Considerazioni su populus e partes. L'exemplum di secessione e potestà tribunizia

The concepts of res publica and populus occupy a central position in Roman legal and political experience. The unitary con-cept of populus does not efface the plurality of its constitutive components. The plebeian secession of 494 BC shows with particular clarity that the relationship between the whole and the part is not an abstract notion: the plebs, as part of the people, ruptures the unity of the whole through an act of negation that is at once territorial, political, legal, and religious. The resolution of this rupture does not occur through a return to the previous order, but through a constitutional re-definition of the balance between whole and part. The tribunate thus emerges as an institution capable of interrupting the ordinary functioning of the republic and, at the same time, of expressing its own political and law-making initiative, initially with the necessary aid of the auspices and later, after the lex Hortensia, autonomously