Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/284

264 its high and free position remained almost equally formidable to the burgesses and to the metœci, and secured equality of legal redress in the nation. But when the community itself was called regularly to elect and to decide, and the president was practically reduced from its master to its commissioner for a set term, this relation could no longer be maintained as it stood; least of all when the state had to be re-modelled on the morrow of a revolution, which could only have been carried out by the co-operation of the patricians and the metœci. An extension of that community was inevitable; and it was accomplished in the most comprehensive manner by admitting into the curies (and to that extent placing on an equal footing with the old burgesses) the collective plebeiate, that is, all the non-burgesses who were not slaves or citizens of extraneous communities living at Rome under the jus hospitii. But at the same time the comitia curiata, which hitherto had been legally and practically the first authority in the state, were almost totally deprived of their constitutional prerogatives. They were still allowed to give their sanction to acts purely formal, or transactions of a private character relating merely to individuals (such as the vow of allegiance to be made to the consul or the dictator when they entered on office just as previously to the king—P. 67—and the legal dispensations requisite for an arrogatio or a testament); but they were not to be allowed henceforward to perform any act of a properly political character. All the political prerogatives of the public assembly—as well the decision on appeals in criminal causes (which indeed were essentially political processes), as the nomination of magistrates and the adoption or rejection of laws—were transferred to, or were first acquired by, the assembled levy of those bound to military service; so that the centuries now received the rights, as they had previously borne the burdens, of citizens. By this step the small beginnings of the Servian constitution (as, in particular, the handing over to the army the right of assenting to the declaration of an aggressive war, P. 101) attained such a development that the curies were completely and for ever cast into the shade by the assembly of the centuries, and people became accustomed to regard the latter as the sovereign people. There was no debate in that assembly any more than in that of the curies, except when the presiding magistrate chose himself to speak or bade others do so; of