Roman Public Life

by A. H. J. Greenidge

The minimum interval between the promulgation and the meeting was the space of three nundina, i.e. 24 days, and this condition was as necessary for jurisdiction and elections as for laws.[1276] On the appointed day the first act of the magistrate, who meant to guide a meeting of the Populus, was the auspicatio in the sacred enclosure (templum) which formed the centre of the gathering. Celestial signs alone[1277] seem to have been the object of this morning watch; but no such observation was necessary for plebeian gatherings; they were disturbed only by auspicia oblativa.[1278] The auspices had been taken before sunrise, and if they were favourable the herald was then sent round the walls inviting the people to meet the magistrate at dawn.[1279] This was sufficient for the comitia of the tribes.[1280] For the centuries more elaborate preparations were necessary. Proclamation of the meeting was made from the Rostra, and the red flag flew from the Janiculum to show that it was guarded while the army was busy in the Campus.[1281] The military horn was blown on the arx and round the walls, and, if the summons was for a court of justice, before the house of the accused.[1282]

When the people were assembled the president opened with a prayer,[1283] and the rogatio was read with the request whether the quirites “will and order it” (velitis, jubeatis). The magistrate is now addressing a contio, and the rogatio is subjected to a limited discussion. The president explains and advises it, and the officials or senators whom he has assembled express their support or dissent.[1284] This discussion always preceded acts of legislation.[1285] When the comitia met for jurisdiction there may have been some debate even in the quarta accusatio;[1286] it was probably only at elections that it was wholly absent.

When the discussion was over the contio was dissolved. Those who had no votes were dismissed from the enclosure;[1287] to those with votes the magistrate said, “Si vobis videtur, discedite, quirites,”[1288] thus asking them to divide up into their separate compartments, whether tribes or curiae or centuries. The enclosure was deemed large enough to hold all the privileged citizens, although where such a space could have been found on the Capitol or in the Forum is one of the mysteries of Roman topography. This enclosure was divided longitudinally into as many compartments (consaepta) as there were voting divisions. Each division was connected with the magistrate’s tribunal through a gallery (pons) running the whole length of the enclosure, this high gallery being connected with the various voting compartments by separate descending pontes.

The votes in each compartment were taken singly, and were given at the exits of the various pontes. During the greater part of Republican history votes were given verbally, the tellers (rogatores) marking them off on tablets by means of points (puncta).[1289] In legislation the affirmative answer was uti rogas, the negative antiquo; in jurisdiction acquittal and condemnation were pronounced by libero and damno; in elections dico and facio seem to have been employed.[1290] But in the latter half of the second century of the Republic the ballot was introduced. The change was gradual. Secrecy was first secured for elections by the lex Gabinia of 139, and for jurisdiction, with the exception of cases of treason (perduellio), by the lex Cassia of 137. The lex Papiria of 131 extended the principle to legislation, and finally the lex Caelia of 107 admitted it for cases of treason.[1291] In legislation and jurisdiction the old formulae were retained, the tablets which were distributed being marked V and A, or L and C. For the purpose of elections blank tablets were distributed on which the voters wrote the names.[1292] The tabellae were now thrown into an urn (cista) at the exit of each pons. The reckoning of the votes (diribitio) was in the hands of tellers who were sometimes called by the old name rogatores, but were also spoken of as diribitores.[1293] The cistae were watched by public custodes, and in the case of elections the candidates were allowed to place one guardian at each urn.[1294]

The issue was decided by the vote of the groups. In the assemblies of the curiae and the tribes the voting of the groups took place simultaneously, in that of the centuries in the order which we have already described.[1295] In the two former assemblies the order in which the votes of the groups were proclaimed had thus to be decided by lot.[1296] The reading (pronuntatio, recitatio) was continued only to the point at which an absolute majority for or against the measure had been obtained. When sixteen curiae or eighteen tribes were found to have given the same vote, it ceased, and the formal announcement of the result (renuntiatio) was then made by the magistrate. In the comitia centuriata the announcement of the result might be reached without all the centuries being called on to vote, since the result of each vote was proclaimed immediately after the group had given it, and the needful majority might be reached before all the groups had voted. The absolute majority was required in elections as well as in legislative acts, and hence the candidate who gained a mere relative majority was not returned.[1297]

Records of the voting were kept for some time in case the decision should be challenged.[1298] The promulgated lex was, as we saw, deposited in the aerarium, as laws which had passed must have been long before this provision was made, but they were kept without order or method, and skilled assistants were required to ferret out the desired enactment.[1299] Little regular provision seems to have been made for the publication even of recent measures; but those which were considered important were originally painted on wood and later engraved on bronze, and fixed in temples or other public places.[1300]

CHAPTER VI
THE SENATE

The Roman constitution, in the form in which we have left it at the close of the period of its growth, was the chaotic result of attempts to arrest internal revolution, and of feeble and misdirected efforts to readjust the relations of outworn powers. A state in which three popular assemblies have each the right of passing binding acts of parliament, in which twenty magistrates with clashing authority have each the right of eliciting the sovereign will of the people, possesses no organisation which can satisfy the need for which constitutions exist—the ordered arrangement of all the wants of civic life by means of a series of uniform acts possessing perpetual validity. It is true that the search for a personal authority is the object of theoretic, not of practical, inquiry. The average man, who is fortunately the power that in the long run determines the shape that politics shall assume, seeks law alone and cares nothing for its source. The vagueness of the ultimate power does not affect him, if the rules it lays down are rigid and binding; he will accept principles in place of persons, and by doing so he proves that he is more scientific than the scientists. But the fundamental principles that lie behind the personal power in a state are too vast in their scope to apply immediately to the needs of human life. They require interpretation by means of legislative and executive authorities; and if these acts of interpretation are to have the character of principles, the dictating authorities must have a fixed character and a permanent life, and there must be some guarantee that they shall submit their judgments to the accumulated experience of the past. No such character and no such guarantee were to be found in the existing elements of the Roman state which had strict legal recognition. The comitia could, like a parliament in a modern state where no provision for a constituent assembly exists, go on in an endless career of constitution-making; the magistrates could interpret the laws at their own will, and by fighting out the merits of their rival interpretations amongst themselves paralyse the state or plunge it into anarchy. It was felt that a central power must reside somewhere, a power which should guide the people and control the magistrates, a power which should above all avert the terrible conflicts between rival authorities so amply encouraged by the existing law.

It was scarcely necessary, at any one point in the growth of the Roman constitution, to raise the question where this power was to be found. A chain of circumstances, some internal and some external, had provided a body of men possessing the three main qualifications necessary for the exercise of central authority—permanence, experience, and the free power of deliberation. With every step in the professed extension of popular privilege the power of the Roman Senate had increased; and the explanation of this anomaly is to be found in the fact on which we have already dwelt, that the distribution of authority amongst the popular assemblies, and the increase in the number of the magistracies, had involved such a weakening of the authority of magistrates and people as to render both incapable of any pretence at effective rule. The long series of wars in which Rome was engaged, from the commencement of the struggle with Pyrrhus to the close of the third contest with Carthage, and the new duties of administration entailed by the organisation of Italy and of the earlier provinces, exhibited this incapacity in a still more glaring light. But the growth of the Senate’s authority cannot be attributed mainly to the necessities of external administration; for the fundamental changes which conditioned its pre-eminence had come when Rome was little more than a city-state, and the Senate would have ruled had Rome continued to govern a tract of territory no larger than that possessed by a Cretan city. The Empire was the final ratification, the seal of the Senate’s authority; but the origin of this authority is to be found, not in the accident of conquest, but in the working of the Roman mind itself.