The Power of the Roman Magistrates

Only holders of certain offices—consuls, praetors, and tribunes of the plebs— possessed the power to summon citizens to meetings to elect new officeholders, to discuss matters of importance, and to decide on laws and policies. Contiones (singular, contio) were occasions just for discussion and debate. The official who had called the meeting addressed the crowd himself, and also brought forward others whose opinions he wished citizens to hear. Comitia and concilia were assemblies where they actually voted. These assemblies met only at Rome so that any citizen resident elsewhere who wished to vote had to come to the city to do so and the voting had to be completed within a single day. Once again, the official who called the meeting controlled the agenda, and the assembled voters could do no more than accept or reject the candidates or the proposals put before them. When assemblies gathered for a discussion or a vote, the senate met at the same time in a nearby temple or other sacred building to provide advice. At any assembly, therefore, ordinary citizens had little freedom of speech or initiative. There was no opportunity for any of them to address the meeting; they could not put forward any proposal or any candidate for election; nor could they seek to amend a proposal presented by the presiding official. All they could do was to vote for or against. In practice, however, despite this official control of both the agenda and the speakers, citizens could still register dissatisfaction with the proceedings informally, through demonstrations, heckling, and occasionally even by destroying an official’s insignia of office, such as his fasces or his official chair.
The fact that Roman citizens did not cast their votes in a mass made the census one of the city’s vital political institutions. By the fourth century, it had become highly complex, and had come to serve a larger range of functions than when it was first instituted in the sixth or early fifth century.Property, reputation, and place of residence remained fundamental to the operation of the developed census. Once new censors were chosen, all citizens made declarations to them, in which they identified themselves and their places of residence, and listed their property and their dependents. From these declarations, and on their assessment of each citizen’s character, the censors assigned men to centuries and tribes and also made distinctions of age. Censors assigned the wealthiest to the centuries of the cavalry, while they placed those who were too poor to serve in the army in the single century of the proletarii. All those considered eligible for service in the infantry were placed in a further group of centuries, ones that were now arranged in a series of classes, each signifying minute gradations of wealth and status. Throughout this entire process, it should be remembered, censors main-tained the right to examine any citizen’s physical condition and way of life. They could express their disapproval of a citizen in various ways—by rebuking him publicly, by registering a cause for complaint in a “note” (nota) attached to his name in the roster of citizens, or by imposing penalties.

By the fourth century the census had shifted from being primarily an aspect of military organization. Membership in a century set voting rights as well as military duties, and it also determined eligibility for payments of tributum, assessments of money for emergencies that fell most heavily on the members of the wealthiest centuriae. Centuries, moreover, no longer strictly corresponded to forms of military service. For example, the equites, the cavalry in wartime, were now not recruited exclusively from the so called equestrian centuries, and some of the men placed in the leading centuries of the infantry must have served on horseback in fact. At the same time, in all probability the complex hierarchy of the infantry centuries no longer corresponded closely to any distinctions in the military service that their members actually performed.

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