Rome Invented a Veto-Holding Office by Walking Out

In 494 BC, somewhere on the slopes of a hill outside Rome called Mons Sacer, several thousand Roman foot soldiers refused to come home. The grievance was debt: plebeian farmers were drafted into Rome's wars, came back to find their farms ruined, borrowed from patrician creditors at terms that often ended in personal enslavement, and then got drafted again. The historian Livy describes it as the first secession of the plebs. The negotiation that ended the strike produced an office that did not exist anywhere else in the ancient world.

The tribuni plebis — tribunes of the plebs — were elected each year by the plebeian assembly to protect plebeians from arbitrary patrician magistrates. The first pair, Lucius Albinius Paterculus and Gaius Licinius, took office for the year 493. Their core power was the ius intercessionis: a tribune could physically place himself between a citizen and a magistrate and veto the magistrate's order. The word veto is Latin for "I forbid," and this is its institutional birthplace. A tribune could block a consul, a praetor, even a vote in the Senate, by saying it.

The office worked because it was sacrosanct. The plebs collectively swore an oath that anyone who harmed a tribune in the exercise of his duty would be killed and his property forfeited. This was not metaphor — the curse was understood as binding on the gods. A patrician who laid hands on a tribune knew the consequence.

The Conflict of the Orders, the long political struggle between plebeians and patricians, ran roughly two centuries — from the secession to the Lex Hortensia of 287 BC, which made plebeian-assembly resolutions binding on the whole state. The tribunate outlived the dispute. Augustus made tribunician power one of the legal foundations of his regime, three centuries after a few Roman soldiers walked off the job.