gesses, 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 important constitutional change
which the new opposition wrung from the nobility, the first victory of
the democracy proper. The pith of it consists partly in the
restriction of the censorial arbitrary rule, partly in the restriction
of the influence of the nobility on the one hand, and of the non-
freeholders and the freedmen on the other, and so in the remodelling
of the centuriate comitia according to the principle which already
held good for the comitia of the tribes; a course which commended
itself by the circumstance that elections, projects of law, criminal
impeachments, and generally all affairs requiring the co-operation of
the burgesses, were brought throughout to the comitia of the tribes
and the more unwieldy centuries were but seldom called together,
except where it was constitutionally necessary or at least usual, in
order to elect the censors, consuls, and praetors, and in order to
resolve upon an aggressive war.

Thus this reform did not introduce a new principle into the
constitution, but only brought into general application the principle
that had long regulated the working of the practically more frequent
and more important form of the burgess-assemblies. Its democratic,
but by no means demagogic, tendency is clearly apparent in the
position which i