Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/116

96 plete armour, and in that point of view were pre-eminently regarded as "those summoned to war-service" (classici). The four following ranks of smaller land-holders, the possessors respectively of three fourths, of a half, of a quarter, or of an eighth of a normal farm, were required to fulfil service, but not to equip themselves in complete armour. As the land happened to be at that time apportioned, almost the half of the farms were entire hides, while each of the classes possessing respectively three fourths, the half, and the quarter of a hide, amounted to scarcely an eighth of the freeholders, and those again holding an eighth of a hide amounted to fully an eighth of the whole number. It was accordingly laid down money was so slow and difficult, the civil organization would be based upon a purely monetary rating. But it is of importance to note that, as Boeckh in particular has most fully shown in his Metrologische Untersuchungen, the sums specified are for so early a period much too high. 100,000 heavy asses or pounds of copper, according to my investigations, = 400 Roman pounds of silver, or about 1050l., is an incredible rating for a full burgess at a time when an ox was valued at 100 asses, = 1l. 1s. Boeckh's hypothesis that the assessments are to be understood as referring to the lighter as (an hypothesis, by-the-way, which rests on the same basis as mine, viz., that the scheme before us is that of the later, and not that of the original census) has of necessity been abandoned, for there are positive proofs that the sums of the census as given by tradition, were reckoned by the heavy as equal to the sestertius. Nothing remains but to assume that the assessments were originally reckoned in land, and were converted into money at a time when landed property had already attained a high money-value.

(3) Landed property, as is well known, formed the qualification for the tribus rusticæ all along, and for the tribus urbanæ down to the censorship of Appius Claudius in. In my work on the Roman Tribes, I have proved that the centuries and classes proceeded from the tribes, and therefore (setting aside the additional centuries of liticines, &c.) the qualification of a tribulis supplied the basis for the proportional arrangement of the classes.

(4) A direct and in the highest sense trustworthy testimony is furnished by the Twelve Tables in the enactment: adsiduo [civi] vindex adsiduus esto; proletario civi qui volet vindex esto. The proletarius was the capite census (Fest. v. proletarium, Cic. de Rep. ii. 22), that is, the burgess not included within the five classes; adsiduus, on the other hand, denoted any burgess belonging to the five classes (Charisius, p. 58, ed. Putsch Patsch p. 75, ed. Keil, comp. Gell. xix. 8, 15: classicus adsiduusque, non proletarius) as indeed necessarily follows from their being contrasted. Now adsiduus, as a comparison between it and residuus, dividuus, &c., incontestably shows, is precisely identical in signification with the German ansässig ("settled on the soil," "permanently domiciled"); and the same holds true of locuples, which is put by the ancients as synonymous with adsiduus (Gell. xvi. 10, 15). Compare, moreover, the passage in Livy, xlv. 15; ''eos, qui prædium prædiave rustica pluris H.S. xxx. millium haberent censendi jus factum est;'' a formula in which, in my opinion, a full indication has been preserved of the nature of the so-called Servian assessments.