The political position of the _libertini_ was probably better at the beginning than at the end of the Republic. Under the Servian _régime_ they were, with all other citizens, members of the tribes; whether they were at first members of the centuries depends on the question whether free birth was always a requisite for military service, and this is a point on which evidence entirely fails us;[584] but when the _comitia centuriata_ had ceased to be a military and become a purely political institution, there is no reason to assume their exclusion. They would have been members of the _comitia tributa_ and _concilium plebis_ from the earliest institution of these two bodies. The freedmen (rarely landowners and usually mechanics) belonged in the main to the four old city tribes. This accident had become a legal prescription by the year 312 B.C. In that year the revolutionary census of App. Claudius, which we shall describe elsewhere,[585] spread them over all the tribes,[586] and probably, according to their census, over all the centuries. In 304 B.C. the old arrangement, which limited the freedman’s vote, was reverted to.[587] The censors of 169 went further and restricted them all to a single tribe.[588] The conflict required the intervention of law, and it was probably the _lex Aemilia_ (of M. Aemilius Scaurus, consul in 115 B.C.) which re-established the old principle of restriction to the urban tribes.[589] But the question of the freedman’s vote became a battle-cry in the last century of the Republic. In 88 B.C. the democratic tribune Sulpicius passed a law which gave the _libertinus_ the tribe of his patron.[590] It was repealed by the optimates; but the second triumph of the democrats in 84 B.C. again restored the law,[591] until Sulla’s ascendency finally established the limitation to the four city tribes. The freedmen were excused the burden, because not thought worthy of the honour, of regular military service in the legions.[592] The same prejudice did not apply to the fleet, and for this service _libertini_ were freely employed.[593] The lack of free birth was also a ground of exclusion from the magistracy, and therefore from the Senate, to which this was the stepping-stone.[594] § 2. _The Theory of the Constitution_