BOOK VI. Change vian consti tution. been very old, and must necessarily have been frequently modified with the growth of wealth, the introduction of coined money, and the reduction in the standard of value. Owing to the scantiness of our information it is not likely that the researches of historians will ever succeed in tracing the successive steps of these modifications.' For the political history of Rome this question, though not altogether impertinent, is not of great moment. It suffices on the whole to discover the character of this element in the constitution in order to comprehend its influence upon political life, and this character is established with sufficient clearness. We know that the constitution of centuries at first formed the foundation of the Roman military system; that all the citizens, without distinction of rank, were divided according to certain property qualifications into five classes; that military service and war taxes were imposed upon them in proportion to their property, and that their share in the rights of sovereignty depended on the class to which they belonged. But at the time when Livy and Dionysius wrote their in the Ser- histories, the constitution which they looked upon as the Servian-i.e. the oldest known in Rome-had undergone a change which had made it more democratic than it had been. We are not informed in what this change consisted. Hence the strange circumstance that we are better acquainted with the detail of the political organization of Rome at the time of the legendary king Servius than at the time when our historians lived and had frequent opportunities, as Dionysius relates, of seeing the working of the centuriate assemblies, of watching their proceedings, and of studying every particular of their organization. Whilst they enumerate how many centuries of the first class, of the other four classes, of the knights, smiths, carpenters and musicians had the right of voting before the commencement of the republic, and how high was the census of each class, they do not tell us whether 'See Böckh, Metrologische Untersuchungen, p. 427 ff.; Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, i. p. 760 ff. at their time the five classes still existed, how many cen- CHAP. mine the to deter nature of this On the basis of these vague observations and a few Attempts accidental allusions to the comitia centuriata in Livy, Cicero, and others, attempts have been made since the revival of historical science to find out the nature of the change. transformation which Livy and Dionysius mention, and at what time it took place. It is not surprising that no positive result should have been obtained, for the materials were too scanty. On the form of the later comitia centuriata modern writers hold, in the main, two different opinions. Niebuhr 3 thought he might conclude from the words of Livy that the number of centuries was diminished by the reform from one hundred and ninety-three to seventy centuries of infantry; that these seventy centuries were formed of the thirty-five tribes, the older men in each 4 1 Dionys. iv. 21: οὗτος ὁ κόσμος τοῦ πολιτεύματος ἐπὶ πολλὰς διέμεινε γενεὰς φυλαττόμενος ὑπὸ Ῥωμαίων· ἐν δὲ τοῖς καθ' ἡμᾶς κεκίνηται χρόνοις καὶ μεταβέβληται εἰς τὸ δημοτικώτερον, ἀνάγκαις τισὶ βιασθεὶς ἰσχυραῖς, οὐ τῶν λόχων καταλυθέντων, ἀλλὰ τῆς κλήσεως αὐτῶν οὐκ ἔτι τὴν ἀρχαίαν ἀκρίβειαν φυλαττούσης, ὡς ἔγνων ταῖς ἀρχαιρεσίαις αὐτῶν πολλάκις παρών. 2 Liv. i. 43, 12: Nec mirari oportet hunc ordinem qui nunc est, post expletas quinque et triginta tribus duplicato earum numero, centuriis iuniorum seniorumque ad institutam ab Servio Tullio summam non convenire. Quadrifariam enim urbe divisa . . . . partes eas tribus appellavit. . . . neque eæ tribus ad centuriarum distributionem numerumque quicquam pertinuere. .... Niebuhr, Röm. Gesch. iii. p. 382, Germ. edit. Livy's words, 'post expletas quinque et triginta tribus duplicato earum numero,' refer to the year 241 B.C., when the number of tribes was increased to thirty-five, the maximum it ever reached. But Niebuhr fixes the reform of the comitia centuriata in the year 304 B.C., when the number of tribes was only thirty-one. According to his hypothesis, therefore, the number of centuries in the reformed comitia was sixty-two, and rose to seventy in 241 B.C. BOOK Theory of tribe representing one century, and the younger men another. The century of the later period would therefore have been equal to half a tribe. Niebuhr further conjectured that to these seventy centuries of infantry were added eighteen centuries of knights, consisting of twelve centuries of citizens with a census of one million asses, and six patrician centuries without a property qualification. But this view cannot be maintained, because it takes no notice of the division of the people into classes, the most essential element in the Servian constitution. Livy, speaking of the difference of the later comitia centuriata compared with those of Servius, does not say that the classes were abolished, but merely remarks that the number of centuries had been changed in consequence of the number of tribes having been increased to thirty-five. Had the census been entirely abolished for all classes, he would surely have mentioned it. But we have still stronger evidence that the classes were not abolished; for in several passages of later writers 2 not only classes are mentioned, but actually the five classes, so that it cannot be doubted that they continued to exist. 3 Professor Huschke is therefore right in maintaining that, even after the reform of the centuries, the old divi Niebuhr's opinion is that in the reformed centuries the patricians, irrespective of their census, were contained in the sex suffragia, or knights' centuries; that the plebeian citizens of a census above one million of asses formed the other twelve centuries of knights; and that the remainder of the citizens who had less than a million of asses and more than four thousand asses formed twice as many centuries as there were tribes: in 304 B.C., accordingly, 62 centuries, half of juniores half of seniores; after 241 B.C. 70 centuries, equally divided between juniores and seniores. 2 Sallust, Jug. 86: Marius interea milites scribere non more maiorum neque ex classibus, sed uti cuiusque libido erat capite censos plerosque. Comp. Cicero, De legib. iii. 19, 44, Pro Val. Flacco, 7, 15, De Repub. iv. 2: Quam commode ordines descripti, ætates, classes, equitatus, in quo suffragia sunt, etiam senatus. The Lex Voconia of the year 169 B.C., and even the Lex Thoria, 118 B.C., presuppose the existence of the first class. Cicero, Academ. prior. ii. 23, 73: Quis hunc philosophum non anteponit Cleanthi, Chrysippo reliquisque inferioris ætatis? qui mihi cum illo collati quintæ classis videntur. Ph. E. Huschke, Verfassung des Servius Tullius, Heidelberg, 1838, pp. 611-690 sion into classes was preserved. The mode in which this was done he supposes to have been a very strange one. He makes out the thirty-five tribes to have been constituted as subdivisions of the five classes. Ten tribes formed, he thinks, the first class; the second, third, and fourth classes consisted each of four tribes; and the fifth, of thirteen. Each of the tribes constitutes one centuria of juniores and one of seniores. By adding to these seventy centuries the old eighteen centuries of knights, Huschke obtains the number of eighty-eight centuries for the reformed comitia centuriata. No conjecture could be more arbitrary and fantastical than this. There is no evidence whatever of the existence of tribes organised according to property qualifications, and the number and arrangement of these tribes which Huschke proposes are utterly chimerical. 1 CHAP. The most plausible supposition was made by Octavius Theory of PantagaPantagathus; but this also is based upon no external thus. evidence, and its chief recommendation is the facility with which it combines the centuries with the thirty-five tribes. Pantagathus supposes that the number of centuries, which varied very much in the five classes of the Servian constitution (being respectively eighty, twenty, twenty, twenty, thirty), was in the later constitution equalised among all the classes, so that there were seventy centuries in each class. These seventy centuries of each class furnished for every one of the thirty-five tribes one century for the older men and one for the younger. All the five classes contained, therefore, five times seventy, or three hundred and fifty centuries. If to these are added eighteen centuries of knights, the sum total amounts to three hundred and sixty-eight centuries. It remains uncertain whether in this later organization there were also centuries of smiths, carpenters, and musicians; but this is not very probable, as the centuries no longer formed the foundation of the army. The conjecture of Pantagathus is communicated in a note by Ursinus to Livy, i. 43, printed in Drakenborch's edition of Livy. BOOK Question of the date of this change. The conjecture of Pantagathus has, in its essential parts, been approved by most modern investigators, and we may accept it as on the whole agreeing with the vague allusions of Livy and Dionysius to the comitia centuriata of the later period. But a second question now arises. At what time did the new order of things originate? Our authorities do not give us the least clue to answer this question, and very great differences of opinion consequently exist among modern writers. Guesses have been made as to the time, ranging from the abolition of the monarchy to the last year of the first Punic war-i.e. from 510 to 241 B.C.-and even beyond this period to the year 179 B.C., covering a space of more than three hundred years,' during which the most desperate struggles between patricians and plebeians were fought out. All through this long period of disturbance and excitement we hear not one word of a dispute concerning a reform of the comitia centuriata. Whilst the plebeians attacked the privileges of the patricians one by one, and gradually acquired equal rights, they apparently submitted to the organization of the centuriate assembly, which so much favoured the patricians that the plebeians found it impossible for a long time to effect the election of a member of their body as a magistrate, even after they had obtained the formal right of election. This silence is so eloquent that the reform has been generally believed to have taken place between the years 292 and 218 B.C., the narrative of which period has unfortunately been lost with the second decade of Livy's work. The year accordingly fixed upon for the reform, not without some internal probability, is the year 241 B.C., because in this year, with It has been supposed that the reform of the centuries took place:-1, soon after the establishment of the republic; 2, by the legislation of the decemvirs; 3, soon after the decemvirate; 4, in the censorship of Appius Claudius and C. Plautius, 312 B.C.; 5, in the censorship of Q. Fabius and P. Decius, 304 B.c. (this is Niebuhr's opinion); 6, in the year 241 B.C., when the number of thirty-five tribes was completed (this is Mommsen's opinion); 7, in the censorship of L. Æmilius and C. Flaminius, 220 B.C.; 8, in the censorship of M. Æmilius and M. Fulvius, 179 B.C. See Becker's Handbuch der röm. Alterth. ii. 3, p. 30. |