community itself was called regularly to elect and to decide, and the
president was practically reduced from its master to its commissioner
for a set term, this relation could no longer be maintained as it
stood; least of all when the state had to be remodelled on the morrow
of a revolution, which could only have been carried out by the
co-operation of the patricians and the --metoeci--. An extension of
that community was inevitable; and it was accomplished in the most
comprehensive manner, inasmuch as the collective plebeiate, that is,
all the non-burgesses who were neither slaves nor citizens of
extraneous communities living at Rome under the -ius hospitii-,
were admitted into the burgess-body. The curiate assembly of the
old burgesses, which hitherto had been legally and practically the
first authority in the state, was almost totally deprived of its
constitutional prerogatives. It was to retain its previous powers
only in acts purely formal or in those which affected clan-relations
--such as the vow of allegiance to be taken to the consul or to
the dictator when they entered on office just as previously to the
king,(9) and the legal dispensations requisite for an -arrogatio- or
a testament--but it was not in future to perform any act of a properly
political character. Soon even the plebeians were admitted to the
right of voting also in the curies, and by that step the old
burgess-body lost the right of meeting and of resolving at all.
The curial organization was virtually rooted out, in so far as it
was based on the clan-organization and this latter was to be found
in its purity exclusively among the old burgesses. When the plebeians
were admitted into the curies, they were certainly also allowed to
constitute themselves -de jure- as--what in the earlier period they
could only have been -de facto-(10)--families and clans; but it is
distinctly recorded by tradition and in itself also very conceivable,
that only a portion of the plebeians proceeded so far as to constitute