Roman census

“ Another proof, besides, is the statement that, even as the censors registered a burgher of the pale in the plebeian tribes, so did they likewise place a plebeian in the equestrian body as a mark of distinction; which excludes a classification according to property. In the reign of Augustus it was indeed quite a different case. At that time, the most distinguished men could not become knights without a certain amount of fortune.
Yet what is meant by census? With us every description of property would be valued, all rights which might be reckoned as a capital. It was otherwise with the Romans. ”

“ The means by which Servius gave the Plebeians a share in the government was by establishing a new Popular Assembly, in which Patricians and Plebeians alike voted. It was so arranged that the wealthiest persons, whether Patricians or Plebeians, possessed the chief power. In order to ascertain the property of each citizen, Servius instituted the Census, which was a register of Ro [Pg 19] man citizens and their property. All Roman citizens possessing property to the amount of 12,500 asses and upward [7] were divided into five great Classes. ”

“ This latter course—the bestowal of Latin, and thereafter of Roman, rights on the communities ripe for full admission to the united state—gradually of itself brought about uniform communal arrangements. In one respect alone this process could not be waited for. The new empire needed immediately an institution which should place before the government at a glance the principal bases of administration—the proportions of population and property in the different communities— in other words an improved census. First the census of Italy was reformed. ”

“ However abundant allowance we make for increase by the excess of births over deaths, by immigration, and by manumissions, it is absolutely impossible to reconcile with the narrow limits of a territory of hardly 650 square miles the traditional numbers of the census, according to which the number of Roman burgesses capable of bearing arms in the second half of the third century varied between 104,000 and 150,000, and in 362, regarding which a special statement is extant, amounted to 152,573. ”

“ The extant fragment, which seems to begin with the second table, regulates (1) applications of citizens resident at Rome for free grain, [2906] (2) the aedilician supervision of the streets, buildings, [457] and games of the capital, [2907] (3) the qualifications for the magistracies and the decurionate in the municipia, [2908] (4) the introduction of the Roman census in the municipia, [2909] and (5) of individual Roman statutes in those municipia which enjoyed the laws of Rome. ”

“ A hasty generalisation might lead us to infer that a wholesale diminution was taking place in the population of Rome and Italy. The returns may add weight to other evidence which points this way; but, taken by themselves, they afford no warrant for such a conclusion. The census lists were concerned, not only purely with Roman citizens, but purely with Roman citizens of a certain type. It is practically certain that they reproduce only the effective fighting strength of Rome, [177] and take no account of those citizens whose property did not entitle them to be placed amongst the classes. ”

“ To the second division belong those towns whose inhabitants were passive citizens of Rome (cives sine suffragio) . They were liable to service in the Roman legions and to taxation, and were included in the Roman census. A deputy or prefect appointed annually by the Roman prætor administered justice according to laws which were subjected to Roman revision. ”

“ The two other classes of Roman subjects, the subject Roman burgesses and the non-Latin allied communities, were in a far inferior position. The communities having the Roman franchise without the privilege of electing or being elected (civitas sine suffragio) , approached nearer in form to the full Roman burgesses than the Latin communities that were legally autonomous. Their members were, as Roman burgesses, liable to all the burdens of citizenship, especially to the levy and taxation, and were subject to the Roman census ”

“ As the population increased, the number of centuries was not augmented, but the several divisions were strengthened by supernumeraries, without altogether losing sight, however, of the fundamental number. Indeed the Roman corporations in general, strictly closed as to numbers, very frequently evaded the limits imposed upon them by admitting supernumerary members.
Census. This new organization of the army was accompanied by a more careful supervision of landed property on the part of the state. ”

“ The Census was made the occasion of a reform in the ordines and especially of the Senate. In the first place, he recruited the dwindling number of patrician gentes by raising certain plebeian families to the patriciate, as his own family had been raised by Iulius in B.C. 45 in virtue of a lex Cassia. The same power was now accorded to him by a law proposed by L. Sænius, who was consul during the last two months of B.C. 30. The [138] object seems to have been to preserve a kind of nobility, which at the same time should have certain political disabilities. ”

“ It is obvious that the complete census of tribes and centuries included every voting unit of Rome, and, in spite of the fact that an individual scrutiny of the aerarii may not have taken place, [1054] we must suppose that there was a tribal list of all the citizens which proved the right to vote at the comitia tributa and the concilium plebis. But it is almost certain that, when an historian mentions a census of Republican times, he is reproducing merely the army list, [1055] the vital element in registration for a military state. ”

“ There is nothing to justify the assumption that non-citizens were to share in the benefit of the land-law, and that by receiving allotments they were to be advanced to the rank of citizens. If the statements respecting the census of 131 B.C. and 125 B.C. are to be trusted, the great increase in the number of citizens must be explained in another way. It is possible ... that after the revolt of Fregellae (125 B.C.) a portion of the allies were admitted to the Roman franchise by several plebiscites. ”

“ If this increase or decrease had harmonized with the history in the annals, it might have been said that some fabulist had set forth his own views in these statistics. Yet such a man would from vanity never have spoken of a decrease of numbers; on the contrary, just in the times when in the census the numbers decrease, there are in the annals victories and acquisitions. I believe therefore that some account, older than the annals, was intended to show in a statistical outline, how Rome and Latium were by unequal wars reduced in population. ”

“ In all Spain under Augustus there were numbered fifty communities with full citizenship; nearly fifty others had up to this time received Latin rights,69 and stood as to inward organisation on a par with the burgess–communities. Among the rest the emperor Vespasian likewise introduced the Latin municipal organisation on occasion of the general imperial census instituted by him in the year 74. ”

“ Tusculum had had from of old the right of Roman citizenship, but not completely; its inhabitants now became full citizens. To the people of Lanuvium and of Nomentum, the freedom of Rome was granted, to become full citizens like the Tusculans; and at the same time, their population was enrolled in the census as plebeians, and admitted into the tribes. ”

“ THE TRIP TO BETHLEHEM In the month of March, 8 B.C. (the month Joseph and Mary were married) , Caesar Augustus decreed that all inhabitants of the Roman Empire should be numbered, that a census should be made which could be used for effecting better taxation. The Jews had always been greatly prejudiced against any attempt to "number the people," and this, in connection with the serious domestic difficulties of Herod, King of Judea, had conspired to cause the postponement of the taking of this census in the Jewish kingdom for one year. ”

“ Parallels between Roman and Hellenic organisation may be observed in certain institutions such as the equites and the census; but these are military rather than purely political, and in all the fundamental conceptions of public law—the rights of the citizens individually and collectively, the power of the magistrate and the divine character even of secular rule—Rome differed widely from the developed Greek communities with which she was brought into contact, and seems in her political evolution to have worked out her own salvation. ”

“ He was the first to institute the census, which till that time was unknown throughout the world. The people being all subjected to a census during his reign, Rome was found to contain eighty-four thousand citizens, including those in the country. He was cut off in the forty-fifth year of his reign, by the criminal machinations of his son-in-law Tarquin the Proud, the son of the king to whom he had succeeded, and of his own daughter, whom Tarquin had married. ”

“ Aquitania, Lugdunensis and Belgica, which, however, during the lifetime of Augustus, formed an administrative unity, under one governor with subordinate legati in each district. The colony of Lugdunum was the seat of the administration, as well as of the imperial cult. No attempt was made to latinize the three Gauls by the founding of Roman colonies; but they remained divided into sixty-four separate peoples, called civitates, with a tribal organization under the control of a native nobility. As early as 27 B. C. Augustus took a census in Gaul, and on this basis fixed its tax obligations. ”

“ Each of these centuries formed a troop of one hundred men under a centurio, [303] and these eighteen centuries of Roman knights with public horses (equites Romani equo publico) continued unaltered in numbers and (with the exception that the sex suffragia ceased to be chosen from the Patricians) in character to the end of the Republic. Although no definite census was required for the class, it was probably chosen from the first from the richest and most distinguished citizens; for its permanent existence implies leisure. ”

“ Few of the enemy escaped from the ambuscade; all the booty was recovered. Thus the return of the consul Quinctius to the city put an end to the suspension of business, which lasted four days. A census [4] was then held, and the lustrum [Footnote: The ceremony of purification took place every five years, hence "Justrum" came to be used for a period of five years.] closed by Quinctius: the number of citizens rated is said to have been one hundred and four thousand seven hundred and fourteen, not counting orphans of both sexes. ”

“ I made a census of the people with Marcus Agrippa as my colleague. I conducted a lustrum, after a forty-one year gap, in which lustrum were counted 4,063,000 heads of Roman citizens. Then again, with consular imperium I conducted a lustrum alone when Gaius Censorinus and Gaius Asinius were consuls [8 B.C.E.] , in which lustrum were counted 4,233,000 heads of Roman citizens. ”

“ If, on the contrary, we study the growth of the Roman republic, we may discover, that, notwithstanding the incessant demands of wars and colonies, the citizens, who, in the first census of Servius Tullius, amounted to no more than eighty-three thousand, were multiplied, before the commencement of the social war, to the number of four hundred and sixty-three thousand men, able to bear arms in the service of their country. ”

“ Hence the name of Comitia Centuriata. Each century was divided into the seniores and the juniores. Each century, further, was counted as one vote, so that a class had as many votes as it contained centuries. In like manner, the equites were divided into a number of centuries or votes. The two principal authorities on these subdivisions are Livy and Dionysius. The annexed table will show the census as well as the number of centuries or votes assigned to each class. ”

“ They are in such cases spoken of as capita, sometimes with the addition of the word civium, and sometimes not; and hence to be registered in the census was the same thing as caput habere. [Caput.] —II. Regimen Morum. This was the most important branch of the censors’ duties, and the one which caused their office to be the most revered and the most dreaded in the Roman state. It naturally grew out of the right which they possessed of excluding unworthy persons from the lists of citizens. They were constituted the conservators of public and private virtue and morality ”

“ Inland, it included the former territories of the Acqui and Hernici, the Sabine country, and even extended eastward into Picenum, While beyond these limits were outlying districts, such as the lands of the Senonian Celts, with the Roman colony of Sena, and others elsewhere in Italy, which had been confiscated by Rome and given over to Roman settlers. Since the 388. first important annexation of territory after the capture of Veii (396) , twelve new tribes had been formed, [140] and the number of male citizens registered at the census had risen from 152,000 to 290,000. ”

“ These res mancipi are as much the object of quiritarian ownership as land, and they may exist without it. A man might own no land and yet be rich in cattle and sheep which he drove on the ager publicus, or in slaves engaged in productive handicrafts, [283] and the state was interested in all that was duly owned and was properly the subject of assessment (res censui censendo) ; [284] the Servian census must have been based on res mancipi, and to a certain degree it was a census based on currency, for cattle (pecus) were recognised as a medium of exchange (pecunia) . ”