The standard abbreviation for the government of Rome was SPQR: senatus populusque Romanus (‘Senate and the people of Rome’). Its institutions were based upon a society that was formally stratified into eight classes of citizens: senators, equites and the people (six classes).
In the regal period the Roman army comprised three thousand infantry and three hundred cavalry (equites). These rounded figures imply an equal contribution from each of the three tribes of Rome, the Ramnes, Tities and Luceres, perhaps representing the Latins, Sabines and Etruscans respectively. Servius, the penultimate king, reorganised the army on the basis of wealth: the cavalry came from the middle classes, as before; the infantry was provided by the rest of the population, modelled on the Greek phalanx but divided into five classes.
The men of the first class included those that could afford to equip themselves with a round shield, cuirass, greaves, spear and sword; the second class lacked a bronze cuirass, the other classes had less, the fifth had only slings and stones. Ranking below the five classes was a large number of men with little or no property, the capite censi, indicating that they were counted by heads and not by wealth. They were not eligible for the army though in an emergency they did fight.
Each of the five classes was subdivided into centuries (which could include either more or fewer than a hundred men) of seniores over the age of forty-six, who defended the city, and juniores aged seventeen to forty-five, who went to war. For voting purposes, the centuries of all the classes withdrew to outside the pomerium (the city boundary), on the Campus Martius (a low-lying plain west of the Tiber in a bend in the river near Tiber Island).
At one time the will of the Curiate Assembly was probably expressed by shouting, but at some point a system of group voting evolved in which the majority vote within a curia counted as one vote of the whole assembly. In the Centuriate Assembly the votes were cast by century. The votes of the cavalry units were taken first, followed by those of the infantry starting with the vote of the first class. Voting ended as soon as a majority was reached. The voting was thus weighted in favour of the wealthy classes – the equites and the first class together comprising ninety-eight centuries, and the second to fifth classes together only ninety. In addition there were two centuries of engineers, two of musicians and one that included the capite censi, making one hundred and ninety three centuries in all.
Leave a Reply