Tribal assembly
After the lex Hortensia in 287 BC endowed the plebeian council with full legislative powers, the two assemblies became practically identical.
[1] The comitia tributa in the classical republic was responsible for the election military tribunes, quaestors, and curule aediles.
[2] The tribes met for legislative and judicial votes in the comitium, a meeting place before the senatorial curia in the forum that could fit between three and four thousand people, prior to 145 BC.
[22] In elections, the results became binding when the presiding magistrates completed the task of creating their successors by swearing in the winners.
[33] Trials before the people (Latin: iudicium populi) were also held before the tribes under the presidency of aediles by 329 and under plebeian tribunes by 212.
[34] In the aftermath of the Social war (91–87 BC), the Rome's Italian allies received Roman citizenship.
How the allies would be incorporated into the Roman citizen body for voting purposes was a highly politicised and difficult question.
[36][37] A plebeian tribune of 88 BC named Publius Sulpicius Rufus brought legislation to overturn these arrangements and, passed with force and a political deal with Gaius Marius, enrolled the new citizens in the existing set of thirty-five tribes.
[40] Enrolment of the new citizens among the existing tribes made them a target for Roman political electioneering, which relied on the aristocrats plying voters with gifts and patronage.
[41] However, the impact of enrolment for the far-flung Italians was minimal since political rights could only be exercised in person at Rome at the initiative of the urban magistrates.
Nor was it entirely likely that the outlying tribes' poorer voters would have the time to make themselves physically present in Rome for an assembly.
This likely favoured, for rural tribes, wealthy landowners who could afford to make the journey to Rome and have their votes counted.
[47] Each of the tribes was artificial; they did not correspond to any real bond of antecedence but instead to a geographic district in which a voter's properties were.
[53] Moreover, so to restrict the influence of manumitted slaves and dilute their individual votes, these were the four tribes into which all freedmen were assigned regardless of their locations of actual residence.
Initially, in the archaic period they were expanded largely by extending the neighbouring tribe and attaching whatever the relevant territory contiguously.
[67] In the late republic the older rural tribes close by to Rome may have become depopulated by urban inflow and the yeoman decline.
Such tribes would have become akin to rotten boroughs where aristocratic families controlled tribal votes malapportioned to a tiny electorate.
After the lex Hortensia in 287 BC endowed the plebeian council with full legislative powers, the two assemblies became practically identical.
Under this view, the statements that a consul or praetor legislated before the tribes were simplifications meant to express a curule magistrate leaning on a friendly tribune.
[69] This view rejects the modern "orthodoxy"[70] from Theodor Mommsen that the separation reflected plebeians' status as a "state within a state"[71][72] and accentuates the difference between tribal and centuriate assemblies, placing the former as the people organised for a civil purpose (domi) within the pomerium and the latter as organised for a military one (militiae) on the campus Martius outside that sacral boundary.
[73] Andrew Lintott, in Constitution of the Roman Republic (1999), rejects the single tribal assembly hypothesis, noting that in the historical period there are multiple cases where laws were brought before the tribes by curule magistrates.
