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and it seems not improbable that, by that statute, it was provided that plebiscita which had no constitutional import, or which related to matters of purely private law, should not require confirmation by the centuries to acquire universal validity. The first of the leges Publiliae apparently extended this exemption to all plebiscita, whatever their content, the effect of it being, as stated by Livy (viii. 12), 'ut plebiscita omnes Quirites tenerent:' from this we should doubtless infer that the patricians now entered as fully into the business of the comitia tributa as into that of the assembly of the centuries. The necessity of senatorial sanction to plebiscita was, however, not yet dispensed with; this was effected by the lex Hortensia, B. C. 287 (Inst. i. 2. 4), which was the outcome of a third plebeian secession, and the final act by which resolutions of the plebs were placed on a footing of complete equality with leges passed in the comitia centuriata (' sed postea lex Hortensia lata est, qua cautum est ut plebiscita universum populum tenerent; itaque eo modo legibus exaequata sunt' Gaius i. 3). The numbers of the plebs were largely augmented B. c. 312, when Appius Caecus, the censor, distributed among the tribes a great mass of libertini, a term which at this epoch denoted the freeborn descendants of a manumitted slave1. These libertini were thus enrolled in the centuries, and possessed very considerable influence through the wealth which they derived from their almost exclusive control of Roman handicrafts and commerce, occupations which were deemed humiliating and derogatory to genuine Quirites; in Rome they played the part, and exercised the influence, though in a far less degree, which with us are connected with 'the city.' Eight years later than the censorship of Appius Caecus, the democratic tendency of his measure was to some degree counteracted by the new censors, Q. Fabius and P. Decius, who confined the 'forensis turba' of libertini to the four city tribes, and thus reduced the preponderance which the lower orders had acquired in the two important comitia.

The effect of the second lex Publilia, according to Livy, was 'ut legum quae comitiis centuriatis ferrentur ante initum suffragium patres auctores fierent;' it thus merely reaffirmed the constitutional doctrine, that no bill should be submitted to the centuries, with a view to its becoming law, unless it had been previously approved by the senate. It is clear from Cicero that in his time the Servian centurial constitution had undergone considerable alterations, effected by in some way combining the centurial organization with that of the tribes. The

1 Suetonius, Claudius 24.

two comitia, with their respective functions, still remained perfectly distinct, but the centuries had been incorporated with the tribes; Cicero (pro Planc. 20) expressly speaks of them as thus incorporated, and in another passage alludes to the votes of the tribes in his own. election as consul. The exact date of this change is uncertain. Niebuhr ascribes it to the censors Fabius and Decius; Mommsen places it somewhat earlier. Its motive was apparently the desire to reduce the influence of moderate fortunes in the comitia, and to exalt that of birth, landed property, and military rank. The proprietary qualification for even the first of the Servian classes had, through the growing prosperity of Rome, ceased to be the measure of a considerable fortune or even the index of social respectability; thus a great mass of the lower middle class had found its way into a body which Servius had conceived as consisting of only the higher or richer orders. The same observation may be made of the second and succeeding classes; the social position of the members of this or that class had altered along with the change in the value of money, and the relative rank in the state of those who composed class one, and who, as we have seen, formed a political force of overwhelming influence, had fallen in proportion; the timocratic constitution remained the same, while money had come to be worth less; the result being a complete change in the political centre of gravity. The natural remedy seemed to be to give up, at any rate partially, the timocratic system, to diminish the number of the centuries, whereby the influence of the equestrian order would be increased, and to bring them into a subordinate relation with the tribes, in whose assembly the political preponderance lay rather with the landed proprietors. These at least appear to be the general lines of the reforming policy. Though the exact changes are more or less matter of conjecture, the best theory of them seems to be that, while the old equestrian centuries, eighteen. in number, were left untouched, those of the five Servian classes were distributed among the tribes and at the same time reduced in number, there being fifty-four centuries in the rusticae, eight in the urbanae tribus; so that the whole number of centuries would now be eighty. The classes still voted in their old order, but speaking generally, were, so far as related to the comitia, no longer determined by a property qualification. The right of a citizen to vote in the comitia centuriata depended on his being enrolled in a tribe, and to what tribe he belonged was settled by the censors. By the year B. C. 241, the number of tribes had by successive additions been raised to thirty

Of the two comitia which we have just been considering, the comitia tributa, as might have been inferred from its history, concerned itself mainly with ordinary domestic legislation, the great majority of enactments which relate to private law being plebiscita; the leading business of the comitia centuriata was the election of magistrates and deliberation on high political matters. After the latter assembly had acquired its full powers, the oldest gathering of all, the comitia curiata, dropped back into a position of quite secondary importance, and its right of independent legislation was less and less frequently exercised. The functions which it continued to discharge were the approval of such resolutions of the centuries as by inveterate custom required a religious sanction, and of other legal dispositions which were deemed incomplete unless confirmed in this manner. The action of the curiae is in fact implicated with that of the pontifices, to whom was first submitted any business for which it was desired to obtain the legislative sanction of this comitia; for instance, the form of adoption known as adrogation, and the lex curiata de imperio, by which the higher magistrates, with the exception of the censors, were invested with their authority, both have a religious significance. It is not known how long the patricians continued to attend the meetings in person; far before Cicero's time they were merely represented by thirty lictors.

The senate apparently did not exercise any purely legislative authority till the last century B.C. Besides its important function of discussing all matters before they were submitted to the assembly of the centuries, which indeed could not be so submitted at all without a senatorial resolution 'ut de ea re ad populum ferretur,' it exercised a considerable influence in this period over the elections. Originally it nominated the candidates whose names the consul was to lay before the comitia; when the plebeians became eligible to all the higher magistracies, this right fell into desuetude, and free canvassing became the rule. But the senate was still able to make its weight felt through the magistrate who conducted the elections; and by the necessity of its 'auctoritas' it controlled the comitia curiata, whose approval of the choice made by the centuries was given, as has just been observed, by the lex curiata de imperio. Even of this influence the senate was indirectly deprived by a lex Maenia, by which it was enacted that the senatorial auctoritas to the comitia curiata should be given before instead of after the assembly of the centuries in which the magistrates were elected.

The period between the reform of the comitia centuriata and the

fall of the Republic produced few constitutional changes which left their mark on private law or on the form of direct legislation. The gradual extension of the Roman dominion over Italy, and then even beyond its confines into Gaul and Spain, Greece, Asia, and Africa, resulted in a constant increase in the value of the Roman civitas, and in a perpetual struggle for the acquisition of it and the privileges which it conveyed on the part of the Italian allies of the city. Their rebellion ninety years before Christ, and the legislation (leges Iulia and Plautia Papiria) by which they became full citizens of Rome, are too well known to need repetition; but the political weight which numerically they deserved was denied them by their not being fairly distributed among the thirty-five existing tribes, but probably among eight of them only. The establishment, however, by Rome of colonies at various points in her dominions had led to a distinction of civil rights which subsequently became of some prominence, and which therefore requires a brief notice. The earliest colonies of this kind consisted of Roman citizens, who retained their full rights of civitas even in their new home. Contrasted with them are what are called 'coloniae Latinae,' by which we should understand Roman colonies whose members enjoyed only the ius Latii or Latinitas. These colonia Latinae were of two kinds, those which originated, like the old Roman colonies, in the actual deductio' or leading of a number of citizens to a new residence amid a conquered population, which was thereby to be awed into submission, and those which existed as townships before, but received the character of Latin colonies, without change in their inhabitants, by statutory enactment. The ius Latii comprised certain of the rights enjoyed by a full Roman citizen, and some of them which were not possessed by the municipia and praefecturae in various parts of Italy upon which Rome had conferred a limited civitas. The inhabitants of a municipium or praefectura had, before the leges Iulia and Plautia Papiria, no political rights (suffragium and honores), nor in all probability had they the connubium; but they had the commercium, and consequently could hold property and make contracts and wills exactly like full Roman citizens. The chief advantage of Latinitas over the limited civitas of a municeps was that if a citizen of a Latin colony served therein the office of a superior magistrate he thereby acquired the full citizenship of Rome (Gaius i. 96); other modes were subsequently introduced in which 'Latins' could become perfect Quirites, and this capacity of rising to the Roman citizenship is the distinctive feature of the ius Latii as a legal status. After that, by the leges Iulia and Plautia Papiria, the Italian

allies had been incorporated with the Roman people, the limited rights denoted by Latinitas were retained as a kind of reward which could be bestowed on cities or districts outside Italy which had deserved well of Rome, but on which she hesitated to confer the civitas ; it was thus quite clear what was meant by a 'Latin;' it was no longer an ethnical or geographical, but a legal term, and by Latinitas or ius Latii was understood a limited citizenship, which in certain ways might be converted into full citizenship of Rome. The lex Iunia. Norbana (A.D. 19) enacted that slaves who had received their liberty in some other way than by one of the three civil modes of manumission (vindicta, census, testamentum), and who had hitherto remained legally slaves, though protected in the enjoyment of liberty by the praetor, should possess this ius Latii, whence they were called Latini Iuniani; but the lex expressly prohibited them from making a will (Ulp. Reg. 20. 14, Gaius i. 22 sqq.)1.

The character of the substantive law in the period intervening between the final constitution of the state and the fall of the Republic is a subject important because it involves a discussion of the origin. and nature of the praetor's indirect power of legislation, and of the kindred distinction between ius civile and ius gentium. Ius civile is one of the two contrasted terms in two celebrated oppositions of Roman law, between which there is an intimate relation. It is opposed, firstly, to ius gentium or naturale in general, and in this connection it is said (Dig. 41. 1. 1. pr.) to be 'ius proprium civitatis nostrae;' so too private law is described (Inst. i. 1. 4) as tripertitum, 'collectum est enim ex naturalibus praeceptis, aut gentium, aut civilibus.' Secondly, it is opposed to the praetorian law which was based on and drawn from the ius gentium: 'ius civile est, quod ex legibus, plebiscitis, senatus consultis, decretis Principum, auctoritate prudentium venit: ius praetorium est, quod Praetores introduxerunt adiuvandi, vel supplendi, vel corrigendi iuris civilis gratia' (Dig. 1. 1. 7)2. The proper meaning of ius civile is thus the peculiar in

Thus in the time of the classical jurists there were two kinds of Latins: (1) the Latinitas of the Latini coloniarii, which was still to be found in some cities on which the ius Latii had been conferred, and which contained the commercium without any limitation; (2) Latinitas acquired by manumission, of which there were four varieties: (a) Latins who were such under the lex Iunia Norbana, (b) slaves manumitted under the age of thirty years without observance of the provisions of the lex Aelia Sentia (Gaius i. 18-21), (c) slaves manumitted by a 'bonitary' owner, or by a true owner, while they were the subjects of a usufruct or pledge, (d) the descendants of libertini whose Latinitas had been due immediately to manumission. * Certain deviations from this most common use of the first of the contrasted

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