mmoned not to
speak, but to hear; not to ask questions, but to answer. No one
spoke in the assembly but the king, or he to whom the king saw
fit to grant liberty of speech; and the speaking of the burgesses
consisted of a simple answer to the question of the king,
without discussion, without reasons, without conditions, without
breaking up the question even into parts. Nevertheless the Roman
burgess-community, like the Germanic and not improbably the primitive
Indo-Germanic communities in general, was the real and ultimate
basis of the political idea of sovereignty. But in the ordinary
course of things this sovereignty was dormant, or only had its
expression in the fact that the burgess-body voluntarily bound
itself to render allegiance to its president. For that purpose
the king, after he had entered on his office, addressed to the
assembled curies the question whether they would be true and loyal
to him and would according to use and wont acknowledge himself as
well as his messengers (-lictores-); a question, which undoubtedly
might no more be answered in the negative than the parallel homage
in the case of a hereditary monarchy might be refused.

It was in thorough consistency with constitutional principles that
the burgesses, just as being the sovereign power, should not on
ordinary occasions take part in the course of public business. So
long as public action was confined to the carrying into execution
of the existing legal arrangements, the power which was, properly
speaking, sovereign in the state could not and might not interfere:
the laws governed, not the lawgiver. But it was different where a
change of the existing legal arrangements or even a mere deviation
from them in a particular case was necessary; and here accordingly, under
the Roman constitution, the burgesses emerge without exception as
actors; so that each act of the sovereign authority is accomplished
by the co-operation of the burgesses and the king or -interrex-.
As the legal relation between ruler and ruled was itself sanctioned
after the manner of a contract by oral question and answer, so
every sovereign act of the community was accomplished by means of
a question (-rogatio-), which the king addressed to the burgesses,
and to which the majority of the curies gave an affirmative answer.
In this case their consent might undoubtedly be refused. Among
the Romans, therefore, law was not primarily, as we conceive it,
a command addressed by