THE CLASS DIVISION OF THE ROMAN PEOPLE
One of the chief characteristics of a fully formed city state was a citizenry organized communally to fulfill its roles in politics, religion, and war. In Rome, the mass of adult male citizens was known as the populus Romanus. At some indeter-minate point, this populus gained the right to give assent to officeholders and their policies, a practice that would eventually become formalized as a vote. The bulk of Rome’s population was integrated into the city’s institutions through intermediary groups based on kinship, real or imagined. In Rome, as in some other cities, several clans or gentes formed a larger unit known as a curia (plural, curiae).
The Roman curiae, supposedly thirty in number, came together to form three tribes, the Tities, Ramnes, and Luceres.
Like other elements of Rome’s social and political order, these curiae had important religious functions. In later, better-documented times, curiae met for communal meals during major festivals and for the performance of their own reli-gious rites. Their only known officials, curiones, libones, and flamines, either were priests or at least possessed many priestly attributes. Rome’s oldest aristocratic families dominated these positions, and they would maintain this control long after they had lost their monopoly of other priestly offices at the end of the fourth century.
The tribes had an essential role in Rome’s political and military organization. When the city made war, its armythe followers of the king and of powerful members of the elite, along with some sort of general levy was organized by tribes, with each one providing its own unit of cavalry and of infantry. Aristocratic families probably dominated their tribal contingents just as they did the curiae.
During the sixth century, a reform superseded this organization of tribes and curiae, but did not eliminate it. The sixth king, Servius Tullius, supposedly created new forms of classifying and organizing the population—the beginnings of the Roman census, in other words, which in later periods would be one of the central institutions of the city.