Chapter II
§ 1
A survey of the ancient history best known to us may help to make clearer the fatality of strife and the impossibility of solving it save by transcending the physical plane. The habit of summing up all Roman history as so many planned actions of "the Romans," or of "Rome," is in singular contrast with the imbroglio of the records. In the social stage discovered to us by the analysis of the oldest known institutions, "early" Rome is already an artificial political organism, far removed from the simple life of tribal barbarism.[12] There are three tribes; the very name of tribe, it may be, comes from the number three[13] in the flection tribus; and the subdivisions are fixed by the numbers three and ten.[14] Behind the artificial "tribe" is a past in which, it may be, a group of villages forms the pagus or settlement.[15]
Already privilege and caste are fully established, even between classes of freemen; and only by inference can we reach the probable first bases of civic union among the ruling caste. They were clearly a caste of conquerors. Their curiæ, apparently the oldest form of group after the family or the clan,[16] are artificially arranged, numbering thirty, each curia containing nominally a hundred gentes, each gens nominally ten families.
Eduard Meyer (Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 511) decides for the view of L. Lange, that the historic appellation of Roman citizens, Quirites, derives from curia. The ancients had several theories as to the name. One (Festus) was that the Sabine goddess Curis gave her name to the Sabine town Cures (cp. Athenê, Athenai), whence, according to the legend, had come a band under Titus Tatius, who conquered the Capitoline and Quirinal hills, and had for tribe-god Quirinus. Cp. Ihne, Early Rome, p. 82. Mommsen (Eng. tr. 1862, i, 57, 78, notes) has secured currency for the other tradition, argued for by F.W. Newman (Regal Rome, 1852, pp. 55-56), that the root is the Sabine word curis, quiris, a spear. For this somewhat unplausible theory there is support in the fact that in the cognate Gaelic coir, pronounced quîr, means a spear, and that there is derived thence curiadh, a warrior. Mommsen is followed by Merivale, General History of Rome, 5th ed. p. 13; and Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 33. Pott and Becker, who derived Quirites from curia, explain the latter word as co-viria, the band of warriors. And as the view that "Athenê" comes from "Athenai," not vice versâ, has the stronger claims to acceptance, the more acceptable presumption is that "Curis" and Quirinus evolved from the curia. If Quirites meant spearmen, how could Cæsar be understood to cow mutineers by simply addressing them as Quirites [= citizens]? The curia theory is supported by the facts that "the Roman constitutional tradition ... makes the division into curies alone originate with the origin of the city"; that it "appears as an essential part of the Latin municipal system;" and that of all the old divisions it seems to be the only one that "really fulfilled important functions in the primitive constitutional organisation" (Mommsen, B. i, ch. v, pp. 73-75).
These curiæ may be conceived as derived from inner tribal or clan groups formed in the conquering stage, since they are ostensibly united by their collective or curial sacra, the rites for which the grouped gentes—who each have their private sacra—assemble in a special place, under a special priest. They still retain the usage of a common banquet,[17] the earliest form of collective religion known to us.[18] Apart from the members of the curiæ are the conquered plebs,[19] "the many" not enslaved, but payers of tribute; without share in the curiæ or vote in the comitia, or assembly, and without part in the curial or other sacra.
On this head there has been some gratuitous confusion. Schwegler (i, 621 sq.) gives convincing reasons for the view that in early times the plebs were not members of the curiæ. Cp. Ihne, as cited, pp. 110, 127; and Fustel de Coulanges, p. 278 sq. Meyer (ii, 513, 521) asserts, on the contrary, without any specification of periods, that the curiæ included plebeians as well as patricians. The contradiction seems to arise out of inattention to chronology, or a misreading of Mommsen. That historian rightly sets forth in his history (B. ii, ch. i; Eng. trans. ed. 1862, i, 264-65) that the plebs were not admitted into the comitia curiata before the "Servian" period; adding that these bodies were "at the same time" almost totally deprived of their prerogatives. In his Römisches Forschungen, 1864, i, 144 sq., he shows that they were admitted in the "historic period"—when the comitia in question had ceased to have any legal power, and when, as he elsewhere states, the admission "practically gave little more than the capacity for adrogation" (Römisches Staatsrecht, Bd. iii, Abth. i, p. 93). Here again he states that "to equal rights in the curies, especially to the right of vote in the comitia, the plebeians attained only in the later times" (Id. p. 72). Yet Professor Pelham, in asserting (p. 21; cp. p. 46) that "the primitive Roman people of the thirty curiæ included all the freemen of the community, simple as well as gentle," gives the note: "The view here taken on the vexed question of the purely patrician character of the curiæ is that of Mommsen (Röm. Forschungen, vol. i)."
When this error is corrected, the question ceases to be vexed. Schwegler has disposed of the blunder of Dionysius, who ascribes to the plebeians a share in the curiæ from the beginning; and it is not disputed that they were allowed to enter when the comitia curiata had been practically superseded by the comitia centuriata. It is to be noted that the denial of the inclusion of the plebeians in the original curiæ does not apply to the clientes, whose status, though non-patrician, had been different from that of the true plebs. M. Delaunay, who argues that the plebeians were all along admitted to the curiæ, adds the qualification: "Doubtless not the entire mass of the plebeians, but only those who were ... attached to the gentes" (Robiou et Delaunay, Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome, 1884, i, 21). But who were these gentilitia if not the clientes? (cp. loc. cit. p. 26).