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Originally posted by GeoSorosReptilian
reply to post by Helious
Bush DID NOT declare war on the nation's employers as BO and his Czars are doing.
The Comitia Curiata and the Comitia Centuriata
The patricians were the earlier settlers and their descendants.
They claimed for themselves rights and priviliges, which they did not allow to the more recent accessions to the population, the plebeians.
Both were free-men; but the patricians constituted themselves into a kind of aristocracy which sought to control the state, and did in fact generally succeed in controlling its policy.
King Servius Tullius, the sixth monarch, who has already been mentioned, would seem to have effected a very radical change in the social and governmental organization of the city in his time by enlarging the power of the plebeians and giving them a greater voice than they had previously possessed in the government of the state.
But, notwithstanding this, the line between the two classes was always sharply drawn; it was to some extent as well as in some others, the constitution of the Roman state was singularly complex, and indeed to our modern understanding somewhat obscure.
There were the Comitia Curiata and the Comitia Centuriata.
The Comitia Curiata was the original Roman Assembly, composed of the first populus or people of Rome, the patricians, who were divided into thirty curiae, or tribes, ten for each of the three original grand divisions.
Voting in the Comitia Curiata, or Tribal Assembly, as we may perhaps call it, was by curiae or tribes, as units, each tribe having one vote, and that vote determined by a majority of the votes of the individual members of the curia.
The franchise of the Comitia Curiata, as indicated, was restricted to the patricians.
The plebeians had no voice in it.
The Comitia Centurata, in which the plebeians had a voice, was established, it is said, by King Servius Tullius, early reformer of the Roman state, and who, by reason of his own rather obscure birth and for other considerations, was disposed to protect the plebs or plebeians, and to secure political rights for them.
The term Comitia Centuriata has scarcely a corresponding word in English.
The literal meaning is the Assembly of the Centuries.
For the purpose of its establishment the whole people of Rome, the populus and the plebs, the patricians and the plebeians alike, were divided, on the basis of the amount of property owned by them, into five classes, according to Livy, or into six classes, according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which again were subdivided into 193 centuries, or groups of one hundred each, centum meaning one hundred, so called because originally, as it is stated, each group was actually composed of one hundred persons.
Possibly this represented the actual population of Rome at the time the institution was established.
Afterwards, of course, although the name was always retained, the membership of the several groups or centuries, so far as number was concerned, necessarily became indefinite.
Every Roman citizen, patrician and plebeian alike, was entitled to participate in the Comitia Centuriata. The voting in it was by classes and by centuries - the first class being called first, and the others in their order.
Each century had one vote, determined by the majority of its members. A majority of the centuries, being ninety-seven, was required for the passage of any proposed measure.
The division into five or six classes, as the case may have been, was important only in the fact that the classes first called to vote might carry a measure without the necessity of calling upon the remaining classes; and the influence of the wealthier classes therefore became predominant.
The result was either directly or indirectly that the power of the patricians always remained the dominant factor in the Roman commonwealth.