The Roman Assemblies From Their Origin to the End of the Republic

CHAPTER I. The Populus and Its Earliest Political Divisions

THE POPULUS AND ITS EARLIEST POLITICAL DIVISIONS

I. The Populus

The derivation of populus, “people,” “folk,” is unknown. Attempts have been made to connect it with populari, “to devastate,” so as to give it primarily a military signification—perhaps simply “the army.” In the opinion of others it is akin to plēnus, plēbes, πλῆθος, πολύς, πίμπλημι, in which case it would signify “multitude,” “mass,” with the idea of collective strength, which might readily pass into “army” as a secondary meaning. Fundamentally personal, it included all those individuals, not only the grown men but their families as well, who collectively made up the state, whether Roman or foreign, monarchical or republican. Only in a transferred sense did it apply to territory. The ancient definition, “an association based on the common acceptance of the same body of laws and on the general participation in public benefits,” is doubtless too abstract for the beginnings of Rome. Citizenship—membership in the populus—with all that it involved is elaborately defined by the Roman jurists; but for the earlier period it will serve the purpose of the present study to mention that the three characteristic public functions of the citizen were military service, participation in worship, and attendance at the assembly. In a narrower sense populus signifies “the people,” “masses,” in contrast with the magistrates or with the senate, as in the well known phrase, senatus populusque Romanus.

II. The Three Primitive Tribes

The Romans believed that the three tribes which composed the primitive populus were created by one act in close relation with the founding of the city. For some unknown reason they were led to connect the myth of Titus Tatius, the eponymous hero of the Tities, with the Quirinal, and with the Sabines, who were generally supposed to have occupied that hill. Consequently some of their historians felt compelled to defer their account of the institution of the tribes till they had told of the union of the Sabines with the Romans, which at the same time gave them an opportunity to derive the names of the curiae from those of the Sabine women. Varro, however, who protests against this derivation, refers the organization of the people in the three tribes to an earlier date, connecting it immediately with the founding of Rome. Though he affirmed that one tribe was named after Romulus, another after Titus Tatius, and the third, less positively, after an Etruscan Lucumo, Caeles Vibenna, who came to the aid of Romulus against Titus Tatius, neither he nor any other ancient writer identified the Tities with the Sabines, whose quarter in the city was really unknown, or the Luceres with an Etruscan settlement under Caeles whether in the Vicus Tuscus or on the Caelian hill. Since the Romans knew the tribe in no other relation than as a part of the state, they could not have thought of their city as consisting originally of a single tribe, to which a second and afterward a third were added, or that any one of these three tribes had ever been an independent community. These views are modern; there is no trace of them in the ancient writers. Even if it could be proved that they took this point of view, the question at issue would not thereby be settled; for no genuine tradition regarding the origin of the primitive tribes came down to the earliest annalists; the only possible knowledge they possessed on this point was deduced from the names of the tribes and from surviving institutions presumably connected with them in the period of their existence. Under these circumstances modern speculations as to their independent character and diverse nationality seem absurd. The proper method of solving the problem is to test and to supplement the scant sources by a comparative study of the institution.

The low political vitality of the three primitive Roman tribes, as of the corresponding Greek phylae, when we first meet with them in history, points to the artificiality of these groups—a condition indicated further both by their number and by their occurrence in other Italian states. Far from being confined to Rome, the tripartite division of the community belonged to many Greek and to most Italian peoples, and has entered largely into the organization of communities and nations the world over. A derivation of tribus, Umbrian trifu, accepted by many scholars, connects it with the number three. The wide use of this conventional number, and more particularly the regular recurrence of the same three Dorian tribes in many Dorian cities—as of the same four Ionic tribes in many Ionic cities—and of the same three Latin (or Etruscan?) tribes in several old Latin cities, could not result from chance combinations in all these places, but point unmistakably to the systematic imitation of a common pattern. That pattern must be ultimately sought in the pre-urban populus, ἔθνος, folk. If we assume that before the rise of city-states the Ionian folk was organized in four tribes (phylae) and the Dorian and Latin folks in three tribes, we shall have a condition such as will satisfactorily explain the tribal organization of the city-states which grew up within the areas occupied by these three folks respectively. The thirty votes of the Latins may be best explained by assuming a division of their populus into three tribes, subdivided each into ten groups corresponding to the Roman curiae. Whereas in Umbria the decay of the pre-urban populus allowed its tribes to become independent, in Latium a development in that direction was prevented by the rise of city-states, which completely overshadowed the preëxisting organization.

The Italian city-state grew not from a tribe or a combination of tribes, but from the pagus, “canton,” a district of the pre-urban populus with definite consecrated boundaries, usually centering in an oppidum—a place of defence and refuge. In the beginning the latter enjoyed no superior right over the territory in which it was situated. A pagus became a populus at the point of time when it asserted its political independence of the folk. The new state organized itself in tribes and curiae after the pattern of the folk. In the main this arrangement was artificial, yet it must have taken some account of existing ties of blood. At the same time the oppidum became an urbs—a city, the seat of government of the new populus. Thus arose the city-state. In the case of Rome several oppida with parts of their respective pagi were merged in one urbs—that known as the city of the four regions. Urbs and ager excluded each other, just as the oppidani contrasted with the pagani; but both were included in the populus.

Most ancient writers represent the three tribes as primarily local, and the members as landowners from the founding of the city. Although their view may be a mere inference from the character of the so-called Servian tribes, the continuity of name from the earlier to the later institution points to some degree of similarity between them. It can be easily understood, too, how in time the personal feature might have so overcome the local as to make the old tribes appear to be based on birth in contrast with the territorial aspect of the new.

It was probably on the institution of the later tribes that the earlier were dissolved. They left their names to the three double centuries of patrician knights. Their number appears also as a factor in the number of curiae, of senators, and of members of the great sacerdotal colleges. Other survivals may be found in the name “tribunus,” in the tribuni militum, the tribuni celerum, the ludus Troiae, and less certainly in the Sodales Titii.

III. The Curiae

The curia as well as the tribe was a common Italian institution. We know that it belonged to the Etruscans, the Latins, and several other peoples of Italy. There were ten curiae to the tribe, making thirty in all. The association was composed, not of gentes as many have imagined, but of families. For the performance of its social and religious functions it had a house of assembly, also called curia, in which the members—curiales—gathered for religious festivals. The place of meeting was a part of an edifice belonging to the collective curiae. In historical time there were two such buildings—the Curiae Veteres on the northeast slope of the Palatine near the Arch of Constantine, containing seven curial meeting-places, and the Novae Curiae near the Compitum Fabricium, containing the others. Their deities were Juno and Tellus; and their chief festivals were the Fornacalia and the Fordicidia. As the worship was public, the expense was paid by the state. At the head of the curia stood the curio—who in historical time was merely a priest—assisted in his religious functions by his wife and children, by a lictor and a flamen. The fact that the curio had these officials proves that he was originally a magistrate. One of the curiones the people elected curio maximus to exercise general supervision over the worship and festivals of the association.

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