to make untouchable the person of tribun voting in favour of leges sacratae. The hypothesis underlined in this paper is that this tribunes’ inviolability (named sacrosanctitas) decreed by leges sacratae and defended by the revolutionary power of the secluded plebs makes the plebeians magistrates able to do everything against the faculty of praetores and other urbans delegates, also before a lex publica gives the tribunes wider constitutional powers.