duties alone, and not rights. It must have rather owed its origin either to the wisdom of one of the Roman kings, or to the urgent desire of the burgesses that they should no longer be exclusively liable to military service, and that the non-burgesses also should contribute to the levy. By the Servian constitution the duty of service and the obligation connected with it of making advances to the state in case of need (the tributum), instead of being imposed on the burgesses as such, were laid upon the possessors of land, the "domiciled" or "freeholders" (adsidui), or the "wealthy" (locupletes), whether they were burgesses or merely metœci; service in the army was changed from a personal burden into a burden on property. The details of the arrangement were as follow.
Every freeholder, from the seventeenth to the sixtieth year of his age, was under obligation of service, including children in the household of fathers who were freeholders, without distinction of birth; so that even the emancipated slave had to serve, who in an exceptional case had come into possession of lauded property. We do not know now the strangers who held landed property in Rome were dealt with; probably there existed a regulation, according to which no foreigner was allowed to acquire land in Rome unless he actually transferred his residence thither, and took his place among the metœci there, that is, among those bound to serve in war. The body of men, liable to serve was distributed according to the size of their portions of land into five "summonings" (classes, from calare). Of these, however, only those liable under the first summoning, or those in possession of an entire hide[1] of land, were obliged to appear in com-
- ↑ [Hufe, hide, as much as can be properly tilled with one plough, called in Scotland a plough-gate.]
As to the question, whether the assessments of the Servian census were originally reckoned in money or landed property, we may observe:
(1) Our information regarding it is derived from the scheme of the census preserved in the archives of the censors, the censoriæ tabulæ (Cic. Orat. xlvi. 156), or the Descriptio classium quam fecit Servius Tullius (Fest. s. v. procum. p. 249, Müll.). This scheme of course presented the Servian constitution as it stood in the last period of its practical application, and therefore with all the modifications which the course of time had introduced. As to the original arrangements we have no evidence; for the statement of the later writers, who in accordance with their usual custom attribute that scheme to Servius Tullius, has no claim to authority.
(2) It is unnecessary to dwell on the intrinsic improbability, that in an agricultural state, like the Roman, and in a country where the growth of
