f exercising influence on that assembly, and especially
of managing the election of tribunes according to their views; and
both were henceforth done away by means of the new method of voting
according to tribes. Of these, four had been formed under the Servian
constitution for the purposes of the levy, embracing town and country
alike;(8) subsequently-perhaps in the year 259--the Roman territory
had been divided into twenty districts, of which the first four
embraced the city and its immediate environs, while the other sixteen
were formed out of the rural territory on the basis of the clan-cantons
of the earliest Roman domain.(9) To these was added--probably
only in consequence of the Publilian law, and with a view to bring
about the inequality, which was desirable for voting purposes, in
the total number of the divisions--as a twenty-first tribe the
Crustuminian, which derived its name from the place where the plebs
had constituted itself as such and had established the tribunate;(10)
and thenceforth the special assemblies of the plebs took place, no
longer by curies, but by tribes. In these divisions, which were based
throughout on the possession of land, the voters were exclusively
freeholders: but they voted without distinction as to the size of
their possession, and just as they dwelt together in villages and
hamlets. Consequently, this assembly of the tribes, which otherwise
was externally modelled on that of the curies, was in reality an
assembly of the independent middle class, from which, on the one hand,
the great majority of freedmen and clients were excluded as not being
freeholders, and in which, on the other hand, the larger landholders
had no such preponderance as in the centuries. This "meeting of the
multitude" (-concilium plebis-) was even less a general assembly of
the burgesses than the plebeian assembly by curies had been, for it
not only, like the latter, excluded all the patricians, but also the
plebeians who had no land; but the multitude was powerful enough to
carry the point that its decree should have equal legal validity
with that adopted by the centuries, in the event of its having been
previously approved by the whole senate. That this last regulation
had the force of established law before the issuing of the Twelve
Tables, is certain; whether it was directly introduced on occasion
of the Publilian -plebiscitum-, or whether it had already been called
into existence by some other--now f