User:Ifly6/Servian tribes

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Addenda for Romulean tribes[edit]

List form for simplicity.

  • People today think it did have some relation to "three".

On the etymology of the term tribus, Taylor was noncommittal, except for its connection with the Umbrian trifu... Currently, the view prevails that both words derive from the same Indo-European compound noun denoting "tripartite entity"... This view squares exquisitely with the tradition of the original tripartite division of Roman gentes into the three tribes of Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres.[1]

  • Clustumina was the twenty-first tribe, formed on territory that was Crustumerium. It was the first rural tribe with a topographical name.[2] There is "no satisfactory explanation" for the substitution of L for R.[3]

The Servian tribes[edit]

The tribes of the classical republic were not those of Romulus. By the republican period, the curiate constitution had been largely swept away, though how exactly this occurred is the subject of scholarly debate. In the three Romulean tribes' place stood, after 241 BC, thirty-five tribes which were used as the organising blocs for two assemblies – the concilium plebis and comitia tributa – which both exercised wide-ranging legislative and electoral power.[4]

History[edit]

Function[edit]

Each tribe was both a territorial and administrative unit, with officials called tribules who counted and facilitated the votes of tribe members.[5] Another group of officials, the divisores coordinated gifts among tribesmen and were regularly implicated in electoral bribery during the late republic.[6] At the census, citizens would declare their tribe, along with owned property, which would classify that citizen for purposes of the comitia centuriata.[7] Various reconstructions of how the comitia centuriata, with its centuriae qua levy units, interacted with the geographic tribes. One reconstruction, in Tim Cornell's Beginnings of Rome, is that each tribe was itself divided into sixty centuries which were called up by lot or by selection as needed. By doing so, the tribal and centuriate organisations of the army drew from a cross-section of society that minimised aristocratic influence.[8]

EXPAND FROM TAYLOR

Membership in a tribe was prima facie proof of Roman citizenship and also formed the basis on which the army was levied.[9] Toward the end of the Republic, the tribe became so important that it became an official part of a Roman's name, usually appearing, in the most formal documents and inscriptions, between a citizen's filiation and any cognomina.[10]

Formation[edit]

According to Roman tradition, the sixth king of Rome, Servius Tullius (traditionally r. 578–535 BC), engaged in substantial political reforms to add citizens for the purpose of subjecting them to conscription and taxation. To that end, he abolishs the Romulean tri-partite tribes, instituting a census and replacing the old tribes with four urban tribes and twenty-six pagi (districts) in the countryside. These pagi then later coalesce into the first seventeen rural tribes.[11]

The specific founding of the first seventeen rural tribes is muddled: "the relevant texts are confused and contradictory... and no firm conclusion is possible".[12] Dionysius of Halicarnassus quotes a certain Vennonius as saying Servius created thirty-five tribes, was the figure only reached in 241 BC, which is largely rejected. Dionysius also quotes Fabius Pictor as claiming that Servius created twenty-six rural tribes. Marcus Terentius Varro seems to confirm Fabius Pictor's claim, but only as to regions or districts rather than tribes.[13] During the 19th century, Barthold Georg Niebuhr and Friedrich Cornelius proposed that some of the putative thirty tribes had been conquered by foreigners, leaving only twenty-one, but this hypothesis is now generally rejected.[14]

Livy reports twenty-one tribes in total in 495 BC. It is, however, unclear how many of (if any) date back to the regal period.[15] The twenty-one tribes reported 495 BC were four urban and seventeen rural tribes. The four urban tribes were Palatina, Collina, Esquilina, and Suburana. The seventeen country tribes were Aemilia, Camilia, Claudia, Clustumina, Cornelia, Fabia, Galeria, Horatia, Lemonia, Menenia, Papiria, Pollia, Pupinia, Romilia, Sergia, Voltinia, and Voturia.[16] One tribe, Clustumina, has a geographic name and refers to Crustumerium, which the Romans conquered in 499 BC. The others all end with -ia and the majority of them coincide with the names of known patrician clans.[16] The tribe Claudia appears to be of republican origin: the ancient sources relate that it was formed after the Claudii immigrated to Rome. Tim Cornell suggests a date of 495 BC based on the consulship of Appius Claudius, the clan's leader, in that year. However, as to the other tribes, "anything that is said about the... tribes before 495 BC must be largely conjecture".[17]

Some scholars have posited that the tribes were all formed during the republic because the aristocratic names given to the tribes are viewed as incompatible with the late Roman monarchy as popular tyranny. Others have argued that the names, other than Clustumina, which do not correspond with a known patrician clan are in fact geographic; however, that those tribes are not named in the meagre evidence available should not be viewed as dispositive.[18]

Later tribes[edit]

As the Roman republic expanded, it added new tribes. While tribes were created by legislation, the actual registration of citizens into those tribes was done by the censors.[19] There was a specific official order of the rural tribes based on a counter-clockwise sequence around the city, likely established only after the last tribes were created.[20]

The first were four new tribes created after the capture of Veii in 387 BC: Arniensis, Sabatina, Stellatina, and Tromentina.[21] When Rome took territory from the Latins and the Hernici in 358 BC, two tribes were formed from Roman citizens settled on the annexed territory: Pomptina and Publilia.[22] The censors of 332 BC enrolled two more tribes, Maecia and Scaptia, from territory annexed at Lanuvium and Velitrae.[23] In 318 BC, the Romans created two new tribes – Oufentina and the Falerna – from colonies settled in Campania.[24] From land taken from the Aequi and the Aurunci in 314, respectively, the tribes Aniensis and Teretina were created in 299 BC.[25] The final two tribes, Quirina and Velina, were established in 241 BC, making the total thirty-five.[26]

After 241 BC, no further tribes were created. Legislation, passed concurrently by the senate and the people, decreed that citizens created by further territorial annexation would be registered in one of the rural tribes. Before this reform, the tribes had been relatively contiguous units; after it, they became geographically fragmented across Roman territory.[9] While it was common to extend a tribe to cover some newly enfranchised area, this was not always possible and some twenty rural tribes became divided from themselves.[27]

Over a hundred years after 241 BC, in the midst of the Social War, Rome extended citizenship to all its allies so that they would put down arms. Starting from 90 BC, Italians became Roman citizens with the passage of the lex Julia, which planned to stuff the myriad new citizens into a couple of newly created tribes that would deprive them of political influence.[28] This plan to stuff the new citizens into new tribes was challenged in 88 BC when Publius Sulpicius Rufus, a plebeian tribune, passed legislation inscribing the new citizens in the old thirty-five tribes. But after Sulla's march on Rome that year, Sulpicius' law was abrogated. After Lucius Cornelius Cinna took control of the city, espousing the cause of Italian suffrage, he settled the matter in favour of distributing the new citizens among the old tribes, which was confirmed during and after Sulla's civil war both by the victor and the senate.[29] This process started only in 70 BC with the election of new censors. The process of registering those new citizens, however, took many years – perhaps delayed by Roman inaction – and was only completed during the reign of Augustus.[30]

Registration of freedmen[edit]

When a slave was freed in ancient Rome, he acceded to the citizenship. Consequently, he was then enrolled into one of the urban tribes, without regard to his geographic location. This led to the urban tribes being viewed as socially inferior. Archaeological evidence has "amply confirmed" a further social inferiority for the tribes Esquilina and Suburana, which are sparsely represented in finds with finds bearing the names of freemen and infames.[31]

Through the republic, there were halting attempts to register freedmen in the rural tribes. The first documented attempt was that of Appius Claudius Caecus in the censorship of 312 BC.[32] EXPAND

Comitia tributa[edit]

Main articles: Plebeian Council and Tribal Assembly

There were two assemblies which were organised by tribe in the Roman republic: the concilium plebis and the comitia tributa. The former was founded, according to the Roman tradition, in 494 BC with the First secession of the plebs.[33] About two decades later, the comitia tributa was formed.[34]

The modern debate as to whether patricians could vote in the concilium plebis is largely immaterial due to the minuscule number of patricians at the end of the Conflict of the Orders and "there ceased to be any substantial difference between the two assemblies in terms of their composition". The differentiating factor by this point was largely legal and had to do with the presiding magistrate: if the president was a plebeian tribune, it was a concilium plebis; if a consul or praetor, then a comitia tributa.[34]

List and location of tribes[edit]

The thirty-five tribes at the end of the republic were as follows. The following names and abbreviations are based on Taylor 2013, pp. 270–76.

The names of the various tribes vary, both due to scribal error and changes in Latin orthography. For example, the tribe Maecia must originally have been Maicia due to its abbreviation as Mai; Crustumina and Clustumina are used interchangeably.[citation needed] With their usual abbreviations, the tribes were:[a]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Further tribal name irregularities include Publilia and Poblilia for Poblilia. Letters are sometimes added or removed: Falerina for Falerna, Sabatia for Sabatina, Terentina for Teretina, and Votinia for Voltinia.[citation needed]

Bibliography[edit]

Citations[edit]

  1. ^ Linderski 2013, pp. 357–58.
  2. ^ Linderski 2013, p. 359.
  3. ^ Taylor 2013, p. 12 n. 27.
  4. ^ Vishnia 2012, pp. 96 et seq.
  5. ^ Vishnia 2012, pp. 120–21.
  6. ^ Vishnia 2012, pp. 140–41.
  7. ^ Momigliano & Cornell 2012a.
  8. ^ Cornell 1995, p. 194.
  9. ^ a b Vishnia 2012, pp. 32–33.
  10. ^ Mouritsen 2017, p. 38; Vishnia 2012, p. 33.
  11. ^ Lomas 2017, p. 133; Vishnia 2012, p. 32; Cornell 1995.
  12. ^ Lomas 2017, p. 133.
  13. ^ Cornell 1995, pp. 175–76.
  14. ^ Cornell 1995, p. 175. "The ingenious arguments used to support this unlikely hypothesis have been shown to be fallacious, however, and it is now generally rejected".
  15. ^ Lomas 2017, p. 133; Cornell 1995, p. 174.
  16. ^ a b Cornell 1995, p. 174.
  17. ^ Cornell 1995, p. 175.
  18. ^ Cornell 1995, p. 176.
  19. ^ Linderski 2013, p. 360.
  20. ^ Linderski 2013, pp. 367–68.
  21. ^ Cornell 1995, p. 320.
  22. ^ Cornell 1995, pp. 324, 383.
  23. ^ Cornell 1995, p. 349.
  24. ^ Cornell 1995, p. 353.
  25. ^ Cornell 1995, pp. 357–58.
  26. ^ Cornell 1995, pp. 379, 383.
  27. ^ Linderski 2013, p. 369.
  28. ^ Mouritsen 1998, p. 163, adding in n. 32, that the number of new tribes is unclear: "Sisenna, 17P, mentions an early proposal to create two new tribes, while Velleius, 2,20,2, states that the new citizens were to be inscribed in eight [new] tribes".
  29. ^ Mouritsen 1998, p. 168.
  30. ^ Vishnia 2012, p. 38. "[Slow registration of Italians] was not a matter of concern for some Romans; they preferred to defer [their] registration... as much as possible, so as to minimise their impact on political life... registration of all Italian residents as Roman citizens was completed only under the reign of Augustus".
  31. ^ Taylor 2013, pp. 277–78; Linderski 2013, pp. 373–74.
  32. ^ Linderski 2013, p. 372.
  33. ^ Vishnia 2012, p. 96, pace, Forsythe, Gary (2005). A critical history of early Rome. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 175. ISBN 978-0-520-94029-1. OCLC 70728478.
  34. ^ a b Vishnia 2012, p. 96.

Sources[edit]

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