uries

According to the order of voting hitherto followed in the centuriate
comitia, although the freeholders were no longer--as down to the
reform of Appius Claudius(59) they had been--the sole voters, the
wealthy had the preponderance. The equites, or in other words the
patricio-plebeian nobility, voted first, then those of the highest
rating, or in other words those who had exhibited to the censor an
estate of at least 100,000 -asses- (420 pounds);(60) and these two
divisions, when they kept together, had derided every vote. The
suffrage of those assessed under the four following classes had been
of doubtful weight; that of those whose valuation remained below the
standard of the lowest class, 11,000 -asses- (43 pounds), had been
essentially illusory. According to the new arrangement the right of
priority in voting was withdrawn from the equites, although they
retained their separate divisions, and it was transferred to a voting
division chosen from the first class by lot. The importance of that
aristocratic right of prior voting cannot be estimated too highly,
especially at an epoch in which practically the influence of the
nobility on the burgesses at large was constantly on the increase.
Even the patrician order proper were still at this epoch powerful
enough to fill the second consulship and the second censorship, which
stood open in law alike to patricians and plebeians, solely with men
of their own body, the former up to the close of this period (till
582), the latter even for a generation longer (till 623); and in fact,
at the most perilous moment which the Roman republic ever experienced
--in the crisis after the battle of Cannae--they cancelled the quite
legally conducted election of the officer who was in all respects the
ablest--the plebeian Marcellus--to the consulship vacated by the death
of the patrician Paullus, solely on account of his plebeianism. At
the same time it is a significant token of the nature even of this
reform that the right of precedence in voting was withdrawn only from
the nobility, not from those of the highest rating; the right of prior
voting withdrawn from the equestrian centuries passed not to a
division chosen incidentally by lot from the whole burgesses, but
exclusively to the first class. This as well as the five grades
generally remained as they were; only the lower limit was probably
shifted in such a way that the minimum census was, for the right of
voting in the cen