Licinio-Sextian rogations

The Licino-Sextian rogations were a series of laws proposed by tribunes of the plebs, Gaius Licinius Stolo and Lucius Sextius Lateranus, enacted around 367 BC. Livy calls them rogatio – though he does refer to them at times as lex – as the plebeian assembly did not at the time have the power to enact leges (laws).[1]

These laws provided for a limit on the interest rate of loans and a restriction on private ownership of land. A third law, which provided for one of the two consuls to be a plebeian, was rejected. Two of these laws were passed in 368 BC, after the two proponents had been elected and re-elected tribunes for nine consecutive years and had successfully prevented the election of patrician magistrates for five years (375–370 BC). In 367 BC, during their tenth tribunate, this law was passed. In the same year they also proposed a fourth law regarding the priests who were the custodians of the sacred Sibylline Books.

The laws and the long struggle to pass them were part of the two hundred year conflict of the orders between the patrician aristocracy and the plebeians, who were most of the Roman populace. The conflict was one of the major influences on the internal politics of Rome during the first two centuries of the Roman Republic.

  1. ^ Drogula 2015, p. 37. "So-called because the Plebeian Assembly did not yet possess the legal capacity to pass a lex, nor would it have this capacity until the lex Hortensia of 287 BC. Livy generally refers to this bill put forward by the plebeian tribunes L Sextius and C Licinius as a rogatio... although he does occasionally refer to it as a lex".