he consuls could not but appear fraught with danger; and not only
positive testimonies, but above all the oldest names given to the
magistrate himself and his assistant, as well as the limitation of the
office to the duration of a summer campaign, and the exclusion of the
-provocatio- attest the pre-eminently military design of the original
dictatorship.

On the whole, therefore, the consuls continued to be, as the kings had
been, the supreme administrators, judges, and generals; and even in a
religious point of view it was not the -rex sacrorum- (who was only
nominated that the name might be preserved), but the consul, who
offered prayers and sacrifices for the community, and in its name
ascertained the will of the gods with the aid of those skilled in
sacred lore. Against cases of emergency, moreover, a power was
retained of reviving at any moment, without previous consultation of
the community, the full and unlimited regal authority, so as to set
aside the limitations imposed by the collegiate arrangement and by
the special curtailments of jurisdiction. In this way the problem of
legally retaining and practically restricting the regal authority was
solved in genuine Roman fashion with equal acuteness and simplicity
by the nameless statesmen who worked out this revolution.

Centuries and Curies

The community thus acquired by the change of constitution rights
of the greatest importance: the right of annually designating its
presidents, and that of deciding in the last instance regarding the
life or death of the burgess. But the body which acquired these
rights could not possibly be the community as it had been hitherto
constituted--the patriciate which had practically become an order of
nobility. The strength of the nation lay in the "multitude" (-plebs-)
which already comprehended in large numbers people of note and of
wealth. The exclusion of this multitude from the public assembly,
although it bore part of the public burdens, might be tolerated as
long as that public assembly itself had no very material share in
the working of the state machine, and as long as the royal power by
the very fact of its high and free position remained almost equally
formidable to the burgesses and to the --metoeci-- and thereby
maintained equality of legal redress in the nation. But when the
community itself was called regularly to elect and to decide, and the
president was practically reduced from its master to its commission