TULLIUS HOSTILIUS KING OF ROME
Although it may not have been part of the original census, citizens soon came to be assigned to tribes that received their members from defined territories. Servius Tullius supposedly divided the city itself into four “urban” tribes for its residents, and this number was never increased. At the same time or shortly after, “rural” tribes were added for the inhabitants of the countryside, and their number was to grow as Roman territory expanded. These territorial tribes served as the mustering units of the Roman army. Residents of the city assembled for military service in their four tribes. Members of the rural tribes probably gathered in a tribal mustering center, which would have been a prominent, and no doubt fortified, place in its territory.
Tullius’ creation of these tribes did not require the elimination of the three orig¬inal ones, which continued to perform some of their old functions. Consequently, Roman citizens now belonged to two tribes in two different tribal systems. Over time, however, the new tribes came to be considerably more important than the old, and membership in one became a mark of citizenship. By the first century B.C., there were even some Romans who did not know their own curia, but all would have been able to name their territorial tribe.
Accounts of Servius Tullius’ life and reign are full of dramatic events, turns of fortune, and tales of divine intervention, and many of the incidents recorded about his life may be more a matter of myth than of history. Descriptions of his reforms, moreover, contain elements that only became standard at a later date. Nonetheless, the key features were probably in place by the early fifth century at the latest. The oldest territorial tribes, those closest to the city, bear the names of families who were prominent in the first decades of the Republic, but less promi¬nent later. Later Roman historians thought that Tullius ruled without the consent of the senate, and that he was sometimes hostile to it. In some contemporary Greek cities, where institutions like the Roman census can also be found, the creation of a list of citizens and the reassignment of the population to new subunits certainly did have the effect of lessening aristocratic control; newly created means of organization acted to decrease the importance of older ones in which members of the elite had possessed hereditary rights of leadership.