never in reality allowed to have such institutions.
Even in the army, it is true, the infantry had as
many pairs of leaders as there were tribes; but each
of these pairs of military tribunes did not command
the contingent of a tribe; on the contrary each individual
war-tribune, as well as all in conjunction, exercised
command over the whole infantry. The clans were
distributed among the several curies; their limits
and those of the household were furnished by nature.
That the legislative power interfered in these groups
by way of modification, that it subdivided the large
clan and counted it as two, or joined several weak
ones together, there is no indication at all in Roman
tradition; at any rate this took place only in a way
so limited that the fundamental character of affinity
belonging to the clan was not thereby altered.
We may not therefore conceive the number of the clans,
and still less that of the households, as a legally
fixed one; if the -curia- had to furnish a hundred
men on foot and ten horsemen, it is not affirmed by
tradition, nor is it credible, that one horseman was
taken from each clan and one foot-soldier from each
house. The only member that discharged functions
in the oldest constitutional organization was the
-curia-. Of these there were ten, or, where
there were several tribes, ten to each tribe.
Such a “wardship” was a real corporate
unity, the members of which assembled at least for
holding common festivals. Each wardship was
under the charge of a special warden (-curio-), and
had a priest of its own (-flamen curialis-); beyond
doubt also levies and valuations took place according
to curies, and in judicial matters the burgesses met
by curies and voted by curies. This organization,
however, cannot have been introduced primarily with
a view to voting, for in that case they would certainly
have made the number of subdivisions uneven.
Equality of the Burgesses
Sternly defined as was the contrast between burgess
and non-burgess, the equality of rights within the
burgess-body was complete. No people has ever
perhaps equalled that of Rome in the inexorable rigour
with which it has carried out these principles, the
one as fully as the other. The strictness of
the Roman distinction between burgesses and non-burgesses
is nowhere perhaps brought out with such clearness
as in the treatment of the primitive institution of
honorary citizenship, which was originally designed
to mediate between the two. When a stranger
was, by resolution of the community, adopted into
the circle of the burgesses, he might surrender his
previous citizenship, in which case he passed over
wholly into the new community; but he might also combine
his former citizenship with that which had just been
granted to him. Such was the primitive custom,
and such it always remained in Hellas, where in later
ages the same person not unfrequently held the freedom
of several communities at the same time. But