Judicial business, which no one has ever assumed to be a primitive function of the Roman assembly, needs no long consideration here. Among the early Indo-Europeans the settlement of disputes and the punishment of most crimes were in the hands of the families and brotherhoods; only treason and closely related offences were noticed by the state; and these cases were tried by the king in the presence of the assembly.[1081] The religious ideas attaching to crime and punishment[1082] in early Rome suggest that the priests had the same connection with these matters there as among the Celts and Germans. That condition yielded to the growing authority of the king, who is represented by the ancients as wielding an absolute power of life and death over his people and as allowing in capital cases an appeal to the assembly at his own discretion.[1083] From the general conception of the relation between king and assembly as established in this chapter, it is necessary to infer that if the people had any claim to a share in the jurisdiction, it must have been slight as well as vague, and one which they were in no position to enforce. A review of the individual kings might give the impression that an act of the assembly was unessential to filling the regal office. Not only were Romulus and Tatius kings without election,[1084] but according to Livy[1085] Numa’s appointment was made by the senate alone; and Servius ruled long and introduced his great reforms before his election.[1086] Tarquin the Proud to the end of his reign was neither appointed by the senate nor chosen by the people.[1087] From these four or five instances of kings who ruled without election, as well as from the fact that both the dictatorship—a temporary return to monarchy—and the office of rex sacrorum—the priestly successor to the monarch—were filled by appointment, we might infer that the kingship was not elective.[1088] But on the other hand the word interregnum, which could not have been invented in the republican period and which involves the idea of election, as well as the general custom of choosing kings among primitive European peoples, may be added to the authority of our sources[1089] in favor of an elective monarchy in earliest Rome. The nomination of the king by the competent person was perhaps acclaimed in a contio in some such way as among the early Germans. Such an election, we may suppose, was in the beginning legal without further action on the part of the people. But the accession of a king was a momentous event in the life of a generation—far more important than the annual declaration of war upon a neighbor—and the advantage of a formal vote of the curiate assembly, after its institution, was obvious both to the king and to the sacerdotes; it gave to the former the solemn oral pledge of obedience from the citizens, and to the latter an opportunity to influence the proceedings through the auspices and through the manipulation of the calendar.