already noticed that the same individuals, on the whole, were entitled
to vote in both assemblies, but that--apart from the exclusion of
the patricians from the plebeian separate assembly--in the general
assembly of the districts all entitled to vote were on a footing of
equality, while in the centuriate comitia the working of the suffrage
was graduated with reference to the means of the voters, and in so
far, therefore, the change was certainly a levelling and democratic
innovation. It was a circumstance of far greater importance that,
towards the end of this period, the primitive freehold 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