THE CENTURIES.

WITH regard to the purpose of the Servian constitution to impart an equal share in the consular government to the plebeians, every one is at liberty to think as he likes that it granted them the right of taking part in elections and in legislation, is universally acknowledged.

:

Servius, as for the sake of brevity I will call the lawgiver in accordance with the writers of antiquity, would have taken the simplest method of bestowing these rights, if he had adopted the same plan whereby the commons in feudal states obtained a station alongside of the barons, and had ordained that all national concerns should be brought both before the council of the burghers and that of the commonalty, and that the decree of the one should not have force without the approval of the other, and should be made null by its rejection. This was the footing on which the plebeian tribes in aftertimes stood in relation to the curies: but if these two bodies had been set up over against each other from the beginning, they would have rent the state asunder; to accomplish the perfect union of which the centuries were devised by Servius. For in them he collected the patricians and their clients together with the plebeians; and along with all these that new class of their fellow-citizens which had arisen from bestowing the Roman franchise on the inhabitants of other towns, the municipals: so that nobody could in any way look upon himself as a Roman, without having some place or other, though indeed it might often be a very insignificant one, in this great assembly 1002. The

1002 Comitiatus maximus.

preponderance, nay the whole power in that assembly lay with the plebs: this however excited no ill-will, because no one was excluded; and provoked no opposition, because it did not decide by itself, but stood on an equipoise with

the curies.

This institution of the centuries has thrown that of the tribes completely into the shade; and through the former alone has the name of king Servius maintained its renown to our days. Moreover it has long and universally been held to be a settled point, that this is understood with more certainty and accuracy than any other part of the Roman constitution; because it is described by Dionysius and Livy, and that description is coucht in numbers: and only a very few, who saw more clearly, have ventured to pronounce, that at all events these representations were not suited to the times of which we have a contemporary history. At present this in the main is no longer contested; and, a far more authentic record having come to light, the errours common to the two historians, and those peculiar to each, may be satisfactorily pointed out. They cannot either of them have been acquainted with the account contained in the commentaries which were ascribed to the king himself, but have written from very different and very defective reports: as to Cicero, the only reason that indisposes us to believe his having drawn immediately from the authentic source, is, that erudition of this sort was not in his way; else his statements are exceedingly accurate and trustworthy. The mistakes of the two historians need not surprise us; for they were not speaking of an institution still existing, nor even of one that had been recently changed, but of what had long since past away. Livy says expressly, that it had nothing in common with the constitution of the centuries in his days: and this moreover is the very reason why he describes it, as he does the ancient tactics in his account of the Latin war. Various other statements too must have been current, containing still greater

discrepancies; for Pliny takes 110000 ases to be the limit for the property of the first class, Gellius 125000 1005; numbers, which can neither be regarded as blunders in the manuscripts, nor as slips in the writers.

con

In one point both the historians are mistaken: founding the burghers with the commonalty, they imagine that a people, in which till then perfect union and equality had prevailed, was now divided into classes according to property, in such a manner that all the power fell into the hands of the rich, though incumbered with no slight burthens. Dionysius adds another errour to this, in looking upon the eighteen equestrian centuries, which had the first rank in the constitution of Servius, as a timocratical institution.

The principle of an aristocracy is to maintain a perfect equality within its own body. The poorest and obscurest nobile of Venice, into whose family no office of dignity had come for centuries, was esteemed in the great council as the equal of those whose wealth and name encircled them with splendour. A government formed like the Roman by a large body of houses is a complete democracy within itself, just as much so as that of a canton where the population is not more numerous: an aristocracy it is solely in its relation to the commonalty. This was misunderstood by Dionysius and Livy: no change was made by Servius in this equality of the ancient burghers: his timocracy only affected those who stood entirely without the pale of that body, or those who at the utmost were attacht to it, but far from partaking in the same equality.

The six equestrian centuries establisht by L. Tarquinius were incorporated by Servius into his comitia; and received the name of the six suffragia: so that these comprised all the patricians; among whom it cannot be conceived that in this constitution, any more than in the earlier, there existed any distinction adapted to the scale of their property. Livy, though he forgot that the six centuries had

1003 Pliny H. N. xxxIII. 13. Gellius vII. 13.

been instituted by Tarquinius, makes a perfectly correct distinction between them and the twelve which were added by Servius 1004; out of the principal men in the state, as he says he ought to have said, in the commonalty: for the patricians were in the six suffragia, nor can any of them have been admitted into the twelve centuries. Dionysius therefore should have confined himself to these twelve centuries, when he conceived that the knights were chosen by Servius out of the richest and most illustrious families; which notion he extends to all the eighteen": for the patricians, who unquestionably as a body were the richest as well as the leading men in the state, had all of them places in the six suffragia by birth and descent, though particular individuals among them might happen to be exceedingly poor.

Else it is clear from the character of the measure, that the person who arranged this division of ranks, when he collected the notables and separated them from the commonalty, would pass over such of the nobles of Medullia or Tellena as were totally reduced to poverty and insignificance, and would enroll in these centuries such of the merely freeborn inhabitants as in compliance with the notion of the class possest wealth enough to equip a horseman, provided their honour was untarnisht; not those whose character stood the highest, if their means were too small. Marius would not have been placed among the knights: the object of Servius however was not to bestow prizes on the virtues of individuals, but to establish an estate in the nation; to unite the plebeian notables with the patrician. Now among the Greeks,

1004 Festus (v. Sex Suffragia) in direct opposition to the truth takes the six to have been the centuries formed by Servius. To this he was led by the notion that the twelve had already been instituted by Tarquinius. See above p. 355, note 892.

5 IV. 18. Ἐκ τῶν ἐχόντων τὸ μέγιστον τίμημα, καὶ κατὰ γένος ἐπιφανῶν. The passage of Cicero about selecting the knights censu maximo is mutilate, and cannot be filled up with any certainty.

wherever the ancient government did not dwindle into an oligarchy, the transition to that later order of things which the course of nature brought about, was effected by the remnant of a decaying aristocracy uniting themselves into one class with the richer landed proprietors among the commonalty, the yewuópor: this class, from γεωμόροι: being able to defray the expense of serving as horsemen out of their own means, bore the name of inπeîs; which is best rendered in English by the word knights, although in using it certain associations must be guarded against. The Greek philosophers, when the ancient notions of ancestry had long been lost, defined nobility to consist, according to the way of thinking then prevalent, of hereditary good birth together with hereditary wealth 1006 Where poverty has intruded, none but a military nobless, such as that which several German provinces take pride in, can maintain the character of the class in public opinion, which alone preserves it. Nay the privileged classes have universally esteemed wealth, and the outward splendour that flows from it, as the only thing which can place any one on a level with themselves. Such has always been the case. The Heraclid Aristodemus, the progenitor of the Spartan kings, said, Money makes the man. Alcæus repeated it in his songs, as a saying of the wise: and bad as this sounds, bad as it is, still it can no way be disputed that, in an undertaking like that of king Servius, wealth and not bare lineage was to be taken as the criterion for the plebeian aristocracy which was to be establisht under a new form.

Only we must beware of confounding the first institution with what took place afterward; as also of supposing that the subsequent standard of an equestrian fortune, a

1006 Aristotle Fragm. de Nobilitate.

7 Xpημar' άvýp. Alcæus in the Schol. on Pind. Isthm. II. 17. fragm. 50. ed. Matth. Aristodemus said it at Sparta: so that this tradition, like the national one in Herodotus (vi. 52.), represented him as not having died until the conquest was completed.