basis of the
right of suffrage began for the first time to be called in question.
Appius Claudius, the boldest innovator known in Roman history, in his
censorship in 442 without consulting the senate or people so adjusted
the burgess-roll, that a man who had no land was received into
whatever tribe he chose and then according to his means into the
corresponding century. But this alteration was too far in advance
of the spirit of the age to obtain full acceptance. One of the
immediate successors of Appius, Quintus Fabius Rullianus, the famous
conqueror of the Samnites, undertook in his censorship of 450 not to
set it aside entirely, but to confine it within such limits that the
real power in the burgess-assemblies should continue to be vested in
the holders of land and of wealth. He assigned those who had no land
collectively to the four city tribes, which were now made to rank not
as the first but as the last. The rural tribes, on the other hand,
the number of which gradually increased between 367 and 513 from
seventeen to thirty-one--thus forming a majority, greatly
preponderating from the first and ever increasing in preponderance,
of the voting-divisions--were reserved by law for the whole of the
burgesses who were freeholders. In the centuries the equalization of
the freeholders and non-freeholders remained as Appius had introduced
it. In this manner provision was made for the preponderance of the
freeholders in the comitia of the tribes, while for the centuriate
comitia in themselves the wealthy already turned the scale. By this
wise and moderate arrangement on the part of a man who for his warlike
feats and still more for this peaceful achievement justly received the
surname of the Great (-Maximus-), on the one hand the duty of bearing
arms was extended, as was fitting, also to the non-freehold burgesses;
on the other hand care was taken that their influence, especially
that of those who had once been slaves and who were for the most part
without property in land, should be subjected to that check which
is unfortunately, in a state allowing slavery, an indispensable
necessity. A peculiar moral jurisdiction, moreover, which gradually
came to be associated with the census and the making up of the
burgess-roll, excluded from the burgess-body all individuals
notoriously unworthy, and guarded the full moral and political
purity of citizenship.

Increasing Powers of the Burgesses

The powers of the comitia ex