walker), find every clan a horseman and a senator. When communities combined, each of course appeared as a part (tribus) of the whole community (tota in Umbrian and Oscan), and the original unit became multiplied by the number of such parts. This division had reference primarily to the personal composition of the burgess-body, but it was applied also to the domain so far as that was distributed at all. That the curies had their lands, as well as the tribes, admits of the less doubt, since among the few names of the Roman curies that have been handed down to us we find along with some apparently derived from gentes, e. g. Faucia, others certainly of local origin, e. g. Veliensis. Besides, we meet with a very old measure of land, corresponding to the curia of a hundred households, the "hundred" (centuria), comprising a hundred homesteads of two acres[errata 1] each. The clan's lands, of which we have already spoken (P. 38), must in this primitive period of joint possession have been the smallest unit in the division of land.
We find this constitution under its simplest form in the scheme of the Latin or burgess communities that subsequently sprang up under the influence of Rome: these had uniformly the number of a hundred acting councillors (centumviri), and each of these councillors was called "head of ten households" (decurio).[1] The same normal numbers make their appearance throughout the earliest edition regarding the tripartite Rome, which assigns to it thirty curies, three hundred gentes, three hundred horsemen, three hundred senators, three thousand households, and as many foot-soldiers.
Nothing is more certain than that this earliest constitutional scheme did not originate in Rome: it was a primitive institution common to all the Latins, and perhaps reached back to a period long anterior to the separation of the stocks. The Roman constitutional tradition, in such points quite deserving of credit, while it accounts historically for the other divisions of the burgesses, makes the division into curies alone originate with the origin of the city; and in
- ↑ Even in Rome, where the simple constitution of ten curies early disappeared in other respects, we still discover one practical application of it, and that, singularly enough, in the very same formality which we have other reasons tor regarding as the oldest of all those that are mentioned in our legal traditions, the confarreatio. It seems scarcely doubtful that the ten witnesses in that ceremony had the same relation to the constitution of ten curies as the thirty lictors had to the constitution of thirty curies.
Errata:
