for certain cases, and could
command an army; the consul in the city held primarily the supreme
administration and the supreme command, but he too acted as a judge
in cases of emancipation and adoption--the functional indivisibility
of the supreme magistracy was therefore, even in these instances,
very strictly adhered to on both sides. Thus the military as well as
jurisdictional authority, or, laying aside these abstractions foreign
to the Roman law of this period, the absolute magisterial power, must
have virtually pertained to the plebeian consular tribunes as well as
to the patrician. But it may well be, as Becker supposes (Handb. ii.
2, 137), that, for the same reasons, for which at a subsequent period
there was placed alongside of the consulship common to both orders
the praetorship actually reserved for a considerable time for the
patricians, even during the consular tribunate the plebeian members
of the college were -de facto- kept aloof from jurisdiction, and so
far the consular tribunate prepared the way for the subsequent actual
division of jurisdiction between consuls and praetors.

2. I. VI. Political Effects of the Servian Military Organization

3. The defence, that the aristocracy clung to the exclusion of
the plebeians from religious prejudice, mistakes the fundamental
character of the Roman religion, and imports into antiquity the modern
distinction between church and state. The admittance of a non-burgess
to a religious ceremony of the citizens could not indeed but appear
sinful to the orthodox Roman; but even the most rigid orthodoxy never
doubted that admittance to civic communion, which absolutely and
solely depended on the state, involved also full religious equality.
All such scruples of conscience, the honesty of which in themselves
we do not mean to doubt, were precluded, when once they granted to the
plebeians -en masse- at the right time the patriciate. This only may
perhaps be alleged by way of excuse for the nobility, that after it
had neglected the right moment for this purpose at the abolition of
the monarchy, it was no longer in a position subsequently of itself
to retrieve the neglect (II. I. The New Community).

4. Whether this distinction between these "curule houses" and the
other families embraced within the patriciate was ever of serious
political importance, cannot with certainty be either affirmed or
denied; and as little do we know whether at this epoch there really
wa