Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/120

100 place publicly and before witnesses, was declared null; and a revision of the register of landed property, which was at the same time the levy-roll, was directed to be made every fourth year. The mancipatio and the census thus arose out of the Servian military organization.

It is evident at a glance that this whole institution was effects of originally of a military nature. In the whole detailed scheme we do not encounter a single feature which points to any destination of the centuries to other than purely military purposes; and this alone must, with every one accustomed to think regarding such things, form a sufficient reason for pronouncing its application to political purposes a later innovation. The regulation also, by which every one who had passed his sixtieth year was excluded from the centuries, becomes absolutely absurd, if they were intended from the first to form a representation of the burgess-community similar to and parallel with the curies. Although, however, the organization of the centuries was introduced merely to nlarge the warlike resources of the burgesses by the inclusion of the metœci, and there is therefore no greater perversion than to represent that organization as the introduction of a timocracy in Rome, the new obligation imposed upon the inhabitants to bear arms exercised in its consequences a material influence on their political position. He who is obliged to become a soldier, must also, wherever the state is not rotten, have it in his power to become an officer; beyond question plebeians also could now be nominated in Rome as centurions and as military tribunes, and by that step admission even to the senate (to which, besides, there was no obstacle de jure, P. 71), was probably de facto thrown open; this of course by no means involved admission into the burgess-body. Although, moreover, the institution of the centuries was not intended to curtail the political privileges exclusively possessed by the burgesses as hitherto represented in the curies, yet it was inevitable that those rights, which the burgesses hitherto had exercised, not as the assembly of curies, but as the burgess-levy, should pass to the new centuries of burgesses and metœci. Henceforward, accordingly, it was the centuries who interposed