Each house in each tribe was represented by
its chief or decurion in the senate, making the number of
senators exactly three hundred, at which number the senate was
fixed. Subsequently was added, by Ancus, the plebs, who remained
without authority or share in the government of the city of Rome
itself, though they might aspire to the first rank in the allied
cities. The division into tribes, and the division of the tribes
into gentes or houses, and the vote in the state by tribes, and
in the tribes by houses, effectually excluded democratic
centralism; but the division was not a division of the powers of
government between two co-ordinate governments, for the senate
had supreme control, like the British parliament, over all
matters, general and particular.
The establishment, after the secession of the plebs, of the
tribunitial veto, which gave the plebeians a negative power in
the state, there was an incipient division of the powers of
government; but only a division between the positive and negative
powers, not between the general and the particular. The power
accorded to the plebs, or commons, as Niebuhr calls them--who is,
perhaps, too fond of explaining the early constitution of Rome by
analogies borrowed from feudalism, and especially from the
constitution of his native Ditmarsch--was simply an obstructive
power; and when it, by development, became a positive power, it
absorbed all the powers of government, and created the Empire.
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