turies as for service in the legion, reduced from
11,000 to 4000 -asses-. Besides, the formal retention of the earlier
rates, while there was a general increase in the amount of men's
means, involved of itself in some measure an extension of the suffrage
in a democratic sense. The total number of the divisions remained
likewise unchanged; but, while hitherto, as we have said, the 18
equestrian centuries and the 80 of the first class had, standing by
themselves, the majority in the 193 voting centuries, in the reformed
arrangement the votes of the first class were reduced to 70, with the
result that under all circumstances at least the second grade came to
vote. Still more important, and indeed the real central element of
the reform, was the connection into which the new voting divisions
were brought with the tribal arrangement. Formerly the centuries
originated from the tribes on the footing, that whoever belonged to a
tribe had to be enrolled by the censor in one of the centuries. From
the time that the non-freehold burgesses had been enrolled in the
tribes, they too came thus into the centuries, and, while they were
restricted in the -comitia tributa- to the four urban divisions,
they had in the -comitia centuriata- formally the same right with
the freehold burgesses, although probably the censorial arbitrary
prerogative intervened in the composition of the centuries, and
granted to the burgesses enrolled in the rural tribes the
preponderance also in the centuriate assembly. This preponderance was
established by the reformed arrangement on the legal footing, that of
the 70 centuries of the first class, two were assigned to each tribe
and, accordingly, the non-freehold burgesses obtained only eight of
them; in a similar way the preponderance must have been conceded also
in the four other grades to the freehold burgesses. In a like spirit
the previous equalization of the freedmen with the free-born in the
right of voting was set aside at this time, and even the freehold
freedmen were assigned to the four urban tribes. This was done in the
year 534 by one of the most notable men of the party of reform, the
censor Gaius Flaminius, and was then repeated and more stringently
enforced fifty years later (585) by the censor Tiberius Sempronius
Gracchus, the father of the two authors of the Roman revolution. This
reform of the centuries, which perhaps in its totality proceeded
likewise from Flaminius, was the first impo