How Democratic Was the Roman Republic?

Millar admits that the popular assembly called the comitia centuriata (the Centuriate Assembly), which elected the highest magistrates (censors, consuls, praetors, and curule aediles) and occasionally passed legislation, was biased toward the upper census classes of property owners by its complex unit-voting system. This system was based upon groups called centuries, whereby the votes of the wealthier centuries were more numerous than the votes of the poorer centuries (200-204). The crucial thing for him, however, is that legislation was usually introduced by tribunes of the plebs, supposedly the defenders of the common citizens, in the assembly known as the comitia tributa, the Tribal Assembly, in which the voters were organized in territorially based units called tribes (205 and 209). His argument rests upon the claim that “in … the comitia tributa, no form of social stratification applied, and each citizen’s vote counted equally” (209, cf. 204).

That is a very misleading, if not downright disingenuous claim, so that Millar’s argument fails on the basis of his own criteria. If the comitia tributa had embodied the principle of "one man, one vote," as in the Athenian Ecclesia or had been based on the proportional representation of the citizens, as in the U. S. House of Representatives, we could agree that it would have been a democratic institution. Instead, the nature and number of the tribes plus the unit-voting rule, whereby each tribe had one vote determined by the majority of those voting within it, did not let each citizen’s vote count equally and “with no form of social stratification applied” (209). Even at its origin, in the early fifth century B.C., tribally organized voting was biased in favor of the rural men of property in the more numerous rural tribes. From the beginning, there were only four urban tribes, and the number of rural tribes was always greater. From 495 B.C. to 241 B.C. the number of rural tribes increased from 17 to 31, where it remained fixed thereafter (OCD, ed. 3, “tribus”). Therefore, the urban voters, who had only 4 tribal votes, were always outnumbered by the rural voters, no matter how few voted in each rural tribe. Even worse, freedmen, regardless of residence, were enrolled only in the disadvantaged urban tribes and after 168 B.C. were enrolled in only one of those tribes. I fail to see how that was a situation where “no form of social stratification applied and each citizen’s vote counted equally.”

There were also practical as well as formal reasons why the comitia tributa cannot be considered democratic. First, all voting had to be done in Rome. Therefore, mostly well-to-do voters and their loyal clients from the more distant rural tribes could come to Rome to vote. Conversely, members of rural tribes who moved to Rome and managed to retain their original tribal registration through the inefficiency or collusion of the censors were not really representative of rural voters and their interests. A handful of such voters registered in a rural tribe could determine that tribe’s vote because they lived in Rome, where they could more easily vote. Indeed, the best estimates indicate that only 2% of Roman citizens usually voted, which makes any idea of democracy nugatory.