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The Conflict of the Orders, also referred to as the Struggle of the Orders, was a political struggle between the plebeians (plebs) and patricians (patricii) of the ancient Roman Republic, in which the plebeians sought political equality and achieved it in 287 BC, after two centuries of strife.

According to Livy, the patricians were the aristocrats of Rome, taking over when the kings were expelled and the Republic formed in 509 BC, while the plebeians were the "lower class". Initially, only patricians could hold magistracies (such as the consulate), positions in the religious colleges, and sit in the Roman Senate.

However, the patrician clans abused their position, using the creditor's right of nexum to take plebeian debtors into bondage and selling them as slaves, favoring patricians over plebeians in court cases, and overriding the will of the Centuriate Assembly.

Plebeian responses included the establishment of the tribunes, whose authority to protect plebeians was eventually accepted by the patricians, and the concilium plebis whose decisions were originally binding on plebeians only, but in 287 applied to all citizens. The plebs prevailed over the patricians by engaging in secessio, the act of leaving the city and refusing to participate until the patricians gave in.

In 449 BC the decemvirs codified the law via the Twelve Tables, but then their 11th Table forbade intermarriage between patricians and plebeians, sharpening the distinction between the classes, and it was soon repealed by the Lex Canuleia of 445 BC.

In 367 the Lex Licinia Sextia resumed the previously suspended consulship and provided that one of the two consuls should always be a plebeian. Soon after the dictatorship, censorship, and praetorship became open to plebeians as well.

The final crisis in the struggle came in 287, when economically-stressed farmers demanded debt relief from the Senate and were rebuffed. A secessio resulted in the Senate appointing the plebeian Quintus Hortensius (dictator), who solved the problem in a manner unknown to us, then passed the lex Hortensia giving equal weight to the decrees of the Senate and the Council of Plebs. Although individuals identified themselves as plebeian or patrician for the remainder of the Republic and well into the Empire, and the patricians retained certain priesthoods, there was no political difference between the orders.

• Kurt Raaflaub, ed. Social Struggles in Archaic Rome: New Perspectives on the Conflict of the Orders (University of California Press, 1986)