Roman Magistrates

Two principles: collegiality and annuality

• Consul: highest ranking, two elected annually
• Praetors: judicial officers
• Quaestors: financial officers
• Aediles: responsible for the food supply, public buildings, streets, sewers, games and public entertainments
• Tribunes: plebeian representatives
• Two censors: fixed the census status of citizens; issued rules on public morality

Voting Assemblies

• Curiate Assembly: early Roman assembly (withered in High Rome)
• Plebeian Council: declined after Licinian-Sextian laws
• Senate: originally made up of patricians; made up of ex-office holders; passed treaties, but could not legislate (technically not)
• The Tribal Assembly: constituted the Roman people organized according to districts (tongue in cheek, sort of like gerrymandering)
• The Centuriate Assembly: the assembly by "centuries"; centuries: groups of people grouped by wealth (assessed by censors with respect to citizens' wealth and placed in one of the 192 centuries, also gerrymandered)

block voting system (the origin of electoral college); direct democracy; gerrymandered in a way with which 10% of the population were allowed to control around 100 out of the total 192 centuries

Underlying Principles of Rome

1. The Romans paid enormous deference to age, experience and tradition; the oldest member of the Senate (princeps senatus)always spoke first; senatusconsulta: opinion of the Senate
2. Patron-client bonds were critical to the operation of Roman society as a whole
3. A remarkably small number of families (about 100)provided almost all officers of the Roman Republic during the first 400 years of its existence.
4. Two Roman political values: Auctoritas: Authority; Mos maiorum: "the custom of our ancestors"