and still less that of the households, as a legally fixed
one; if the -curia- had to furnish a hundred men on foot and ten
horsemen, it is not affirmed by tradition, nor is it credible, that
one horseman was taken from each clan and one foot-soldier from
each house. The only member that discharged functions in the oldest
constitutional organization was the -curia-. Of these there were
ten, or, where there were several tribes, ten to each tribe. Such
a "wardship" was a real corporate unity, the members of which
assembled at least for holding common festivals. Each wardship was
under the charge of a special warden (-curio-), and had a priest of
its own (-flamen curialis-); beyond doubt also levies and valuations
took place according to curies, and in judicial matters the burgesses
met by curies and voted by curies. This organization, however,
cannot have been introduced primarily with a view to voting, for in
that case they would certainly have made the number of subdivisions
uneven.

Equality of the Burgesses

Sternly defined as was the contrast between burgess and non-burgess,
the equality of rights within the burgess-body was complete. No
people has ever perhaps equalled that of Rome in the inexorable
rigour with which it has carried out these principles, the one as
fully as the other. The strictness of the Roman distinction between
burgesses and non-burgesses is nowhere perhaps brought out with
such clearness as in the treatment of the primitive institution
of honorary citizenship, which was originally designed to mediate
between the two. When a stranger was, by resolution of the community,
adopted into the circle of the burgesses, he might surrender his
previous citizenship, in which case he passed over wholly into the
new community; but he might also combine his former citizenship with
that which had just been granted to him. Such was the primitive
custom, and such it always remained in Hellas, where in later
ages the same person not unfrequently held the freedom of several
communities at the same time. But the greater vividness with which
the conception of the community as such was realized in Latium
could not tolerate the idea that a man might simultaneously belong
in the character of a burgess to two communities; and accordingly,
when the newly-chosen burgess did not intend to surrender his
previous franchise, it attached to the nominal honorary citizenship
no further meaning than that of an obl