The Servian Reforms
Author(s): Hugh Last
Source: The Journal of Roman Studies , 1945, Vol. 35, Parts 1 and 2 (1945), pp. 30-48
Published by: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/297276
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THE SERVIAN REFORMS
By HUGH LAST
The origin and purpose of the centuriate organization are a subject for which the
surviving evidence is too scanty to permit of any confident interpretation; and it might
well be argued that, when so much has been written already about so little, it is idle to
write more. Nevertheless, I have ventured to put down the remarks which follow because,
unless I am wrong, there are still some relevant facts which have not been taken into account,
and also because certain recent treatments of the matter, by concentrating on selected details
without regard to the fundamental problem of the reason why the Servian system was
introduced, seem to me to have moved rather away from the truth than towards it. But
for the conclusions suggested below at most I do not claim more than that they deserve
consideration.
In dealing with so complicated a piece of history within the limits of an article it is
obviously both necessary to be selective and more than usually desirable to be clear. So
I have not hesitated either to pass by the less relevant detail in silence or to mention points
on which opinion is now generally agreed when such points are essential to make the
argument intelligible. For help in an attempt to attain these ends I owe my hearty thanks
to four friends-Professors Buckland and de Zulueta, Dr. David Daube and Dr. Momigliano,
and in particular also to the first three of them for their generosity in putting at my disposal
their knowledge of recent literature in the field of private law. They must not, however,
be assumed to share any of the views here outlined.
I. PATRICIANS, PLEBEIANS AND POPVLVS IN EARLY ROME
According to the account current in Rome of the late Republic, the early Romans
had formed a State based on kinship. Its individual members each naturally belonged to
a family, the families were grouped in curiae, and the curiae were grouped in the three
Romulian' tribes of the Ramnenses, Titienses and Luceres. Whether the title to
citizenship was membership of a family belonging to this organization or, as certain
analogies might perhaps be thought to suggest, membership of a curia, there are three
points on which the tradition betrays no doubt-(i) that the only political assembly was the
Comitia Curiata, (ii) that to exercise any public rights of citizenship a man must be in one
of the curiae of which this assembly was composed, and (iii) that the whole curiate structure
was founded on kinship.
What sections of the population did this system include ? In 1864 Mommsen, though
accepting the view that in later Republican times the Comitia Curiata had contained
plebeians as well as patricians, pronounced, I as Niebuhr had done before him, 2 that
originally the patricians had been the only citizens; and consequently he had to regard
the admission of plebeians as a comparatively late development, which he then sought to
date. That this undertaking proved difficult is not surprising, because the sources preserve
no trace whatever of an agitation by the Plebs to force an entry into the curiae; and in
i88o serious doubts about Mommsen's whole theory were expressed by W. Soltau.3 Then
in I887 there were printed the unfinished studies on kingship in ancient Italy wherein
H. Jordan 4 observed (pp. i5 ff.) that of the seven canonical kings of Rome all except the
eponymous Romulus and the two Etruscan Tarquins had names which are otherwise only
attested as having been borne by plebeians-Pompilius, Hostilius, Marcius and Tullius;
and this observation at length allowed proper weight to be given to the statement of Livy
that Numa and Servius Tullius, as well as the elder Tarquin, had sprung from the Plebs
(4, 3, i6). In 1893 the theory of a purely patrician citizen-body in early Rome was made
' Romische Forschungen i1 (Berlin, I864), 140 ff.
2 Romische Geschichte i, page of note I296, ff.
3 Ueber Entstehung und Zusammensetzung der
altromischen Volksversammlungen (Berlin, i88o), 69 ff,
4 Die Konige im alten Italien: ein Fragment (Berlin.
I 887).
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THE
SERVIAN
REFORMS
31
the subject of a damaging comment by Eduard Meyer,5 and in I906 it was exploded by
G. W. Botsford.6 Finally in 1924 Chr. Huelsen pointed out what should have been noticed
before-that of the seven places united in the Septimontium the only three bearing names
which are also personal had names belonging in historical times to plebeian families alone.
By now it may be said with some confidence that the earliest Romans formed a single
political body. Within this body, however, there were doubtless distinctions, due to varying
ability and wealth, of the sort which is found in every community; and it may be conjectured that these were the distinctions which in course of time hardened until the citizens
came to be sharply divided into patricians and plebeians. When that hardening process
first reached the point at which it became possible to regard the Roman population as
composed of two orders will probably always remain to some extent doubtful. Huelsen
indeed (o.c. 85), impressed by the fact that, whereas four of the Roman kings and three of
the hills in the Septimontium have plebeian names, such personal names as are found
among those of the earliest rustic tribes, whose formation Livy mentions under the year
495 B.C. (2, 2I, 7), all belong to families of patrician connection, was inclined to see in the
patriciate a governing oligarchy which did not begin to separate itself off from the rest of
the community until a date after the end of the regal period. In this he almost certainly
went too far ; for it is very difficult to believe that the formation of the orders occurred
suddenly after the expulsion of the kings and was not rather an outcome of the distinction
between leaders and led which must have existed at Rome, as in every other society, from
the start. But his suggestion is not wholly unprofitable. Though the aristocracy, claiming
that it alone was entitled to political office and that it alone had knowledge of the ius
diuinum and the ius humanum (if these two are to be distinguished so early), seems only
gradually to have shut itself off from the masses, and though G. De Sanctis 8 is undeniably
right in saying that tradition does not record exactly when this process had gone far enough
to justify the assertion that what he calls ' la serrata del patriziato ' had happened, it may
be doubted whether there is good ground for the widespread belief that the process had
reached this point by a date far back in the regal age. Once it has been recognized that some
of the kings of Rome bore names which in historical times were exclusively plebeian, it
becomes hard to hold that the patriciate, at any rate as it was composed during the opening
decades of the Republic, had long formed a caste apart; and this reflection makes possible
an attempt to fix the approximate period of a certain stage in the development of a closed
patriciate with the help of evidence which hitherto has been almost completely ignored.
The evidence here to be considered did not, indeed, escape the notice of Madvig 9;
but, presumably because it was completely incompatible with the general picture he was
concerned to draw, he dismissed the conclusion to which it points as ' ganz undenkbar'.
It was natural that one who held the patriciate to have stood in sharp opposition to the
Plebs from ' the earliest times ' (o.c. 73) should not find much value in the suggestion
that the denial of ius conubii between patricians and plebeians-the clearest' single sign of
the separation of the orders-was an innovation due to the second panel of decemuiri, the
traditional date of whose activity is 450 B.C. Yet this, unless I am mistaken, is the consistent
view of our three leading authorities-Cicero, Livy and Dionysius. Cicero (de re p. 2, 63)
describes these decemuiri as having added to the ten tables produced by their predecessors
two more ' quibus, etiam quae diiunctis populis tribui solent conubia, haec illi ut ne plebei
cum patribus essent, inhumanissima lege sanxerunt '. To call this measure ' inhumanissima
lex ', as Cicero does, is not the language of a man who believed it to be no more than the
restatement of a rule which had been in force for centuries. That Livy held the same
8 Storia
dei Romani I (Turin, 1907), 234.
5 Geschichte desAltertums 21 (Stuttgart, I893), 512
f.
6 'The Social Composition of the Primitive Roman
Populus,' in Political Science Quarterly 2I, I906,
498 ff.: see also The Roman Assemblies from their
Origin to the End of the Republic (New York, I909),
i6 ff.
7 ' I veri " Fondatori di Roma"', in Atti della
Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, Serie 3,
Rendiconti 2, 1923-4, 83 ff.
9 Die Verfassung und Verwaltung des romischen
Staates I (Leipzig, i88I), 84. A distant approach to
the same view, apparently made without knowledge
of Madvig's remark, is to be found in V. Costanzi's
article ' Sul divieto di connubio fra patrizi e plebei'
in Atti del .I Congresso nazionale di Studi Romani
(Rome, 1929), 2, 171 ff., at 176 f.
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32
HUGH
LAST
opinion he shows in at least three places. First, whether ' pessimo publico ' is the right
reading or not, the recent introduction of the bar to legal marriage between the orders is
plainly implied when C. Canuleius is made to ask (4, 4, 5) ' hoc ipsum, ne conubium patribus
cum plebe esset, non decemuiri tulerunt paucis his annis pessimo publico, cum summa
iniuria plebis ? ', and again just afterwards when he goes on (4, 4, io) ' quod priuatorum
consiliorum ubique semper fuit, ut in quam cuique feminae conuenisset domum nuberet,
ex qua pactus esset uir domo in matrimonium duceret, id uos sub legis superbissimae
uincula conicitis, qua dirimatis societatem ciuilem duasque ex una ciuitate faciatis '. These
two sentences make it sufficiently, clear that in Livy's opinion the Roman People was one
until the legislators of 450 B.C.-the subjects of the verbs ' dirimatis ' and 'faciatis 'devised the measure which split it into two. Secondly, Canuleius claims that Rome will
become united again ' conubiis redditis ' (4, 5, 5)-when conubium has been restored;
and what can be restored is not something which has never been possessed before. Finally
the speaker in 4, 6, 2, whoever he was, explains why the decemuiri had passed the offensive
law; and his explanation is, not that its provisions were a rule as old as Rome, but, ' quod
nemo plebeius auspicia haberet, ideoque decemuiros conubium diremisse ne incerta prole
auspicia turbarentur.' Here again it is the decemuiri who appear first to have broken off
conubium. So much for Livy, and with him for Macer, who was probably the immediate
source of the narrative in which the speech of Canuleius is set. It remains to mention
Dionysius, who also, by the motive he ascribes to the decemuiri in preventing legal marriage
between patricians and plebeians, suggests that the embargo was an innovation. They
added, he says (IO, 60, 5), two fresh tables EV cdv Kali M 6 V'POS 'V, P ET?1Va1 ToTs
TraTplKiOiLs TUpOs ToUs 6T1pOtiKOVJS ETrWyapi'as cuvvayaV 8t' OuE'V WOS E'POt SOKEIV ETEpOV i1
To P1l aVVE2eEV EIS 6'Po,votav ra EOvT) y'a,cov EhTaXayalts Ka OIKE1OTfTCOV KOtVCViats
cYUyKEpacrOEvTa.
It has often been admitted that at all times unions between patricians and plebeians
must in fact have occurred 10; but such unions in early Rome have been widely regarded
as either unrecognized by law or else as exposing the children to an unattested rule whereby
their status is alleged to have followed that of the inferior parent, and the prohibition
imposed by the second decemuiri has consequently been represented as no more than what
Schwegler called ' die formliche Sanction eines bestehenden Rechtsgebrauchs '.11 There
is, of course, no need to deny that the aristocracy had in confarreatio its own characteristic
form of marriage, or that for a son of what passed in those days as a ' big house ' to marry
into the village was not much more common in early Rome than such affairs were in
Victorian England. But the evidence, dispassionately considered, is clear in its suggestion
that the denial of conubium which the decemuiri of 450 B.C. sought to enact was a novelty;
and, if so, this same evidence points to the conclusion that it was not till then that the
separation of the orders had gone far enough to make it possible for those who favoured
such a development to attempt a legal prohibition of valid marriage between a member of
one and a member of the other. This conclusion is of some importance. It yields a date for
a certain stage in the growth of the distinction between patricians and plebeians; it confirms
the consistent view of the Romans themselves that both orders were always included in a
single citizen-body; it makes credible some other striking features of the tradition-such
as the plain suggestion of Cicero (pro Sestio 137), which it is one of J. S. Reid's many
services to have stressed,'2 that the Senate was open to plebeians from the beginning of the
Republic; and it disproves an assumption freely exploited by those who have sought to
discredit the ancient picture of society in primitive Rome.
The picture offered by such evidence as we have for the Roman People in its earliest
days is of a group of families united in a single body politic. A member of any one family
included in it could contract a valid marriage with a member of any other such family, and
all such members might therefore be said in the later language of the lawyers to have had
the ius conubii. Nor is there any reason to deny, what indeed has less generally been doubted,
10 See e.g. Soltau o.c. in note 3 above, 92 n. 2.
iudices, edited . . . by H. A. Holden (London, I883,
11 R6rnische Geschichte 3 (Tiubingen, I858), I7 n. 2.
etc.), 249.
12 In M. Tulli Ciceronis pro Publio Sestio oratio ad
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THE
SERVIAN
REFORMS
33
that, subject of course to the restrictions imposed by the contemporary views of property
and of the capacity to own it, the members of all these families were all equally in possession
of the ius commercii-the right, that is, as Ulpian briefly calls it (Epit. I9, 5), to buy and
sell' or, as it soon became, to acquire, hold and alienate property in the fullest sense of
these terms recognized by the ius ciuile. But Rome at this stage was very far from being a
democracy. Though all citizens had conubium and commercium, the humbler could not in
practice exercise their rights without limitation. That marriages between rich and poor
were rare is not surprising, but in matters connected with commercium the smaller people
were still under a special disability. For the law was as yet unwritten ; the aristocrats
kept knowledge of its rules and procedure jealously to themselves; and no one of the many
who were not ' in the know' could expect to get the law's protection unless his interests
were defended by one of the few who were. The commons had in fact to become the
clients of patrons chosen from the nobility; and, though both patron and client had
obligations to the other, they were not obligations between equals, with the result that the
duties of a client to his patron made the clientela an institution which sharpened the
economic distinction between rich and poor by turning the poor into dependents of the rich.
So much is enough for the private rights of citizens. Of their public rights even less
need be said ; for they scarcely existed. It is almost certainly true that every citizen could
take his place in the Comitia Curiata ; but this meant little if, as is probable, during the
regal period that assembly played only the smallest part in public affairs. When the
monarchy was vacant, it does indeed appear to have had some share in the appointment of
a new king ; but both the direct evidence and every parallel suggest that in normal times
the functions of government, such as they were, rested with the king, his officers and the
Senate which advised him. And for admission to this governing class the citizens of
humbler origin, though technically perhaps not ineligible, in fact had very little chance of
consideration.
It remains to say a word about the implications of this view for the course of later
development. The masses outside the oligarchy might make it their programme to break
down the exclusiveness of the few and gain access for some of their number to the class
which exercised political power. Or again they might seek to improve the lot of the poorby getting the law set down in writing so that all men at least might know what their legal
rights and duties were, by mitigating the severity of the law of debt, or possibly by securing
a more even distribution of wealth. To these and other such ends the agitations which
marked the first two centuries of the Republic might have been directed. But what they
could not attempt was to secure for the many an entry into the citizen-body; for that
citizen-body contained from the outset the many as well as the few. The theory of a purely
patrician citizenship-of cutriae to which only patricians belonged-is untenable ; and the
conflict known in its later stages as the ' Struggle of the Orders' must be regarded as a
conflict, not between citizens and non-citizens but, between two classes within a single
citizenship.
II. IMMIGRATION
To say that all Romans in the regal age were equally citizens and that all were members
of the cutriae is not to imply that there were no free inhabitants of the Ager Romanus
outside the citizen-body. Prosperous communities notoriously attract immigrants, such
as those whose presence in Attica presented a problem by the end of the seventh century;
and it is clear enough both that in Italy there were people ready to go where a living was to
be made and also that there were at least certain periods when Rome was a place where
they could make it. Apart from natives of the peninsula who might be willing to move their
homes, there seem to have been foreign workers in Central Italy already by the end of the
ninth century,'3 and there is reasonable justification for the view that the Tiber Valley
was one of the routes up which they came.'4 Moreover, it is now beyond doubt that in the
*course of the sixth century Rome attained dimensions so considerable as to justify languag
13 See A. Blakeway, ' Demaratus ' in JRS 25, I 935,
a29 ff., at I33.
14 ib. I36.
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34
HUGH
LAST
like that of Tenney Frank when he said that it ' was the wealthiest city of Italy north of
Magna Graecia, possessed the most extensive walls of any city north of Tarentum, splendid
buildings including the largest temple in Italy, an active commerce with all the trading
peoples of the Mediterranean, a populous group of artizans, Greek artists and builders, and
a strong and well-organized army '.15 A place of this kind cannot have failed to draw settlers
from outside, nor is it a matter for surprise that the tradition is definite in its view that
regal Rome contained a considerable element of craftsmen.16 And, finally, it has to be
remembered that the later Romans believed it to have been the consistent policy of their
ancestors to encourage immigration. That belief is at least one implication of the legend
about the asylum ' inter duos lucos ' According to Ovid (Fasti, 3, 431 f.)
Romulus, ut saxo lucum circumdedit alto,
'quilibet huc ' dixit ' confuge, tutus eris';
and Cicero (pro Balbo 3I), referring to the pendent story of the Sabine women and its
outcome, puts the underlying principle more plainly in the familiar words
illud uero sine ulla dubitatione maxime nostrum fundauit imperium et populi Romani
nomen auxit, quod princeps ille fundator huius urbis, Romulus, foedere Sabino docuit etiam
hostibus recipiendis augeri hanc ciuitatem oportere; cuius auctoritate et exemplo numquam
est intermissa a maioribus nostris largitio et communicatio ciuitatis.
Largitio et communicatio ciuitatis,' however, was not the easiest of policies to practise
so long as the citizen-body remained theoretically a group of kin. Newcomers to Rome in
the days of the curiate organization found themselves among a people whose citizenship
was acquired by birth and the structure of whose State was not designed to allow the easy
absorption of strangers. As those strangers settled down and became regularly resident
aliens, and as their numbers grew, the need increased both to make provision for their
status and to secure that they should be available to play their part in the military undertakings of the Roman People. And, as it is not unreasonable to conjecture that the majority
at least of those who, to use a phrase applied by Plutarch (Solon 24, 2) to similar settlers in
Attica, may be called oi pETOIK130PEVOI ETi TEXV1 found their homes in Rome, it may
well have been that the problem they created was most obvious in the city itself-a fact,
if such it be, of some possible relevance to the almost unanimous view of the annalists
from Fabius (Dionysius 4, 15, i) onwards that the formation of the urban tribes belonged
to the earliest stage in the development of the Servian system (see further below, p. 40).
III. THE MILITARY CHARACTER OF THE SERVIAN ORGANIZATION
After these preliminaries it is possible to approach the Servian reforms, and at the
outset it will be well briefly to notice a point on which there is no need for argument. In
course of time the centuriate organization came to serve both military and political ends.
For military purposes, if it did no more, it at least determined the capacity in which
citizens were liable to serve, and politically it was the framework of the most authoritative
of the public assemblies. But the system was not equally well adjusted to both these different
kinds of function. It has often been remarked, for instance, that the cornicines formed a
single century in the political assembly, though in warfare buglers obviously have to be
distributed throughout the army and do not go into action as a solid unit. From considerations such as this it appears probable that in origin the scheme was either primarily military,
and was adapted at some time or other to political ends, or was primarily political, and was
sooner or later adapted to military ends. Since this is so, it becomes a question, which has
15 Aspects of Social Behavior in Ancient Rome
(Cambridge, Mass., I932), 124. See also An Economic
Survey of Ancient Rome I: Rome and Italy of the
Republic (Baltimore, I933) 5; and for details I. G.
Scott, ' Early Rotnan Traditions in the Light of
Archaeology' in Memoirs of the American Academy
in Rome 7, 1929, 7 ff., at 69 ff., and I. Scott Ryberg,
' An Archaeological Record of Rome from the Seventh
to the Second Century B.C.' (Studies and Documents I3
-University of Pennsylvania Press, I940), cc. i and ii.
16 The evidence is conveniently collected and
discussed by F. Tamborini, ' La vita economica nella
Roma degli ultimi re' in Athenaeum (Pavia) I8 (N.S.
8), I930, 299 ff. Cf. R. Besnier, ' L'etat economique
de Rome aux temps des rois' in RD, Ser. 4, Ann. I3,
I934, 405 ff. at 445 ff-
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THE
SERVIAN
REFORMS
35
often been debated,'7 whether the military or the political function was the earlier, or
whether both were envisaged from the beginning. The answer is not in doubt-that the
purpose of the scheme at the start was predominantly, if not exclusively, military. It will
be enough to recall that even in fully historical times the Comitia Centuriata still bore many
marks of being essentially an army. It met outside the pomerium quia exercitum . . . intra
urbem imperari ius non sit' (Laelius Felix in Gellius 15, 27, 5); to summon it was called
' imperare ' or ' conuocare, exercitum' (Varro, LL 6, 88 ; 93); the assembly itself was
described as ' exercitus urbanus ' (ib. 93) ; the normal magistrate to summon it was one
with imperium (ibid.) ; and its meetings were held under arrangements devised to allow
its members to go into action as an army at the shortest notice (Dio 37, 28, I-3). To this
it may be added that, though the centuriate system was asctibed to the sixth king of Rome,
its employment during the rest of the regal age seems to have been regarded by the Romans
as purely military, and the first recognized act of the centuries as a political gathering does
not come till they elect consuls after the expulsion of the second Tarquin (Livy i, 6o, 4;
cf. Dionysius 5, 20).
IV. THE NATURE OF THE SERVIAN CENSUS
In the system ascribed to Servius Tullius there were four elements-the tribes, the
census, the classes and the centuries; but the connexion between them is not at first sight
wholly clear. Since every citizen was assigned to one of the classes according to his wealth
and, having been put into his proper class, was then enrolled in one of the centuries in
which members of that class were grouped, the citizens could not be distributed into
appropriate centuries until the value of the property had been ascertained ; and this
among other things it was the business of the census to do. The census, in fact, was a logical
presupposition of the classes and the centuries. But the relevance of the Servian tribes to
this organization is less apparent. It is true that by the reform of the Servian system usually
attributed to the third century the tribes and the centuries were eventually brought into
unmistakable relation with one another, but from the date of their institution down to the
end of the First Punic War the place of the tribes in the whole scheme is not altogether
obvious. Indeed, this is a point which seems to have baffled some of the Romans themselves; for Livy (I, 43, I3) tacks his mention of what he regards as the earliest Servian
tribes on to the end of his remarks about the classes and the centuries, and then adds the
unsatisfying observation ' neque eae tribus ad centuriarum distributionem numerumque
quicquam pertinuere'.
The search for the truth about the original and essential function of the Servian tribes
is complicated by the state of the clues. The centuriate assembly lasted on into the Empire,
and there is a good deal of evidence for its working in the later phases of its existence. But,
since its form was drastically recast at a date in the third century before that at which
Fabius Pictor opened the age of historical writing at Rome, it is not surprising that, when
questions are asked about the nature and purpose of the Servian arrangements at their
inception, the extant information offers no straightforward answer. Nevertheless the truth
is not necessarily beyond our reach.
As has been suggested above (p. 30), in the earliest stage of Roman history what in
those days counted as citizenship seems to have depended on membership of a curia, a body
to which entry was normally secured by birth. What was the corresponding title to
citizenship under the Servian system ? Certainly no longer inclusion in a curia: the
insignificance of the curiae in historical times leaves no doubt about that. But when one
starts to look for the alternative the search is not immediately rewarded. And here it
becomes even more necessary than usual to scrutinize the relevance of each separate piece
of evidence ; for there is no reason why what was true in the last century of the Republic
should have been true when the centuriate organization was first designed. In the course
of generations some of the fundamental facts had changed, and there are two lines of
development in particular which must be borne in mind. First, whereas up till 241 B.C.
17 For a detailed discussion of this point see, e.g., Soltau o.c. in n. 3 above, 239 ff.
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36
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it had been the custom, when the Roman ciuitas was to be extended to the inhabitants of
some hitherto non-Roman area in Italy, to form a new tribe to include them, after that date
new citizens, whatever their domicile, were put into one of the tribes already existing,
whose members consequently came in growing numbers to be people unconnected with
the geographical division of Italy which was the territory of their tribe. And, secondly, the
ways in which men might acquire the Roman citizenship became more numerous. They
might receive it by special grant in return for services rendered, in the manner of which the
archetypal case is that of L. Mamilius, dictator of Tusculum (Livy 3, 29, 6); they
might get it by securing enrolment in a colonia ciuium Romanorum, as happened to Q.
Ennius (Cicero, Brutus 79) ; or, if they were Latins, they might become Roman citizens
by migrating to Rome or even, in the later Latin colonies, by merely holding one of the
local magistracies. So much does not complete the list of avenues to the Roman citizenship,
but it is enough to serve as a reminder that in the later Republic the approaches were many,
and that for this reason the right of any individual to call himself ' ciuis Romanus ' could
not be finally established without first ascertaining which of them he or his ancestors
claimed to have followed and then proving that he or they had done so in fact. In such
circumstances it is not surprising that Cicero in 63 B.C. could deny outright that enrolment
in the lists of Roman citizens drawn up by the censors was by itself a good title to the
citizenship: ' census non ius ciuitatis confirmat ac tantum modo indicat eum qui sit
census ita se iam tum gessisse ' (pro Archia i i).
This passage has attained great importance and requires careful consideration: it
must certainly not be uncritically accepted as the mere formulation of a doctrine long
established and never challenged. For, though the precise arguments used by Grattius in
his attack on the citizenship of Archias are not easy to infer from the replies of the defence,
Cicero's words 'census nostros requiris' (ibid.) pretty clearly imply that Grattius had seriously
talked as if the absence of a man's name from the censors' list of Roman citizens was
evidence that he was not in fact a citizen. In this connexion it may be noticed that J. S.
Reid, who was the first to propound an intelligible reconstruction of the prosecution's case,18
said indeed, and rightly, that Grattius ' cannot have meant to contend that no man could
act as a citizen whose name was not on the census-roll ' because, owing to the irregularity
with which the census had been taken since 86 B.C., 'such a contention . . ., if valid, ...
would have disfranchised large numbers of Roman citizens for no fault of their own';
but he added in a footnote that ' in the early times of the Republic when the census was
regularly taken, such a contention might have been good'.
There are certain indications that this is near the truth, and that there had been a time
when the census-lists were decisive about the claim of any individual to Roman citizenship.
It seems possible, in fact, that those whose names were enrolled were citizens and that
everyone else was not. On an issue such as this, which first arises in a period remote from
the age of historical writing, the evidence of the annalists has slight authority at most, and
least of all when it is contained in casual and unconsidered phrases. The clues which best
repay investigation are those provided by institutions which existed in fully historical
times and which may have survived from that obscure and distant past in which the problem
had its origin. Mommsen is generally thought to have denied that enrolment by the censors
on the list of Roman citizens was ever by itself a title to citizenship ; and this was
probably his belief, though how much of his account he meant to qualify by the words
I wenigstens spaterhin ' (R. Staatsrecht 23, 374: cf. Droit public 4, 52) is perhaps not
altogether clear. But his denial, if he made it, was based on nothing more than the words of
Cicero in pro Archia i i, the irrelevance of which to the centuriate organization in its infancy
has been suggested above. For the present purpose it is more profitable to consider some
other features of the censius which mark it through a long period of its history and are
attested by evidence plentiful enough to make at least their outlines clear. It may be
mentioned first that, whether the censors could make a man a Roman citizen or not, there
is no doubt that they could decide what measure of the rights of Roman citizenship he
18 M. Tulli Ciceronis pro A. Licinio Archia poeta oratio ad iudices, edited by J. S. Reid (Cambridg
I877, etc.), I4 f.
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THE
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37
should enjoy. Any individual whom they chose to exclude from the tribes was entered on
the Caeritum tabulae, and by that act he lost the public rights of citizenship and became
a ciuis sine suffragio (Gellius i6, I3, 7: cf. pseudo-Asc. in Diu. 8-p. I03 B., I89 S.). If
that consideration suggests that the status of a Roman citizen might be seriously affected by
a decision of the censors, the institution of manumissio censu gives a hint that citizenship
itself might depend on inclusion in the censors' list. Mommsen indeed, extending the
doctrine of pro Archia i i to the whole history of the census, struggled to avoid the admission
that ciuitas R. in these cases was conferred by the addition of the name of the manumitted
slave to the roll of Roman citizens ; but it needs a sturdier faith than some can command
to follow him to his conclusion that ' in beiden Fallen ' (of nianuznissio utindicta in the
presence of a praetor and of manunzissio censu) ' wird formell die Freiheit, das heisst das
Buirgerrecht nicht von dem Herrn und noch weniger von dem betreffenden Magistrat
gegeben, sondern, freilich falschlich, vorausgesetzt' (R. Staatsr-echt 23, 374, n. 4: cf. Droit
public 4, 52 n. 2). On this point H. Degenkolb observed that the appearance of a name
in the list of citizens must have had some significance 19 ; for otherwise there would have
been no need to raise the problem which Cicero poses in the words 'quaeritur, is qui domini
uoluntate census sit continuone an ubi lustrum conditum liber sit ' (de or. I, 183 : see also
Frag. Dos. I7). That significance he then tried to explain; but to his explanation he might
have added not only the reflection that the phrase ' census sit ' is here used in a way which
suggests that the act it describes was in some sense operative but also a more general and
perhaps more cogent consideration. One meaning of ' citizenship ' is a body of rights and
obligations, but another is the status of one who enjoys those rights and is subject to those
obligations. For such a one to hold that status effectively, the fact that he holds it must be
recognized and admitted by the State whose law offers these rights and imposes these
obligations. And how was that recognition of his citizenship given at Rome to the ex-slave
who had been manumitted censu unless by the censor who enrolled him in the list of
citizens ?
This view of manumissio censu is not completely new : it was asserted without argument
by H. Levy-Bruhl when he said in a footnote to an article on a cognate matter 20 that
' l'affranchissement " censu " . . . [n'est] pas autre chose, en effet, qu'une declaration
de volonte du maltre ratifiee . . . par le censeur '. But, though this unsupported remark
about manumissio censu invites little attention for its own sake, Levy-Bruhl's theory about
manumissio uindicta is relevant to any argument which seeks to show that the business of
the censor in manumissio censu was to accept on behalf of the Roman People the freed slave
as a new member of the citizen body. For the last century or more the prevailing doctrine
deduced from the notoriously unsatisfactory evidence about manumissio uindicta has been
that in form this process was essentially an action. A person called the ' adsertor
libertatis' claimed (what the slave, being a slave, could not claim for himself) that the slave
was free; the owner, however, did not offer opposition as he would have done in a serious
action but remained silent, merely touching the slave with a wand or giving him a slap;
and the praetor in his judical capacity thereupon gave judgment in favour of the adsertor
and pronounced the slave to be free. Levy-Bruhl, on the other hand, taking more careful
note of certain doubts which this version had provoked among some of his predecessors,
argued that the adsertor libertatis had no place in the proceedings and had been wrongly
introduced by modern speculation; that the only persons whose presence was necessary
were the dominus, the slave to be freed, and a magistrate ; that the dominus did not remain
silent, but had to signify his wish that the slave should become free; and that the
magistrate did not decide any kind of even fictitious action, but merely performed the
administrative function of publicly recognizing the change in the status of the ex-slave.
This view has been spoken of with respect by high authority 21; but it has also been
19 ' Die Befreiung durch Census ' in Festgabe of
Herrn
the offprint (Palermo, I932): at p. 74 in the reprint
Dr. Rudolph von Ihering . . . dargebracht von der Juristenfakultdt zu Tuibingen (Tiibingen, I892), 123 ff., at
136 if.
20 ' L'affranchissement par la vindicte ' contributed
to be found in. H. Levy-Bruhl, Quelques problemes
du trWs ancien droit romain (Paris, 1934).
21 W. W. Buckland, A Manual of Roman Private
Law 2 (Cambridge, 1939), 43.
to Studi in onore di Salvatore Riccobono, 3, at p. 17
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38
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vigorously attacked,22 and it cannot be said yet to have gained general acceptance. This,
however, is not the place to discuss the issue, nor is the interpretation of the crucial passage
in Cicero, ad Att. 7, 2, 8 a matter on which I should be prepared to dogmatize. All I would
say is that Levy-Bruhl's argument deserves mention in the present connexion. For, if it
were true that in its original conception the part of the magistrate in manumissio uindicta
was to take formal note of the creation of a new citizen, there would be a very strong
presumption that the original part of the magistrate in manumissio censu was the same. On
the other hand, the account of manumissio censu adumbrated above does not depend for its
correctness on Levy-Bruhl's doctrine of manumissio uindicta. Even if Cicero be thought to
supply what Arangio-Ruiz calls ' prova piena dell'opinione dominante in tema di m.m.
vindicta ' 23- proof that an adsertor was needed, and consequently that there was some sort
of action and that the magistrate had a judicial function to perform-it would remain true
that the magistrate's addictio was a pronouncement made on behalf of the Roman People
and thereby at least implied public recognition that a new member had been added to the
citizen-body. And in that case too it would be natural to expect some similar recognition
in manumissio censu.
It must be freely admitted that in the course of its development the census became
an operation primarily concerned with the assignment to their proper centuries of people
whose citizenship was established already; but what has been said above may be thought to
authorize the conjecture that, despite the reply of Cicero to Grattius in pro Archia i i, one
function of the census in the days of its effective working had been to determine who was,
or should be, a Roman citizen and who not. If that was so, it becomes unnecessary to retain
Mommsen's peculiar theory that what the censors did with a slave manumitted censu was
falsely to assume him already to be possessed of a good title to Roman citizenship. Rather
we may say that they conferred citizenship on him by adding his name to the list of Roman
citizens, thereby in the name of the Roman People accepting him as a member of the
populus. And if in this way they could turn a slave into a citizen, there is no obvious reason
why their powers should not have been adequate to do the same for a man, such as an alien
settler in Roman territory, whose liberty was not of recent acquisition or who had been
free from birth.
V. THE FIRST PURPOSE OF THE SERVIAN REFORM
The view that one purpose of the Roman census at its inception was to draw up a list
of the Roman citizens invites the question why such a list was needed ; for under the
Romulian arrangements the cur-iones, or whoever were the officials charged with this task,
presumably kept records which showed who were members of the curiae. The answer
usually given is that a new and more detailed suryey of the citizen-body was necessary
because, to determine their liability to military service and to taxation, the citizens were
now to be distributed into classes; and it is not to be denied that this classification was one
of the innovations to which the institution of the census was a more or less immediate
preliminary. But to say so much is not to say that this was the sole or primary object of the
census. Among our accounts of the Servian reforms that of Dionysius deserves as much
attention as any, because his mention of the versions given by Fabius (Pictor), Cato and
Vennonius (4, 15, i) and by L. Piso (4, I5, 5) shows that on this matter he had been at
considerable pains to compare the authorities. In his narrative it is well to notice, first,
the stress he lays on the substitution of the new local tribes for the old tribes based
ultimately on kinship. Of the urban area he says EiS TET-Tapas loipaS 51svCAV TfTV -rro
ETTpapUVXOV E'TirCO TE V -TVrov svaIV TpipuOV oi)av T7ES (4, I4, i), using langua
strikingly reminiscent of that in which Herodotus (5, 66, 2) describes the work of
Kleisthenes at Athens-TETpa(pVous E'OvTQ& 'Asnvaious 8EKaQUp\XUoS E0ol'c, and in
next section (4, I4, 2) he returns to the substitution of a new kind of tribe for the old
22 V. Arangio-Ruiz, ' Romanisti c Latinisti' in
Studi Sassaresi, Ser. 2, i6, 1938 (Scritti di Diritto e di
23 Art. cit. in n. 22, p. 32 (p. 20 of the offprint).
Economia in onore di Flaminio Mancaleoni), I5 if.
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THE
SERVIAN
REFORMS
39
when he explains that Servius now
YEVIKaS coS lTpOTEpOV, axa?' a- KaT
This is enough to show that in the opinion of Dionysius the recasting of the tribal
system was an important element in the work attributed to Servius. Secondly it
must be observed that he gives a good deal of space to the continuation by Servius of
earlier efforts to make the Roman citizenship easier of access to outsiders, in his case by
opening it to manumitted slaves (4, 22, 3 ff.) FTrOlcYQTO ? Kaci TT)nS a Ic,ES TOV
TTOXITlKOU o'vVTaXy1AaTos oU pIKpaV -rrpovoiav OJTOs O PaucIXEVS, i-rp&}ypa auvi5Zv O
lTrapE?I1TOV 01 Trpo aIJToU vri pacXES (4, 22, 3). Naturally no single detail of
such a tradition as this can be pressed, but the general trend of the whole
is not to be ignored. And there is a good deal of plausibility in his suggestions
that the new tribes held a prominent place in the Servian plan and that the enlargement of the citizen-body was a regular feature of early Roman policy. For, if it is
to expand, every State which has started with arrangements whereby blood is the test of
membership has sooner or later to make the transition to a system under which citizenship
is determined by domicile ; and there is one very familiar case in which that transition
was effected by the introduction of a fresh tribal organization.24 What Kleisthenes did at
Athens must in some way or other have been done at Rome; for the kin-state of the curiae
gave way to one in which residence, and not blood, was the essential title to membership.
And the presumption that the change was made by the formation of the Servian tribes is
so strong that it is worth while in this connexion to consider the similar undertaking of
Kleisthenes at Athens.
The nature of that undertaking is so well described in the famous passage wherein
Grote with sure discernment set out its fundamental purpose that it will be enough to
quote his words.25
The political franchise, or the character of an Athenian citizen, both before and since
Solon, had been confined to the primitive four Ionic tribes, each of which was an aggregate of
so many close corporations or quasi-families-the gentes and the phratries. None of the residents
in Attica, therefore, except those included in some gens or phratry, had any part in the political
franchise. Such non-privileged residents were probably at all times numerous, and became
more and more so by means of fresh settlers. . . Kleisthenes, breaking down the existing
wall of privilege, imparted the political franchise to the excluded mass. But this could not be
done by enrolling them in new gentes or phratries, created in addition to the old. For the gentile
tie was founded upon old faith and feeling which in the existing state of the Greek mind could
not be suddenly conjured up as a bond of union for comparative strangers. It could only be
done by disconnecting the franchise altogether from the Ionic tribes as well as from the gentes
which constituted them, and by redistributing the population into new tribes with a character
and purpose exclusively political. Accordingly Kleisthenes abolished the four Ionic tribes, and
created in their place ten new tribes founded upon a different principle, independent of the
gentes and phratries. Each of his new tribes comprised a certain number of demes or cantons,
with the enrolled proprietors and residents in each of them. The demes taken altogether
included the entire surface of Attica, so that the Kleisthenean constitution admitted to the
political franchise all the free native Athenians; and not merely these, but also many
metics.
If one discounts the Victorian touches in this account, it may be accepted as an accurate
description of what it is reasonable to conjecture to have been the first and fundamental
purpose of the Servian reform. That purpose was to include in the Roman citizen-body
all, and not merely some, of the free and permanent residents in Roman territory; and the
distribution of the citizens into economic classes, which is commonly regarded as having
been the primary object, was in fact only secondary.
It did not escape the ranging mind of Niebuhr that there was a certain likeness between
24 About the new territorial districts into which
Solomon divided his kingdom (i Kings iv, 7 ff.),
on which see, e.g., W. F. Albright, 'The Adminis-
character seems to me inadequate to show whether
they provide a parallel to the development here in
question or not.
25 A History of Greece, part 2, ch. 31, fourth
trative Divisions of Israel and Judah,' in The yozrnal
of the Palestine Oriental Society 5, 1925, 17 ff., at
2.5 ff., I say no more than that the evidence for their
paragraph: ' New Edition' (London, 1907), 3,
347 f.
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40
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the achievements of Servius Tullius and of Kleisthenes,26 but his account of the Servian
reform, like that of Mommsen, is largely vitiated by the mistaken idea that the patricians
had been the only citizens of early Rome. And Mommsen's interpretation is further
damaged by another error-that the Servian franchise was confined to landowners. Nevertheless, though it may be impossible to agree with him even on an issue so fundamental
as this, and though one must reject both his conception of the early populus (above, p. 30)
and his considered theory of the census (above, p. 36 f.), when one turns from Mommsen
the critic of piecemeal authorities, who could sometimes be bemused by a single piece of
evidence, to Mommsen the historian, who was ready to proclaim that it is' die divinatorische
Sicherheit des Urteils, die den eminenten Historiker bezeichnet ',27 one sees the eagle
swoop unerringly upon the truth. ' The organization of the centuries was introduced
merely to enlarge the military resources of the burgesses by the inclusion of the metoeci.' 28
Before, however, this account can be finally accepted, it is essential to consider the
objection to it presented by the doctrine of Mommsen himself about the qualification for
membership of the Servian tribes. For it may be assumed that the metics whom it is con-
jectured to have been one purpose of the reform to enfranchise were largely craftsmen;
and if, as Mommsen alleged, until the fourth century the tribes were closed to all except
landowners, the supposed enfranchisement would have been denied at the outset to a
sizable fraction of the potential recruits to the reserve of Roman man-power. Mommsen's
view, for which his authority won a widespread acceptance, seems possibly to have had its
origin in the paper by C. L. Grotefend 29 to which he refers with approval in a juvenile
work 30; but, however that may be, it was developed at length in I864 31 and repeated
twenty-three years later in his last pronouncement on the subject.32 His view is familiar
that the tribes were properly areas of land and not groups of people; that the business
of those who took the census was in the first place to make a list of estates and only
secondarily to concern themselves with the owners ; and that originally the landless had
no place in the tribes whatever. Fortunately, however, there is no need to refute it at length,
because it has been disproved already by P. Fraccaro,33 whose arguments it will be enough
briefly to summarize with a few additional reflections.
In the first place this account involves the assumption that at the time of the Servian
reform (and according to Mommsen thenceforward till 312 B.C.) the military resources of
Rome were so amply adequate to her needs that there was no reason for her to recruit
that part of the population which did not own land. That those needs were considerable
during the Volscian, Aequian, Veientan, Gallic, Hernican, Latin, and early Samnite
wars is scarcely to be denied, and the theory that these wars were fought without the help
of the non-landed citizens of Rome was only tenable so long as it could be supposed that
these non-landed citizens were a numerically negligible fraction of the population. This,
however, ceased to be possible when archaeology confirmed the literary evidence that Rome
in the sixth century became a large and prosperous city, where trade flourished and the
arts were in demand (see above, p. 33 f.). Such a city implies non-landed inhabitants in
numbers too great for them to have been left disqualified for military service during the
wars of the fifth century and points to the conclusion that they were made eligible at a date
not later than that to which tradition ascribes the Servian constitution. And, if it be right
to see in the introduction of that constitution the occasion on which they became liable to
recruitment, it may further be observed that tradition points to their importance in the
scheme by its insistence that the urban tribes were among the earliest (Livy I, 43, I3;
Dionysius 4, I4, i)-a feature of the story which has been doubted, but on which even
E. Pais eventually moderated 34 his former scepticism.35
26 Romische Geschichte i, page of note 968.
27 Reden und Aufsdtze3 (Berlin, 1912), II.
28 The History of Rome, book i, ch. 6: 'New
Edition' (London, I894, etc.), I, 120.
29 ' Die romischen Tribus in historischer und
geographischer Beziehung,' in Zeitschriftfiir die Alter-
thumswissenschaft 3, I836, 915 if.
30 Die romischen Tribus in administrativer Beziehung
(Altona, I844), 2.
31 Romische Forschungen il (Berlin, I864), II ff.
32 R. Staatsrecht 3 (Leipzig, I887), I64 f.: Droit
public 6, i, I 84 f.
33' " Tribules" ed " aerarii": una ricerca di
diritto pubblico romano', in Athenaeutm (Pavia) 21
(N.S. ii), 1933, 150 ff.
34 Storia di Roma 3 (Rome, 1927), 540.
35 Storia di Romna i, I (Turin, I 898), 320 n. I :
Storia critica di Roma I, 2 (Rome, 1913), 487 n. i.
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THE
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REFORMS
41
Secondly, Fraccaro deals with Mommsen's positive arguments. Mommsen laid a
good deal of stress on the well-known words of Cicero in pro Flacco 8o-' illud quaero
sintne ista praedia censui censendo, habeant ius ciuile, sint necne sint mancipi, subsignari
apud aerarium aut apud censorem possint. in qua tribu denique ista praedia censuisti ? 36
But it may be doubted whether they help his case. The man Decianus had been trying to
establish an unjustified title to some land in Asia, and to this end he had got it registered in
the Roman census. Cicero therefore asked him certain questions which could only be
satisfactorily answered if the land fulfilled the conditions normally required for such
registration. After his preliminary shot ' quaero sintne ista praedia censui censendo',
which indicates the direction of his attack, he goes on with four more posers-(i) was this
land capable of quiritary ownership ? (ii) was it mancipable, or not ? (iii) would it be accepted
as security by the quaestors or the censors ? and (iv) in what tribe was it registered ?
The answers to (i) and (ii) could only be in the affirmative if the land was in Italy; H. J.
Roby was probably right in saying, though the doctrine he detected cannot be confirmed,
that in (iii) Cicero ' speaks as if only mancipable lands could be made security to the
public' 37; and (iv) is unanswerable because the territory of all the tribes was in Italy.
Cicero's interrogations may, in fact, be summed up in the single question How can land in
Asia possibly be registered in the Roman census ? And the only deduction to be drawn from
it is that (at any rate in the absence of a colonia cc. Rr., of which there can be no question
here) no land outside Italy can properly be so registered. It says nothing about the
registration of individuals, for the very good reason that to do so would be irrelevant;
and it cannot be used to buttress Mommsen's theory that the tribes consisted in the first
place of land but not of people.
Fraccaro, however, may well be right in treating this passage from Cicero as no more
than an adventitious aid to a doctrine really based on other grounds, and in finding the source
of Mommsen's account rather in his assumption that the phrases ' tribu mouere ' and
' aerarium facere ', frequent in descriptions of the degradation of Roman citizens
by the censors, were so far correlative that they connote not two separate proceedings but at most two different aspects of a single act.38 Aerarius,' he held,
meant one who paid taxes ; but, since all Roman citizens at this time were liable to
direct taxation and the aerarii were clearly a special class within the citizen-body, they
must have been people about whose taxation there was something peculiar. This peculiarity
he conjectured at least in part to have been that their taxes were assessed on property
other than land 39; and from this, since on his assumption to become an aerarius involved
being removed from one's tribe, it appeared to follow that members of the tribes were all
assessed on land. But, taking a view which long before had been anticipated by Henry
Dodwell 40 (whose unfortunate misjudgment about the ' Fragmenta Dodwelliana' did not
destroy the value of his comments thereon), Fraccaro had no difficulty in showing that the
phrases ' tribu mouere ' and ' aerarium facere ' describe two distinct operations ; and to
this he added a demonstration that the annalistic evidence proves the Romans of the later
Republic not to have been aware of a period in their early history when membership of the
tribes was confined to landowners.
Thus there seems to be no obstacle to the conclusion that the Servian tribes from the
first contained the landless as well as the landed. If that be so, the tribes can be seen to have
had what on any other view they lack-a clear and intelligible function in the Servian
scheme. Since until the third century B.C. the organization of the Roman army was not
territorial, a satisfactory reason why territorial tribes should have been substituted for their
' Romulian ' predecessors was not forthcoming so long as the purpose of the whole undertaking was conceived to be nothing more than the fixing of liability to military service and
taxation. For the resources of individual citizens could presumably have been ascertained
36 Die romischen Tribus . .. 3: R. Staatsrecht 3, 38 R. Staatsrecht 23, 402 n. 2: Droit public 4,
I64 with n. 5; Droit public 6, I, I84 with n. 5.
83 n. 2.
479 n. I.
40 Praelectiones Academicae in Schola Historices
Camdeniana (Oxford, I692), 7IO ff.
3 Roman Private Law (Cambridge, I 902), I,
39 R. Staatsrecht 23, 392 ff.: Droit public 4, 7I ff.
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42
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as easily when they were grouped in curiae and kin-tribes as when they had been distributed
into the new tribes of the Servian arrangements. But the case is altogether different if it
can be held that the Servian tribes were designed to include people debarred from the
' Romulian' tribes which they superseded, and if the first object of the reform was to
incorporate in a single tribal system both the old citizens and also all other free residents
in Roman territory to whom the Roman citizenship might with advantage be extendedto incorporate, in fact, both those who had been members of the curiae and the metics who
had not, and so to do at Rome what it had been the main achievement of Kleisthenes to do
at Athens.
VI. THE DATE AND CHARACTER OF THE EARLY CENTURIES
The creation of the Servian tribes made liable to the military obligations of Roman
citizenship a number of men who hitherto had been outside the Roman body politic. This
military consequence of the innovation is by itself enough, in the history of a State so
constantly concerned with war as Rome, strongly to suggest that its date was before, and
not after, the warlike undertakings of the fifth century. And this consideration in turn
supports the tradition not only in assigning the reform to the sixth century but in connecting it more particularly with the figure we know as Servius Tullius. For, since the
suspect narrative of Dionysius (3, 34) about the attempt of Tullus Hostilius to establish
a general Roman hegemony in Latium is almost certainly to be rejected,4' it is Servius who
shows the earliest signs of Roman ambition beyond the immediate neighbourhood of the
city by his foundation of the ' fanum Dianae' on the Aventine as a common shrine for
Romans and Latins 42 -an institution which it is plausible to interpret as an intended rival
to the similar establishment at Aricia.43 So far as it goes, tradition is at least consistent in
connecting a sign of Roman aspirations to control Latium with a constitutional innovation
which greatly increased the strength of the Roman army.
This line of argument, however, is not the only one which leads to the conclusion that
on this matter the tradition is in essentials right. In I930 Fraccaro read to the second
Congresso Nazionale di Studi Romani the masterly paper entitled ' La storia dell' antichissimo esercito romano e l'et'a dell'ordinamento centuriato ',4 the main argument of which,
as stated therein and subsequently elaborated in the author's reply 45 to the criticisms of
G. De Sanctis,46 must here be briefly noticed. When the Roman army was increased from
one legion to two, the legion already consisted of sixty centuries; for this was the number
of centuries in the second legion, and in all later legions as they were created. It is a
reasonable conjecture of H. Delbriuck's 47 that the occasion on which the second legion
was formed is to be found in the institution of the dual magistracy which for convenience
we may call the consulship, when the summum imperium, hitherto in the hands of a single
individual, was divided between two. Such a date for the origin of the second legion is at
least compatible with a fairly clear indication that this development belongs to a time when
the Romans had not yet acquired resources in man-power large enough to provide two
legions each as strong as the original one. This indication is to be found in the fact that,
whereas a centuria at its first inception was pretty obviously a unit of men ' quorum
centenarius iustus numerus ' (Varro, LL 5, 88), in Republican times from which we hav
direct evidence its average strength was only half of this-sixty men for each of the forty
centuries of hastati and principes, and thirty for each of the twenty centuries of triarii (Pol.
6, 2I, 7 ff.). Thus it can be said, with as much probability as the nature of the sources allows,
that for a period of uncertain length before the end of the monarchy the heavy infantry of
41 See A. N. Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship (Oxford, I939), 10.
42 Livy, I, 45, 2 ff.: Dionysius 4, 26, 2 ff.
43 See G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der R6mer2
(Munich, I9I2), 39.
44 In Atti del 2? Congresso Nazionale di Studi
Romani 3 (Rome, I93I), 9I ff.
45 ' Ancora sull' eth dell' ordinamento centuriato',
in Athenaeum (Pavia) 22 (N.S. 12), I934, 57 ff.
46 ' Le origini dell' ordinamento centuriato,' in
Riv. fil. 6i (N.S. i i), I933, 289 ff.
47 Geschichte der Kriegskunst im Rahmen der
politischen Geschichte I 2 (Berlin, I908), 265 n. I.
(The third edition of this work, to which the reference
should properly be given, is at present inaccessible
to me.)
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THE
SERVIAN
REFORMS
43
the Roman army was formed of a single legion consisting of sixty centuries, and that at or
soon after the foundation of the Republic this infantry was split into two such legions. If
then it could be shown that the Servian organization implies a single legion of sixty
centuries, the result would be to prove that organization earlier than a date at latest not
long after the beginning of the Republic ; and this Fraccaro essayed to do.
Assuming-and this is an assumption, though not an improbable one, as will be
suggested in the next paragraph-that the recorded Servian system reflects the military
arrangements in force on its introduction, he pointed out that according to the annalists 48
the number of centuries of iuniores in the first three classes was sixty (40 + IO + IO),
the same as that of the centuries in the legion. There is a possibility, then, that the first
three classes supplied the legionary troops. That these troops were drawn from less than
all the five classes is plain both from the very slight armament attributed to the last one or
two and from the summary with which Dionysius (4, i8, i) ends his account of the whole
five, saying a'rrrT pEV T) 8laK6OIralS TIV i1 TO TrE31KOV EKrTArpo0aa TCXV TE ? (aXayylyITcXV
K al T vCo V y iCo V aTpaTEupa. And confirmation of the suspicion that the line
dividing the legionary infantry from the light armed should be drawn between
the third and fourth classes is provided by the language of Livy when he
describes the equipment of the classes in succession. Having enumerated
the armour and weapons of the first. (I, 43, 2), he comes to the second and says
that, with two exceptions, ' arma imperata . . . omnia eadem ' (ib. 4), and of the third his
words are ' nec de armis quicquam mutatum ' (ib. 5) except that they had no greaves. In
fact he treats the gear of the second and third classes as mere modifications of that carried
by the first. But with the fourth class his language changes-' arma mutata: nihil praeter
hastam et uerutum datum' (ib. 6). Thus there are definite grounds for the conclusion
that the Servi,an system envisaged sixty centuries of legionary infantry and that this, in
view of the reduced strength of the centuries in the legions of the Republic, points in turn
to the likelihood that the system was introduced before a second legion was created-that
is, probably before the end of the regal period.
The credibility of this view is not affected by what some would regard as the possibility
that the earliest recorded arrangement of the classes was not the earliest in fact; for to
admit the existence of a more primitive organization than the first about which we have
unmistakable information would not invalidate the reasons for dating the centuriate scheme
as we can first discern it to an age when the heavy infantry of Rome still composed only a
single legion. But it will be well, before we leave this part of the subject, briefly to notice
the evidence which has been thought to imply a simpler system than that in which the
legionary troops were drawn from the first three classes out of five. Gellius 49 asserts that
' " classici" dicebantur non omnes qui in quinque classibus erant, sed primae tantum
classis homines, qui centum et uiginti quinque milia aeris ampliusue censi erant. " Infra
classem" autem appellabantur secundae classis ceterarumque omnium classium, qui
minore summa aeris, quod supra dixi, censebantur.' These words have often been assumed
to refer to the classes in their military aspect and to preserve the memory of a period in
which the legionary troops were all drawn from the first class.50 This may conceivably be
right: much time has undoubtedly been spent on efforts to fit the story told by Gellius
into the history of the Roman army, and personally I should not at present by any means
be prepared to assert that the first recorded form of the Servian organization was in all
respects the first in fact. But here these attempts do not call for notice in detail,
because all that for the present purpose need be said is that, if the assumption from which
they start is sound, the period with which they are concerned was earlier in the regal age
than the time when the sixty centuries of heavy infantry were introduced and may even
have belonged to the days of the ' Romulian' army. It will perhaps, however, be worth
while in this connection to mention two points which have not received the notice they
48 Livy I, 43, i ff.: Dionysius 4, i6, 2 ff.
4 Gellius 6 (7), I3, I f.: cf. Festus p. I00 L.,
113 M.
50 Among recent exponents of this view may be
mentioned K. J. Beloch (Romische Geschichte bis zum
Beginn der punischen Kriege-Berlin-Leipzig, I926
29I) and H. Stuart Jones (CAH 7, 435).
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44
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deserve. The first may possibly be of no great moment. It is that, if his language may be
treated as precise, Gellius does not describe a time when the citizens of substance were
divided into only two groups-the ' classici' and the ' infra classem '-but to one when,
although they were already divided into five classes, members of the first alone were known
as ' classici ' and the rest were lumped together as ' infra classem '. The second is that the
only place of which we know where the contrast between ' classicus ' and ' infra classem'
seems to have appeared in a context giving a clue to the connexion in which the contrast
was understood was almost certainly not of military but of economic relevance. The
passage in question is that to which Gellius refers as the reason for his own investigation
of the matter (l.c. 3), and it came from the elder Cato's suasio legis Voconiae-the plebiscite
whereby testators who had been put by the censors in the first of the five classes were
prohibited from instituting women as their heirs. It is obvious that anything Cato said
about the classes in dealing with this subject must primarily have referred to them in their
economic, and not in their military, significance; and one cannot rule out the possibility
that the usage in question was a social colloquialism, prompted perhaps by the outstanding
importance of the first class which is put beyond doubt both by its wealth and by the
exceptional number of voting centuries it contained. For these reasons prudence may be
thought to counsel caution in the use of this information as evidence for the history of the
Roman army.
After that digression it remains to consider a consequence of the arguments used to
date the centuriate organization to the regal age. The identity in number of the centuries
of the legion with the centuries of the Servian system containing men qualified for legionary
service strengthens the view, accepted in Section III above, which may be sufficiently
summarized in the words of Mommsen when he said ' it is evident at a glance that this
whole institution was from the outset of a military nature '.51 And an exhaustive discussion,
which did not stop short of regions where speculation alone is possible, might even lead us
farther than most critics are prepared to go-to conjecture that at the start the Servian
centuries may actually have been the centuries in which the citizens of military age went to
battle. Admittedly, if at this time the regular military formations only included those whom
the later terminology distinguished as iuniores, which is by no means certain, such an
hypothesis would imply that new centuries must have been formed to incorporate the
seniores and the senes before the centuries as a whole could become an assembly of the Roman
People; but it is not unthinkable that a development of this sort was necessary. At least
it must be borne in mind that for purposes of taxation nothing more was needed than that
a man should be registered in a tribe and be assigned to his proper class: so far as payment
of tributum went it was immaterial whether he belonged to a century or not. But on these
issues demonstrative evidence is lacking, and here it must be enough to say in conclusion
what can be said with confidence-that the centuriate organization of the members of the
Servian tribes was designed primarily for military ends and that its adaptation to serve
political purposes, whether contemporary with its inception or later, was secondary.
VII. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLITICAL FUNCTIONS OF THE CENTURIES
The date to which one should assign the beginning of the development whereby the
centuries acquired their secondary functions as voting-groups depends on the interpretation
to be given to evidence which tells no certain tale. The one reasonably well established
fact comes from the mention by Cicero of ' leges praeclarissimae de duodecim tabulis
tralatae duae, quarum . . . altera de capite ciuis rogari nisi maximo comitiatu uetat '52
The reference in the words' maximo comitiatu 'is undoubtedly to the Comitia Centuriata,53
and the passage therefore goes to show that by the time of the Decemviral Legislation, which
tradition is almost certainly right in assigning to the middle of the fifth century, the
centuries had begun to act as an assembly of the Roman People. But, though we are thus
provided with a terminus ante quem for the start of this development, there is no clear
51 The History of Rome, book i, ch. 6: 'New
Edition' (London, I894, etc.), i, I20.
52De legg. 3, 44: cf. ib. i I.
53 Cicero, de re p. 2, 6I.
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THE
SERVIAN
REFORMS
45
evidence for the date at which it actually started. It may be said, indeed, that, since the
Comitia Curiata no longer contained the whole populus after the large measure of
enfranchisement effected by the formation of the Servian tribes, the centuries must have
acted as the assembly of the People from the first moment at which such a comprehensive
assembly was needed after the Servian organization was introduced. The difficulty,
however, is to determine exactly when a body of this sort was first needed. On the one hand,
by its silence about the activity of an assembly between the time of Servius Tullius and the
end of the monarchy,54 the tradition suggests that the need was not felt before the
foundation of the Republic. On the other, by its tendency to represent the tribal assembly,
the formal recognition of which is implied by the plebiscite of Publilius Volero ascribed to
47I B.C., as a rival alternative to a gathering which, despite attempts to identify it with the
Comitia Curiata, can only have been the Comitia Centuriata,55 hints that the latter was
already well established so early in the fifth century that its development must have been
very rapid if it did not begin before the last decade of the sixth. The respective weights of
these opposing considerations it is the business of every historian to assess for himself,
but, to whatever date he decides to assign its start, he will probably find himself led to
accept as historical a process by which the system of centuries, at first purely military, was
enlarged so as to include citizens of non-military age in a manner more or less like that
envisaged by W. Soltau and placed by H. Delbriuck just after the expulsion of the
second Tarquin.56
VIII. THE MEASURES OF 3I2/I AND 304 B.C.
The history of the Servian tribes is still so much dominated by the authority of
Mommsen that it may not be waste of space shortly to repeat what has been said more than
once by others 57 about the significance of the censorships of 3I2 and 304 B.C. The matter
is by no means irrelevant to the conclusions reached above, and in particular to the view
that the tribes contained both landed and non-landed citizens from the start ; for that view
would be untenable if Mommsen were right in his interpretation of the evidence for what
happened in 3I2/I B.C. Having decided that originally it was only landowners who could
become tribules, he was compelled by the fact that later in the Republic the tribes
undoubtedly contained those who were not landed proprietors to look for the occasion on
which such people were first admitted; and this occasion he found in the censorship of
Appius Claudius (Caecus) and C. Plautius. According to him,58 it was then that ' the
primitive freehold basis of the right of suffrage began for the first time to be called in
question. Appius Claudius, the boldest innovator known in Roman history, in his censorship in 442 without consulting the Senate or People so adjusted the burgess-roll, that a
man who had no land was received into whatever tribe he chose and then according to
his means into the corresponding century '. From this he goes on to say that ' this alteration
was too far in advance of the spirit of the age to obtain full acceptance. One of the
immediate successors of Appius, Quintus Fabius Rullianus . .. undertook in his censorship
of 450 not to set it aside entirely, but to confine it within such limits that the real power in
the burgess-assemblies should continue to be vested in the holders of land and of wealth.
He assigned those who had no land collectively to the four city tribes, which were now made
to rank not as the first but as the last '.
If Mommsen was justified in his belief that Appius first admitted the landless to the
tribes, he did not exaggerate the importance of the innovation. But it is not easy to agree
that he had any right to interpret the evidence as he did. This evidence is not much,
consisting as it does of only two items that matter. First is the passage in Diodorus 20, 36, 4,
where Fischer reads E8.OKE 6? (sc. 'ATTTios KXaOvlos) Tols 1TOxiTTalS Kai T-r)1V Eouiai'V EV
orroi, T US Xoi r-TEl qJD TQTTES-al Kal oTrrol rrpoaipoiTo Ti Tuaa0ai. Neither this
lection, however, nor any other of those preserved makes the slightest reference to an
54 See above, p. 35.
55 Livy 2, 56, 2 ff.: Dionysius 9, 41, 2 ff.
56 Soltau, o.c. in n. 3 above, 344 ff.; Delbruick,
o.c. in n. 47 above, 262 f.
57 See, e.g., Fraccaro, o.c. in n. 33 above, I57 ff.
58 The History of Rome, book 2, ch. 3 : 'New
Edition ' (London, I894, etc.), I, 396: cf. R. Staats-
recht 23, 402 ff.; Droit public 4, 83 ff.
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46
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enrolment of the landless in the tribes for the first time, but all alike in one way or another
simply say that Appius allowed people to be entered in any tribe they liked and to present
themselves for registration wherever they chose. There remains the famous testimony of
Livy (9, 46, IO ff.) about the events of 304 B.C. Cn. Flavius, alleged to have been a scriba,
according to some authorities on the staff of Appius himself, was elected to a curule
aedileship; and this result was achieved by what Livy calls the ' forensis factio, Ap.
Claudi censura uires nacta, qui senatum primus libertinorum filiis lectis inquinauerat et,
posteaquam eam lectionem nemo ratam habuit nec in curia adeptus erat quas petierat opes
urbanas, (,urbanis J. F. Gronovius) humilibus per omnes tribus diuisis forum et campum
corrupit ... Ex eo tempore in duas partes discessit ciuitas; aliud integer populus,
fautor et cultor bonorum, aliud forensis factio tenebat (tendebat F), donec Q. Fabius et
P. Decius censores facti et Fabius simul concordiae causa, simul ne humillimorum in manu
comitia essent, omnem forensem turbam excretam in quattuor tribus coniecit urbanasque
eas appellauit '. (For the sake of precision it may be worth while to say that, if' excretos ' is
the true reading in z8, 39, IO, that passage supplies evidence for Livy's use of' excernere '
and supports the. interpretation of ' excretam ' here as the past participle of that verb
rather than of ' excrescere ', which it would be surprising to find in Livy's vocabulary.)
The meaning of this is not obscure. Flavius was elected aedile by voters whose political
power dated from the censorship of Appius, who, after an attempt to secure influence in
the Senate by admitting to it the sons of freedmen had proved unsuccessful because nobody
recognized the validity of their admission, had distributed the poorer citizens (domiciled
in the city, Gronovius) over all the tribes and thus had corrupted ' forum et campum'.
The result of this was politically to split the State, which so remained until 304, when
Q. Fabius, in order that the assemblies might not be in the power of the lowest classes,
sifted out the whole crowd of loungers in the market-place and concentrated them into
four tribes, which he called ' urban '. The first comment to make on this is that Livy says
nothing about the incorporation in the tribes of people who hitherto had been excluded
from them because they owned no land: he merely records that Appius spread certain
' humiles ' over all the tribes. The second is that for these ' humiles ' to have had any
notable and regular effect on the votes of assemblies they must have been at least primarily
people resident in Rome, so that Gronovius's conjecture ' urbanis ', though not essential,
considerably improves the sense. The third is that, for reasons lucidly set out by Fraccaro,59
this redistribution of the poorer voters over the tribes cannot-unless indeed the measures
ascribed to 3I2/i and 304 B.C. are transferred to some year after the reform of the centuries
about 24I B.C. 60-have affected the Comitia Centuriata at all, because down to the end of the
First Punic War the tribes were irrelevant to the organization of the voting-groups in that
body. And the fourth is that what would have been affected by such a redistribution were
the two tribal assemblies, one of which may reasonably be regarded as responsible for the
election of Cn. Flavius to an aedileship 61 -an election to which Livy holds the change
made by Appius Claudius at least to have contributed. In these bodies the voting-units
were the tribes ; the vote of each tribe was determined by those of its members who were
present when the vote was taken ; and, since the assemblies met in Rome, it was almost
inevitable that on any particular occasion the number of members present from one of the
rustic tribes whose territory was remote from the city should have been much smaller than
that of those from one of the urban tribes, whose members lived more or less on the spot.62
Hence the vote of an individual in an urban tribe generally counted for considerably less
than that of one who belonged to a rustic tribe. One who had political support in the city-
population might argue with some plausibility that his followers were denied the influence
to which they were entitled by their numbers so long as they could affect the votes of only
four tribes out of a total which in 3I2 B.C. was probably thirty-one. Accordingly it was
natural for such a one to let these voters into the rustic tribes as well ; and that is what both
Diodorus and Livy describe Appius as having done.
59 O.c. in n. 33 above, i6i f.
60 For proposals of this sort see, e.g., E. Pais,
Storia di Roma 5 (Rome, 1928), i99 ff., and K. J.
Beloch, o.c. in n. 50 above, 266.
61 See Mommsen, R. Staatsrecht 23, 483: Droit
public 4, 175.
62 On this see AYP 58, 1937, 468 ff.
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THE
SERVIAN
REFORMS
47
The result was resented by those whose interests required that the tribal assemblies
should be dominated by the men of the countryside, who could generally be relied on to
express the conservative outlook characteristic of a rural population. So in 304 B.C.
Q. Fabius Rullianus sorted the urban residents out of the rustic tribes and confined them
to the four tribes whose territories between them covered the area of the city. On this
central point Livy's words are clear; but it must be added that, whether thanks to a definite
mis-statement by some source or through misinterpreting a phrase which itself was true,
in 9, 46, I4 he writes as if the four tribes into which Fabius packed the humillimi (of Rome)
were new. Such a view cannot be accepted, though the truth, if there be any, behind this
remark of Livy's is not easy to divine. The most plausible conjecture, perhaps, is that some
predecessor of Livy's had said what Mommsen once supposed,63 though later he slightly
modified this opinion64 -that a result of what happened in 3Iz2/i and 304 B.C. was to brand
the urban tribes with that inferiority to the rustic in prestige which marked them in the
later phases of their existence.65 This, however, is a problem whose solution does not bear
on the only aspect of the matter of relevance here. Whatever account be given of Livy's
obscurity about the urban tribes, it remains true that the authorities for the events of
312/I B.C. do nothing to compel, or even to invite, the conclusion that Appius Claudius
in that year for the first time admitted to the tribes citizens who did not own land. His
activities were directed to a quite different end, and nothing we are told about them conflicts
With the view defended above-that landowners and the landless had both been included
in the Servian tribes from the time of their formation.
IX. CONCLUSIONS
The Servian organization is a subject so large, and its history is so complicated, that
the most determined efforts to discuss its essence without burying the argument under
piles of detail may fail. So it is perhaps desirable that these remarks should end with a
summary of the conclusions which they have sought to establish or support. Not all are
new ; for, in order to make intelligible those that are, it has been necessary to mention a
few that are not.
i. The earliest (curiate) organization of the Roman People was based on kinship.
There is no good evidence that in any period citizenship at Rome was confined to
patricians: at all recorded times both patricians and plebeians, rich and poor, leaders and
led, were included together in a single body politic. Error on this matter has been
encouraged by the false assumption that the denial of conubium between patricians and
plebeians was a feature of primitive Roman society; but in point of fact Cicero, Livy and
Dionysius are unanimous in representing this rule as one which the deceniuiri of 450 B.C.
were the first to attempt to invest with legal validity.
2. The advanced culture and active trade of Rome in the sixth century, which are now
generally recognized, strongly confirm the suggestion of the literary authorities that Rome
was a city which attracted immigrants who were not easy to incorporate into a structure
founded, like that of the curiae, on kinship.
3. Of the alternatives that the Servian system was (i) a military organization adapted
to political ends or (ii) a political organization adapted to military ends, the former is to be
preferred.
4. The far-reaching conclusions about the censorship drawn by Mommsen from
Cicero, pro Archia i i, are unjustified. It may be conjectured that one of the earliest purposes
of the census was to determine who should count as Roman citizens in the immediate
future, whether because they had been citizens in the past or because the officials holding
the census chose to make them such. The act of such an official in enrolling a man in the
list of Roman citizens was originally not merely an admission that he claimed the citizenship but an operative act whereby he acquired it.
63 See above p. 45 and n. 58, and, earlier, Die
..romischpn Tribhlc - - - T CA f. with n T.I{.
64 R. Staatsrecht 3, 174 n. 9: Droit public 6, i,
Io6 n. T.
65 See, e.g., Pliny, NH i8, I3.
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48
THE
SERVIAN
REFORMS
5. The first purpose of the Servian reform was to introduce an organization which
would include all, and not merely some, of. the free and permanent inhabitants of the
Ager Romanus. This was effected by substituting for the curiate system another in which
domicile was the title to citizenship. The new system involved a census of all free residents
in Roman territory, which for this purpose was divided into a number of districts (the
Servian tribes), and any such resident enrolled as a Roman citizen at the census thereby
became one if he had not been one before. The Servian reform at Rome is in fact parallel
to that of Kleisthenes at Athens.
This account would lose some of its plausibility if Mommsen had been right in his
contention that before 312 B.C. only landowners were included in the Servian tribes. But
that contention has been successfully disproved and may be ignored.
6. The most probable date for the institution of the Servian system is one in the sixth
century. This date in turn would confirm the view that the main object of its introduction
was military rather than political.
7. The evidence does not permit a confident answer to the question whether the
centuries began to develop political, ns opposed to purely military, functions before, or
only after, the fall of the monarchy.
8. Mommsen's interpretation of the censorship of Appius Claudius in 3I2 B.C. is not
in accordance with the evidence. There is nothing in the authorities to suggest that Appius
was the first to admit landless citizens to the Servian tribes, and what is recorded of his
measures in no way conflicts with the view that such citizens had been included in the
tribes from the start.
Finally I would emphasize what appears to me the most important consideration to be
borne in mind by any who would develop our still slender knowledge of the Servian
organization. Unless the main contention of this paper is mistaken, the primary object
of those who designed that organization was to create a political structure which would
comprise both the old citizens who belonged to the curiae and other people whose residence
in Roman territory made them appropriate recipients of the Roman ciuitas. Consequently
the fundamental element in the new system is to be found in the tribes, by the creation of
which this enlargement of the citizen-body.was effected ; and it is with the tribes that the
study of the Servian reform should begin. Accounts which assume that the primary purpose
of the scheme was to establish a timocracy mistake what was at most a secondary end for
the principal aim ; and many of them, by starting with the centuries instead of with the
tribes, if not by concentrating on our very imperfect information about the economic
qualifications required for membership of the various classes, stray into errors because they
miss the essential character of the innovation. And error on this subject is serious; for,
if it be true that the Servian reform had its origin in the sixth century, the language of
Fraccaro was not too strong when he stigmatized ' l'ipotesi di coloro che lo attribuiscono al
V o al IV sec. come una delle piCu perniciose trovate dei critici moderni, che oscuro la
nostra conoscenza, gi'a di per se cosi scarsa, della storia romana piu antica '.66
6 6O.c. in n. 33 above, 152 n. 3.
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