The History of Rome, vol 2 | Page 7

undoubtedly connected with the fact that the dictator,
presumably as being the leader of the infantry, was constitutionally
prohibited from mounting on horseback. In the light of these
regulations the dictatorship is doubtless to be conceived as an
institution which arose at the same time with the consulship, and which
was designed, especially in the event of war, to obviate for a time the
disadvantages of divided power and to revive temporarily the regal
authority; for in war more particularly the equality of rights in the
consuls could not but appear fraught with danger; and not only positive
testimonies, but above all the oldest names given to the magistrate
himself and his assistant, as well as the limitation of the office to the
duration of a summer campaign, and the exclusion of the -provocatio-
attest the pre-eminently military design of the original dictatorship.
On the whole, therefore, the consuls continued to be, as the kings had
been, the supreme administrators, judges, and generals; and even in a
religious point of view it was not the -rex sacrorum- (who was only
nominated that the name might be preserved), but the consul, who
offered prayers and sacrifices for the community, and in its name
ascertained the will of the gods with the aid of those skilled in sacred
lore. Against cases of emergency, moreover, a power was retained of
reviving at any moment, without previous consultation of the
community, the full and unlimited regal authority, so as to set aside the
limitations imposed by the collegiate arrangement and by the special
curtailments of jurisdiction. In this way the problem of legally retaining
and practically restricting the regal authority was solved in genuine
Roman fashion with equal acuteness and simplicity by the nameless
statesmen who worked out this revolution.
Centuries And Curies
The community thus acquired by the change of constitution rights of
the greatest importance: the right of annually designating its presidents,
and that of deciding in the last instance regarding the life or death of

the burgess. But the body which acquired these rights could not
possibly be the community as it had been hitherto constituted--the
patriciate which had practically become an order of nobility. The
strength of the nation lay in the "multitude" (-plebs-) which already
comprehended in large numbers people of note and of wealth. The
exclusion of this multitude from the public assembly, although it bore
part of the public burdens, might be tolerated as long as that public
assembly itself had no very material share in the working of the state
machine, and as long as the royal power by the very fact of its high and
free position remained almost equally formidable to the burgesses and
to the --metoeci-- and thereby maintained equality of legal redress in
the nation. But when the community itself was called regularly to elect
and to decide, and the president was practically reduced from its master
to its commissioner for a set term, this relation could no longer be
maintained as it stood; least of all when the state had to be remodelled
on the morrow of a revolution, which could only have been carried out
by the co-operation of the patricians and the --metoeci--. An extension
of that community was inevitable; and it was accomplished in the most
comprehensive manner, inasmuch as the collective plebeiate, that is, all
the non-burgesses who were neither slaves nor citizens of extraneous
communities living at Rome under the -ius hospitii-, were admitted into
the burgess-body. The curiate assembly of the old burgesses, which
hitherto had been legally and practically the first authority in the state,
was almost totally deprived of its constitutional prerogatives. It was to
retain its previous powers only in acts purely formal or in those which
affected clan-relations --such as the vow of allegiance to be taken to the
consul or to the dictator when they entered on office just as previously
to the king,(9) and the legal dispensations requisite for an -arrogatio- or
a testament--but it was not in future to perform any act of a properly
political character. Soon even the plebeians were admitted to the right
of voting also in the curies, and by that step the old burgess-body lost
the right of meeting and of resolving at all. The curial organization was
virtually rooted out, in so far as it was based on the clan-organization
and this latter was to be found in its purity exclusively among the old
burgesses. When the plebeians were admitted into the curies, they were
certainly also allowed to constitute themselves -de jure- as--what in the
earlier period they could only have been -de facto-(10)--families and

clans; but it is distinctly recorded by tradition and in itself also very
conceivable, that only a portion of the plebeians proceeded so far as to
constitute -gentes-,