law of the land: he might diminish his
fellow-combatants' share of the spoil; he might impose exorbitant
task-works or otherwise by his imposts unreasonably encroach upon
the property of the burgess; but if he did so, he forgot that his
plenary power came not from God, but under God's consent from the
people, whose representative he was; and who was there to protect
him, if the people should in return forget the oath of allegiance
which they had sworn? The legal limitation, again, of the king's
power lay in the principle that he was entitled only to execute the
law, not to alterit. Every deviation from the law had to receive
the previous approval of the assembly of the people and the council
of elders; if it was not so approved, it was a null and tyrannical
act carrying no legal effect. Thus the power of the king in Rome
was, both morally and legally, at bottom altogether different from
the sovereignty of the present day; and there is no counterpart at
all in modern life either to the Roman household or to the Roman
state.

The Community

The division of the body of burgesses was based on the "wardship,"
-curia- (probably related to -curare- = -coerare-, --koiranos--);
ten wardships formed the community; every wardship furnished a
hundred men to the infantry (hence -mil-es-, like -equ-es-, the
thousand-walker), ten horsemen and ten councillors. 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 the latter was
apportioned 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-; each one of them
embraced, in this primitive period of joint possession of land, a
number of clan-lands, of which we have already spoken.(5)

We find this constitution under its simplest form(6) 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 councillors (-centumviri-). But the same normal numbers make
their appearance thr