CŎMĬTĬA. This word is formed from _co_, _cum_, or _con_, and _ire_, and therefore _comitium_ is a place of meeting, and _comitia_ the meeting itself, or the assembled people. In the Roman constitution the comitia were the ordinary and legal meetings or assemblies of the people, and distinct from the _contiones_ and _concilia_. All the powers of government were divided at Rome between the senate, the magistrates, and the people in their assemblies. Properly speaking, the people alone (the _populus_) was the real sovereign by whom the power was delegated to the magistrates and the senate. The sovereign people or populus, however, was not the same at all times. In the earliest times of Rome the populus consisted of the patricians (or patres) only, the plebs and the clients forming no part of the populus, but being without the pale of the state. The original populus was divided into thirty _curiae_, and the assembly of these curiae (the _comitia curiata_) was the only assembly in which the populus was represented. A kind of amalgamation of the patricians and the plebs afterwards appeared in the comitia of the centuries, instituted by king Servius Tullius, and henceforth the term populus was applied to the united patricians and plebeians assembled in the _comitia centuriata_. But Servius had also made a local division of the whole Roman territory into thirty tribes, which held their meetings in assemblies called _comitia tributa_, which, in the course of time, acquired the character of national assemblies, so that the people thus assembled were likewise designated by the term populus.