Roman Public LifeGreenidge, A. H. J. (Abel Hendy Jones)
History
Roman Public Life
Greenidge, A. H. J. (Abel Hendy Jones)
Constitutional history -- Rome; Rome -- Politics and government
The view that the four tribes[275] comprised the country districts is
preferable, and is not incompatible with the fact that they certainly
designated parts of the city, nor even with the possibility of their
having been engrafted in some way on the older divisions of the _Ramnes_,
_Tities_, and _Luceres_.[276] Local creations of an artificial character,
independent of juxtaposition, are not unknown in early legislations;
they are found in the almost contemporary work of Cleisthenes of Athens.
But even this hypothesis is unnecessary; each tribe may have stretched
continuously with fairly definite boundaries beyond the city walls. The
country portions of these tribes were for a moment wholly lost by the
disastrous wars which followed the expulsion of the kings, and when the
_ager Romanus_ was again regained, a new organisation was adopted The
territory outside the walls was parcelled out into country tribes,[277]
and these grew in number as Rome’s conquests spread. The four Servian
tribe-names were kept as designations only of regions within the city.
Although the tribes were divisions of the land, and individuals were
registered in that tribe in which their land-allotment lay,[278] there is
no good reason for accepting the current belief that the landless citizen
was not enrolled in a tribe.[279] It has generally been assumed that the
only object of the Servian tribes was to furnish a system of registration
for taxation and the military levy. If this was the case, and we believe
that these burdens were imposed only on landed property, it follows as a
consequence that only holders of land were _tribules_. But there is no
evidence that their scope was so limited. They appear to be divisions of
the _populus Romanus_, and the disinherited or ruined Patrician who has
lost his land is still a member of that _populus_. The tribe to which
a landless man belonged would depend upon his domicile; it is a man’s
local position in a tribe, not the land he holds in it, which is given
as a criterion of his membership and of the political rights which it
subsequently conferred.[280]
The system of registration, which was the central idea of the Servian
reforms, was essentially military. It recognised only those persons
who were qualified for service by wealth, regarded them as forming an
army (_exercitus_), and divided this army into its two branches of
infantry and cavalry. This military organisation recognised one primary
and two secondary principles as the basis of classification; the first
was wealth, the second age, the third took the form of a subdivision
for strategic purposes, the military unit employed being the “hundred”
(_centuria_).
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