Roman assemblies: Encyclopedia II - Roman assemblies - Centuriate Assembly

Roman assemblies - Centuriate Assembly

The Comitia Centuriata included both patricians and plebeians organized into five economic classes (knights and senators being the First Class) and distributed among internal divisions called Centuries. Membership in the Centuriate Assembly required certain economic status, and power was heavily vested in the First and Second Classes. The Centuriate Assembly met annually to elect the next year's consuls and praetors, and quintannually (every 5 years) to elect the censors. It also sat to try cases of high treason (perduellio), although this latter function fell into disuse after Lucius Appuleius Saturninus introduced a more workable format (maiestas).

A citizen's vote did not count in the Centuriate Assembly. Rather, the individual's vote was counted within his Century and determined the outcome of the Century's vote. Because only the first eighteen (and richest) Centuries were kept to the nominal size of 100 members, members of those Centuries exerted a disproportionate influence over the outcome of votes. The Centuriate Assembly, originally a military assembly of knights, consisted of many people and had to meet outside the pomerium of Rome on the Campus Martius, and was as a result extremely clumsy to convoke and manage. It was not normally used except to elect the next year's magistrates. The Centuriate Assembly is usually cited, with little contemporary evidence, as the classical precedent for the U.S. Electoral College.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Centuriate Assembly", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki