Centuriate assembly
It was made up of 193 centuries (Latin: centuriae) which were apportioned to Roman citizens by wealth and age, hugely overweighting the old and wealthy.
There is scholarly disagreement as to the extent to which the comitia centuriata facilitated competitive elections, even within its de facto restrictive electorate.
The traditional view is that Roman elections were largely unrepresentative of the population as a whole and dominated by the wealthy through social connections.
While the assembly continued to exist during the Roman Empire, it served largely to approve decisions made by the emperor and senate.
According to Roman tradition, the monarch Servius Tullius created the comitia centuriata as an assembly dividing the people by wealth into centuries to serve in Rome's military.
[2] This was possibly for the goal of splitting the levy across regional and clan loyalties to reduce the power of the patricians against the king.
The specific description of equipment in Livy and Dionysius, however, are likely conjectures from the annalists who were presented with bare property qualification figures.
[5] One conjecture initially given by Plinio Fraccaro is that the original Servian organisation did not contain seniores, making an actual assembly of men entirely of military age since the number of junior centuries in the top three classes is the same as that which made up a Roman legion.
In this telling, only later, when the assembly took on a political character, were the seniores added and given equal representation to the existing actual centuries.
[6] The establishment of the republic, in traditional narrative, would have transformed the comitia into a vehicle for electing consuls with expanded judicial powers, deferred to by the mere fact that it was the army.
[11] However, it is also not too far-fetched to believe that an assembly like the comitia centuriata, similar to hoplite democracies depicted in ancient Greece during the same period, would have existed.
[24] The comitia centuriata also had collateral responsibilities related to public religion with the ordination of flamines to Mars, the god of war.
[30] Meetings took place in the saepta, also called the ovile, which was named for the subdivisions for centuries that looked like rectangular pens.
[38] If the comitia centuriata were assembled instead of vote on a law, which was comparatively rare, a similar process was observed where after the prayer, a speech was given by the presiding magistrate.
However, these were reserved only for those who were equites equo publico (cavalry on public horse), which made up only 1,800 men (around 0.20 per cent of the population).
They received names, divided into priores and posteriores, according to the three Romulean tribes (Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres).
[44] The proletarii, from which English gets the word "proletariat", were in Rome those without sufficient property to qualify for the fifth class and were seen as valuable to the state only in the children they would produce.
[66] Others have denied its impacts,[67][68] arguing for example that the reapportionment was insufficient to change Roman electoral results in any significant way given that elections were by this point already contested into the second class of centuries.
[73] Lucy Grieve, in a 1985 article in Historia suggests that the lower classes had equal representation with twenty-five centuries each.
[81] Even within the portions of the population which definitely voted, the effect of the prerogative century's selection by lot made it more difficult for candidates to target their campaigns.
[82] During Lucius Cornelius Sulla's first consulship in 88 BC, Appian reports there was a reversion of centuriate apportionment to the Servian system along with a restoration of the senate's probouleutic right to review all proposals before they went before any assembly.
[85] Whatever reforms Sulla conducted in 88 BC must have been discarded after Lucius Cornelius Cinna and Gaius Marius emerged victorious from the short Bellum Octavianum the following year.
By the time Sulla returned and won his civil war, establishing his dictatorship, legislation was again being moved in the other assemblies.
[88] Attempts during and immediately after the Social War were unable to resolve this issue: the census of 89 was found religiously invalid and that of 86 was both disputed and failed to enrol much of the peninsula.
[90] From Caesar's dictatorship through to the end of the Second Triumvirate (in 28 BC), elections were haphazard and, if they happened at all, occurred by slate: two candidates were permitted to stand for the two vacant posts which the assembly ratified.
[92] The attempt in 19 BC, by a urban pleb uprising, to secure the consulship for Marcus Egnatius Rufus, was suppressed by the lone consul and the senate with force.
[94] In accordance with the lex Valeria Cornelia, the comitia took on ten (later increased to twenty) centuries of equites and senators in AD 5.
[97] It also helped hide the emperor's role in the state behind influential men more aligned with him, allowing him to present the choices as the result of a concordia ordinum ("an agreement of the orders") rather than imperial fiat.
[104] The shift from somewhat-open elections under Augustus,[105] where the emperor made the effort to campaign for his allies before the centuries and legislation was still necessary to rein in corrupt electoral practices, to the closed-slate voting of AD 14 marked the end of the comitia centuriata's role in elections, transforming it into a rubber stamp for decisions made by the senate and the emperor.
It, however, continued to meet – ILS 6044 records a speech given where someone apologises for supporting Sejanus in the consular elections for AD 31[106][107] – even as the forum for electoral competition largely moved into the senate and thence into the imperial court.
