Quintus Hortensius
Quintus Hortensius was the plebeian the senate appointed dictator in 287 BC when the plebs had marched out of Rome for the last time and camped on the Janiculum over their debts, and the law he carried to bring them back, that what the plebeian assembly resolved bound the whole Roman people, ended two centuries of the struggle between the orders and is the thing his name is attached to; he died in office and almost nothing else about him survives. The sources are late and thin. He was of a plebeian family that had produced no magistrates, which was the point of choosing him, and the crisis he was chosen for was the fifth secession, provoked, the tradition says, by debt and by the patricians' refusal to accept that the assembly of the plebs, meeting by tribes without them, could legislate for the state. Two earlier laws, of 449 and 339, had said something like it and been evaded on the ground that the senate had to give its assent first. The Hortensian law removed the condition, and from 287 a plebiscite was a law. What that meant in practice is argued. The assembly of the tribes was presided over by the tribunes, and the tribunes were by then members of the same office-holding class as the senators. The constitution the law produced was a nobility of patricians and rich plebeians together, governing through a senate that the assemblies rarely crossed for the next hundred and fifty years, until the Gracchi found the law and used it as the weapon it had always been. The dictator also, according to Macrobius, made market days lawful for court business so that the country people could get their cases heard. He is recorded as dying while still dictator, in the same year, and the office was not used again for a domestic crisis until Sulla.
- Lived: 330 BCE – 287 BCE
- Nationality: Roman
- Roles: dictator, statesman
