The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau
4
4. The comitia in ancient Rome
When Servius made his new division, as the thirty
curiae
couldn’t be shared equally between his four tribes, and he
didn’t want to interfere with them; so they became a further
division of the inhabitants of Rome, quite independent of
the tribes. But
curiae
didn’t have any bearing on the rural
tribes or their members, because for them the tribes had
become a purely civil institution, and a new system for
raising troops had been introduced, making the military
divisions of Romulus superfluous.
[Rousseau hasn’t said explicitly
that the division into curiae was a military one; the reader is presumably
expected to know this,]
Thus, although every citizen was enrolled
in a tribe, many of them were not members of a curia.
Servius also made a third division—quite distinct from
the two I have mentioned—and the effects of this made it
the most important of the three. He sorted the whole Roman
people into six classes, distinguished not by place or person
but by
wealth
; the first classes included the rich, the last
the poor, and those in between included people of moderate
means. These six classes were subdivided into 183 other
bodies, called ‘centuries’, which were distributed in such
a way that the first class alone comprised more than half
of them, while the last class comprised only one. Thus
the class that had the fewest members contained the most
centuries, and the whole of the last class—which included
more than half the inhabitants of Rome—only counted as a
single subdivision, ·a single century·.
To veil the results of this arrangement from the people,
Servius tried to give it a military tone: in the second class he
inserted two centuries of armourers, and in the fourth two
of
·
makers of
·
weapons; and in each class except the last he
distinguished young from old, i.e. distinguished those who
were obliged to bear arms from those whose age gave them
legal exemption. (It was this distinction, rather than that of
wealth, that created the need for frequent repetition of the
census.) Lastly, he ordered that the assembly should be held
in the Campus Martius, and everyone whose age made him
liable for military service should bring his weapons.
Why didn’t he divide the last class into young and old?
Because its members weren’t given the right to bear arms
for the country: to have the right to defend hearth and home,
a man had to
have
a hearth and home! Of all the countless
troops of beggars who to-day lend lustre to the armies of
kings, there is perhaps not one who wouldn’t have been
scornfully driven out of a Roman platoon back in the days
when soldiers were the defenders of liberty.
[Rousseau will now refer to certain people (in Latin) as capite censi =
‘head-count people’. They couldn’t figure in a census through their
number of houses, businesses, animals, slaves etc., because they didn’t
own anything.]
But this last class
was
further divided into
•
proletarians and the
•
capite censi
. The proletarians, not
quite reduced to nothing, at least gave the state citizens and
in some times of great need even gave it soldiers. The
capite
censi
, who had nothing at all and could be numbered only by
counting heads, were regarded as zeroes, and Marius—
·
four
centuries after Servius
·
—was the first who stooped to enroll
them.
Without deciding now whether this third arrangement
was good or bad in itself, I think I can say that it couldn’t
have worked if it weren’t for the early Romans’ simple
mœurs
[see Glossary]
, disinterestedness, liking for agriculture, and
scorn for commerce and the profit motive. Where is the
modern people among whom consuming greed, restlessness,
intrigue, continual promotions and demotions, and perpetual
changes of fortune, could leave such a system in place for
·
even
·
twenty years without toppling the entire state? I
should add that
mœurs
and the censorship
[see Glossary]
,
being stronger than this institution, corrected its defects
at Rome—
·
for example
·
, a rich man who made too much
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