Tribal Assembly - Tribes

Tribes

For more details on this topic, see List of Roman Tribes.

The thirty-five tribes were not ethnic or kinship groups, but rather generic divisions into which Roman citizens were distributed. When the tribes were created the divisions were geographical, similar to modern U.S. Congressional districts. However, since one joined the same tribe that his father belonged to, the geographical distinctions were eventually lost. Each tribe had further subdivisions: subdivisions in the urban tribes were called vici and subdivisions in the rural tribes were called pagi. While other subdivisions within tribes were possible, such as professional guilds ("colleges" or collegia), the tribe always remained the fundamental organizing unit.

Each tribe had its own officers, such as Treasurers (divisores) Registers (who conducted the tribal census), and by the late republic, officers whose only task was to distribute bribes. Since Tribal membership was reaffirmed once every five years in each Census, it became possible to crudely gerrymander tribes. While land could never be taken away from a tribe, the magistrates known as "censors" had the power to allocate new lands into existing tribes as a part of the Census. Thus, Censors had the power to apportion tribes in a manner that might be advantageous to them or to their partisans.

During the early and middle republic, the Tribal Assembly met at various locations in the Roman Forum, including the rostra, the comitium, the Temple of Castor and Pollux, and in a location near the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (the area Capitolina). By the late republic, the assembly often met right outside of the city wall on the Field of Mars (Campus Martius), because the size of the field allowed votes to occur more quickly.

The presiding magistrate (either a Consul or a Praetor), always ensured that all tribes had at least five members voting, and if any tribe did not, the magistrate reassigned individuals from other tribes into the vacant tribe. The order that the thirty-five tribes voted in was selected randomly by lot. The order was not chosen at once, and after each tribe had voted, a lot was used to determine which tribe should vote next.

The first tribe selected (the principium) was usually the most important tribe, because it often decided the matter. It was believed that the order of the lot was chosen by the Gods, and thus, that the position held by the early voting tribes was the position of the Gods. As can (usually) be seen in U.S. Presidential primaries, the early results tended to create a bandwagon effect. Once a majority of tribes had voted the same way, voting ended.