The causes of ... [the city's] destruction may be reduced to two. One was the change that took place in the course of time in ideas, resulting from t… - Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges

The symbols of this religion became modified in the course of ages. When the people of Greece and Italy began to represent their gods as persons, and to give each one a proper name and a human form, the old worship of the hearth-fire submitted to the common law which human intelligence, in that period, imposed upon every religion. The altar of the sacred fire was personified. They called it Vesta; the name was the same in Latin and in Greek, and was the same that in the common and primitive language designated an altar. By a process frequent enough, a common noun had become a proper name. By degrees a legend was formed. They pictured this divinity to themselves as wearing a female form, because the word used for altar was of the feminine gender. They even went so far as to represent this goddess in statues. Still they could never efface the primitive belief, according to which this divinity was simply the fire upon the altar and Ovid himself was forced to admit that Vesta was nothing else than a "living flame." If we compare this worship of the sacred fire with the worship of the dead, of which wo have already spoken, we shall perceive a close relation between them. ...It is a chaste fire; the union of the sexes must be removed far from its presence. They pray to it not only for riches and health, but also for purity of heart, temperance, and wisdom. "Render us rich and flourishing," says an Orphic hymn; " make us also wise and chaste." ...Still later, when they made the great Vesta of this myth of the sacred fire, Vesta was the virgin goddess. She represented in the world neither fecundity nor power; she was order, but not rigorous, abstract, mathematical order, the imperious and unchangeable law, which was early perceived in physical nature. She was moral order. They imagined her as a sort of universal soul, which regulated the different movements of worlds, as the human soul keeps order in the human system. Thus are we permitted to look into the way of thinking of primitive generations. The principle of this worship is outside of physical nature, and is found in this little mysterious world, this microcosm — man.

In every city the rich and the poor were two enemies living by the side of each other, the one coveting wealth, and the other seeing their wealth coveted. 'No relation, no service, no labor united them. The poor could acquire wealth only by despoiling the rich. The lich could defend their property only by extreme skill or by force. They regarded each other with the eyes of hate. There was a double conspiracy in every city the poor conspired from cupidity, the rich from fear. Aristotle says the rich took the following oath among themselves: "I swear always to remain the enemy of the people, and to do them all the injury in my power." It is impossible to say which of the two parties committed the most cruelties and crimes. Hati-ed effaced in their hearts every sentiment of humanity. There was at Miletus a war between the rich and the poor. At first the latter were successful, and drove the rich from the city; but afterwards, regretting that they had not been able to slaughter them, they took their children, collected them into some threshing-floors, and had them trodden to death under the feet of oxen. The rich afterwards returned to the city, and became masters of it. They took, in their turn, the children of the poor, covered them with pitch, and burnt them alive. What, then, became of the democracy? They were not precisely responsible for these excesses and crimes; still they were the first to be affected by them. There were no longer any governing rules; now, the democracy could live only under the strictest and best onserved rules. We no longer see any government, but merely factions in power. The magistrate no longer exercised his integrity for the benefit of peace and law, but for the interests and greed of a party. A command no longer had a legitimate title or a sacred character; there was no longer anything voluntary in obedience; always forced, it was always waiting for an opportunity to take its revenge.

[I]t does not appear that these men aspired at first to share the laws and rights of the patricians. Perhaps they thought, with the patricians themselves, that there could "be nothing in common between the two orders. No one thought of civil and political equality. That the plebeians could raise themselves to the level of the patricians, never entered the minds of the plebeian of the first centuries any more than it occurred to the patricians. ...[T]hese men seem to have preferred, at first, complete separation. In Rome they found no remedy for their sufferings; they saw but one means of escaping from their inferiority — this was to depart from Rome. ...In view of such an act the senate was divided in opinion. The more ardent of the patricians showed clearly that the departure of the plebs was far from afflicting them.. Thenceforth the patricians alone would remain at Rome with the clients that were still faithful to them. Rome would renounce its future grandeur, but the patricians would be masters there. They would no longer have these plebeians to trouble them, to whom the rules of ordinary government could not be applied, and who were an embarrassment to the city. ...But others, less faithful to old principles, or solicitous for the grandeur of Rome, were afflicted at the departure of the plebs. Rome would lose half its soldiers. What would become of it in the midst of the Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans — all enemies? The plebs had good qualities; why could not these be made use of for the interests of the city? These senators desired, therefore, at a cost of a few concessions, of which they did not perhaps see all the consequences, to bring back to the city those thousands of arms that made the strength of the legions. On the other side, the plebs perceived, at the end of a few months, that they could not live upon the Sacred Mount. They procured, indeed, what was materially necessary for existence, but all that went to make up an organized society was wanting. They could not found a city there, because they could not find a priest who knew how to perform the religious ceremony of the foundation. They could not elect magistrates, for they had no prytaneum with its perpetual fire, where the magistrate might sacrifice. They could find no foundation for social laws, since the only laws of which men then had any idea were derived from the patrician religion. In a word, they had not among them the elements of a city. The plebs saw clearly that by being more independent they were not happier; that they did not form a more regular society than at Rome; and that the problem, whose solution was so important to them, was not solved. ...It was found, therefore, that the plebs and patricians, though they had almost nothing in common, could not live without each other. They came together and concluded a treaty of alliance. This treaty appears to have been made on the same terms as those which terminate a war between two different peoples. Plebeians and patricians were indeed neither the same people nor the same city. By this treaty the patrician did not agree that the plebeian should make a part of the religious and political city; it does not appear that the plebs demanded it. They agreed merely that in the future the plebs, having been organized into something like a regular society, should have chiefs taken from their own number. This is the origin of the tribuneship of the plebs — an entirely new institution, which resembled nothing that the city had known before.