Centuriate assembly
The centuriate assembly was a popular assembly of ancient Rome. In the Roman Republic, its main function was electing the consuls, praetors, and censors. It was made up of 193 centuries which were apportioned to Roman citizens by wealth and age, hugely overweighting the old and wealthy.
The assembly, according to the ancient sources, dates to the regal period and initially closely resembled the Roman army of the period in form, with the equestrians serving as cavalry, the upper census classes serving as heavy infantry, and the lower classes serving as light infantry. Whether this was ever the case is unclear; regardless, by the third century BC the assembly did not closely resemble the Roman people under arms and it served a largely electoral purpose, as it was rarely called to vote on legislation or to decide – as was its theoretical legal right as place of final appeal – capital cases.
Assembly procedure was weighted towards the upper classes. Both before and after reforms some time between 241 and 216 BC, the first class and equestrians voted first. Their votes would be tallied and announced. Then the classes would vote in descending order of wealth. Once the requisite number of candidates received a majority of voting units, voting would end. Because the equestrians, first class, and second class made a clear majority of voting units, the lower census classes would never be called on if they were in agreement. There is scholarly disagreement as to the extent to which the comitia centuriata facilitated competitive elections, even within its de facto restrictive electorate. The traditional view is that Roman elections were largely unrepresentative of the population as a whole and dominated by the wealthy through social connections.
While the assembly continued to exist during the Roman Empire, it served largely to approve decisions made by the emperor and senate. It is last recorded in the third century AD.
Origins
According to Roman tradition, the monarch Servius Tullius created the comitia centuriata as an assembly dividing the people by wealth into different blocks called centuriae for service in Rome's military. This was possibly for the goal of splitting the levy across regional and clan loyalties to reduce the power of the patricians against the king. Within each class, the even number of centuries was then divided into two, with one for the seniores and one for the juniores. This was reportedly also a division in the duties of these centuries, with the seniores defending the city and the juniores serving on the front lines. Demography suggests that a century of juniores would have outnumbered one of seniores about three-to-one.The highest class were the equites with the public horse, who served as cavalry and received a horse subsidy from the state. The other classes were expected to outfit themselves with military equipment at their own expense. These classes were ordered by wealth, with the first class being the richest. They were expected to have the best equipment, with its quality falling along with the classes' property requirements. The specific description of equipment in Livy and Dionysius, however, are likely conjectures from the annalists who were presented with bare property qualification figures. The top three classes were likely Rome's original hoplite infantry; the fourth and fifth classes were lightly armed troops; and the proletarii were exempt from military service. These divisions were based on the assessed value of the wealth of a family in the census.
One conjecture initially given by Plinio Fraccaro is that the original Servian organisation did not contain seniores, making an actual assembly of men entirely of military age since the number of junior centuries in the top three classes is the same as that which made up a Roman legion. In this telling, only later, when the assembly took on a political character, were the seniores added and given equal representation to the existing actual centuries. The term infra classem applied then to those who were below the class to serve in the heavy infantry.
The establishment of the republic, in traditional narrative, would have transformed the comitia into a vehicle for electing consuls with expanded judicial powers, deferred to by the mere fact that it was the army. However, many parts of this narrative are unclear: it is not clear that there even was a centralised state which elected magistrates in this early period; nor is it certain that Rome was governed by consuls to be elected in such an assembly. For Fred Drogula, in the 2015 book Commanders and command, the decisive break is in 367 BC, when he believes that the Romans centralised their political system around three magistrates that would over time would become the dual consuls and the sole praetor. However, it is also not too far-fetched to believe that an assembly like the comitia centuriata, similar to hoplite democracies depicted in ancient Greece during the same period, would have existed.
It is also possible that this division between classis and infra classem also marked an end to the comitia centuriatas military role, instead taking on the timocratic and gerontocratic character of the later comitia where the old and rich controlled the state. Replacing the centuries as the basis for the Roman levy were the tribes, which received their own assembly. Tim Cornell in the 1995 book Beginnings of Rome, suggests that the 406 BC introduction of wages for soldiers was the transition point, since it necessitated the raising of tax revenue which he suggests was apportioned flatly to each century, therefore correlating political privilege with tax paid.
Duties
By the late republic, almost all business before the centuries was that of elections for the magistracies which would be the centuries' nominal commanders or otherwise to conduct the census which would eventually allot citizens to their centuries. It did, however, also have power to legislate, as in it did in 57 BC when it repealed the laws forcing the consul Cicero to go into exile.The citizens had the right to appeal to the assembly against arbitrary magisterial action. Because legislation by 300 BC made execution of a Roman citizen who had asked for appeal illegal, mere appeal – provocatio – was all that was necessary to trigger this right. Actually calling the assembly to decide on trials was rare, and the expansion of the permanent jury courts by Sulla in the 80s BC caused trials in the assemblies to fall into obsolescence. Whether capital trials were required to be held in the comitia centuriata is debated: Mommsen believed so, following Cicero's interpretation of the Latin maximus comitiatus ; however others have argued instead that this was merely a requirement that turnout be large.
In matters of foreign policy, the centuries also were responsible for formal declarations of war. The most famous example is that of 200 BC at the start of the Second Macedonian War, where the centuries unexpectedly rejected war with Macedon. The vote was repeated after haranguing by the senate and promises not to draft veterans of the Second Punic War, whereupon it passed. However, evidence for this dispository power over war in the late republic is scant. The senate may have assumed such responsibilities, though this may relate to sources simply not mentioning centuriate declarations of war.
The comitia centuriata also had collateral responsibilities related to public religion with the ordination of flamines to Mars, the god of war. Beyond the actual election of censors, the centuriate assembly confirmed their election with a lex centuriata.
Procedure
As with other assemblies, the centuries could only be summoned by a magistrate: they had no right of initiative. For elections, a magistrate – here a consul, dictator, or interrex – would post an edict announcing a day on which elections would be held. Under the lex Caecilia Didia of 98 BC, a trinundium – three market days; a period of more than seventeen days by modern reckoning – then elapsed.All meetings of the centuriate assembly took place on the campus Martius, outside the pomerium, the ritual boundary of the city, since the centuriate assembly was theoretically an army and such a military force was illegal within the city's boundaries. Meetings took place in the saepta, also called the ovile, which was named for the subdivisions for centuries that looked like rectangular pens. During the republic, the saepta was a temporary wooden structure; it was eventually turned into the saepta Julia – an elections complex with a plaza measuring some – during the reign of Augustus. Such a space would have held at most some 70,000 voters with estimates ranging down to 30,000.
By tradition, a red flag would be raised on the Janiculum to warn of possible enemy attack during meetings. On the day of the election, the presiding magistrate would within an inaugurated area take auspices. If the auspices were favourable, he would then call the people to assemble and conduct a prayer. The assembly would then deliver their votes by crossing the templum and registering them into an urn.
The order in which the centuries changed in the second century BC due to a reform in the comitias organisation. Prior to the reform, the equestrian centuries voted first, followed by the classes in rank order. After the reform, a century was selected by lot from the juniores of the first class to vote first. Within the century the members would vote by head; the winners of this first century's votes would then be announced. Afterwards, the rest of the first class voted, followed by the equestrian centuries and then the sex suffragia. The results in all cases were periodically announced. When a candidate secured a majority, he was declared victorious and no more votes could be given to him; once all posts were filled or a decision reached, voting ended and all those who had not yet voted were dismissed.
If the comitia centuriata were assembled instead of vote on a law, which was comparatively rare, a similar process was observed where after the prayer, a speech was given by the presiding magistrate. Afterwards, the centuries divided to vote for or against the motion.