Biondo Flavio's Roma triumphans (1459) is not as well known as it deserves to be.Footnote 1 It was the first humanist attempt to make sense of Roman civilization as a whole, and does so on a large scale and in fascinating, if not exhaustive, detail. In Roma triumphans Biondo examines the institutions of Roman religion, government, military organization and private life with the declared aim of accounting for the stability and the success of the Romans' rule over themselves and other peoples.Footnote 2 The three books on civic government (III–V) have central importance therefore. Indeed, it has been proposed that concern with the history, nature and role of the state was a unifying theme linking together Biondo's major works from the Decades onwards.Footnote 3 No doubt partly because of Biondo's highly pragmatic approach, the contents of the books on government remain almost entirely unstudied.Footnote 4
My purpose in this article is to offer an analytic reading of Biondo's lengthy account of the elections at the end of Roma triumphans book III.Footnote 5 In this he gathered for the first time an astonishing collection of relevant evidence and posed a wide range of questions that remained alive in subsequent research. The task of understanding the comitia was a challenge to historians of Rome for centuries.Footnote 6 For these reasons Biondo's largely unprecedented treatment deserves notice, and also calls for close analysis, both because of the intrinsic complexity of the subject and because, for many reasons, the pioneering Biondo was hampered in his understanding of it.Footnote 7 Furthermore, this topic is one to which Biondo devotes particular care and attention, as he says (unusually) when introducing it. The section is not typical, then, but displays him rising to engage with the difficult task he had set himself, far more difficult than he could know.
The voting assemblies were of central importance to the Roman Republic, for the right to vote and hence to participate in the election of the annual magistrates, in the making of laws and in decisions concerning war and peace was intrinsic to Roman citizenship. The methods of voting employed for elections and the legislative and judicial assemblies, however, were elaborate.Footnote 8 One term, comitia, applied to different types of assembly, convened for different purposes: judicial, legislative and electoral. In Roma triumphans book III Biondo's main concern is to explain what happened at the elections of magistrates. The assemblies for the other purposes come up in the later books.Footnote 9
In Biondo's view the elections require a lengthy and well-researched account, but one that will be very pleasing: ‘Actum comitii describere aggrediamur, qui longa et altissima, sed omnium gratissima narratione indiget’ (Roma triumphans, 73). Biondo's interest in the elections is already attested in an earlier work. At a transitional point in his topographical treatise on the city of Rome, Roma instaurata (1446), Biondo foreshadows that he will discuss buildings which relate to public administration (II, 39), but when he later comes to introduce the sections in which he does this he warns that it is not his intention ‘politica scribere’ (‘to write a Politics’) (II, 61). Despite this disclaimer, certain matters tempt him into digressions on institutions and to strong value statements on political matters. One of the most striking of these is on the comitia (II, 68):
Itaque praeter Senatus consulendi gravitatem, nihil a Romanis factitatum videmus quod comitiorum habendorum institutioni aequiperandum ducamus. Comitiaque verus et solidissimus reipublicae et libertatis nervus eam vim habuerunt ut tantum libertas intertrimenti fecerit quantum sensim comitiis est detractum. (Biondo, Roma instaurata, 67, my emphasis)
Therefore besides the importance of convening the senate, we see the Romans did nothing that in our opinion must be equated to the institution of conducting elections. The elections, the true and strongest sinew of the commonwealth and liberty, had so much power that liberty suffered as much damage as was gradually suffered by the elections.
Later, the treasury, it too libertatis nervus, is added to the senate and comitia, ‘quae duo rei publicae et libertatis maxima fuerunt fundamenta’ (‘which were the two greatest foundations of the commonwealth and freedom’, II, 82)) and, in contrast, the location of the Castra Praetoria prompts a disquisition on the emperor Tiberius' introduction of ‘perniciosissimam libertati atque etiam imperio rem’ (‘a very ruinous thing for freedom and even for the Empire’), the ability of the military to impose an emperor (II, 88–9).Footnote 10 Biondo's interest in the Comitium and the comitia leads him in Roma instaurata to break his rule of confining himself to the description of places and buildings. Not only does he talk about aspects of the comitia at unusual length in II, 68 but his thoughts about them lead soon after to another, related, excursus in II, 77 on colonization and the expansion of the numbers eligible to vote.Footnote 11 Hence it is not surprising that Biondo treats the institution of the comitia at considerable length in Roma triumphans book III: what must be noted, however, is that there is no trace of the terms of his earlier praise of them, the association of the elections with freedom. Indeed, it is noteworthy how seldom the words for ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ appear in Roma triumphans overall.
It is hard to say exactly what Biondo meant by his references to respublica et libertas in Roma instaurata. The ‘democratic’ and anti-Caesarian context in which the statement in II, 68 occurs may give us a clue that he is thinking of a ‘free’ republic as one in which all segments of the citizen community are represented.Footnote 12 After the statement comes a reference to Julius Caesar pillaging the treasury and seizing permanent dictatorship with the help of his partisans, and before it one to an episode from Livy book 2. According to Biondo's briefest of summaries of Volero Publilius' reform in 471 bc, its result was the establishment of the comitia tributa for the election of plebeian magistrates, the tribunes (Livy 2.56.3, cf. 2.58.1), a voting assembly in which, he says, the plebeians as a whole could achieve the majority vote, as they could not in the previously existing comitia centuriata, where the patricians held sway.Footnote 13 Biondo therefore marks here the completion of the electoral system, with the coexistence henceforth of the two chief voting assemblies, ‘one more authoritative and one more popular’. In fact, he returns to the same passage in Roma triumphans (74) to illustrate the difference between the same two assemblies, with the words of introduction: ‘In one single place and better than in all the others Livy [2.56.1–2.64.2] demonstrates how the Tribal Assembly differed from the Centuriate.’ A comparison of these uses of the same episode from Livy shows up their disparity. In Roma triumphans the phase of the patrician–plebeian struggles which led up to the introduction of the comitia tributa is not the issue. In the passage from Roma instaurata that we are discussing, however, it does matter.
While libertas is a concept frequently invoked in Roman literature, especially Livy, in connection with the Roman Republic and its system of annually elected magistrates, I have not found there a similar statement which makes the elections themselves one of the chief mainstays of libertas.Footnote 14 Libertas as a multivalent concept of political thought has a vast hinterland: on the one hand, the writings of the Romans themselves,Footnote 15 and on the other the revival of classical ‘republicanism’ in early fifteenth-century Italy.Footnote 16 In this connection, debate among the humanists over the evaluation of Caesar's actions loomed large,Footnote 17 and the anti-Caesarian position held him responsible for the loss of liberty. Biondo must have been aware of this debate but he does not take a firm stand. In Roma instaurata, despite his tyrannical actions, Caesar is said only to begin the process of suppressing the comitia; in Roma triumphans, Biondo says that he does not know and it is not consonant with his purpose to decide whether Caesar's ‘opinio principatus’ (‘expectation of gaining supremacy’) brought more harm or good to the Roman state.Footnote 18
In the extract from Roma instaurata, Biondo makes liberty (here, I suggest, understood as participation in self-government) a defining characteristic of the ‘Republic’ and demarcates it chronologically. In Roma triumphans, Biondo's fundamental aim is to explain Rome's Imperial expansion and military successes over the more than a thousand years from the foundation of the city until late antiquity: his interest is in the formation and stability of institutions of government spanning the regal, Republican and Imperial periods.Footnote 19 Liberty is not part of Biondo's explanation of Rome's good government and, in its absence, the virtues that Leonardo Bruni associated with it (magnitudo animi, virtus, industria),Footnote 20 and others, such as integrity, moderation and self-control (book V passim), bear all the weight. Hankins shows more fully than is possible here that Biondo's ‘argument is that Roman success was the result of innate Roman virtue, and not of its free constitution under the republic’.Footnote 21 Therefore, while Biondo continues to consider the elections a key part of the Roman system of government, in Roma triumphans he has no reason to highlight their connection with liberty.
In his discussion of the elections in Roma triumphans Biondo repeats, supplements or corrects some of the points he has made in Roma instaurata. There his main concern was to pinpoint exactly where in the Campus Martius the voting was carried out (II, 69–71, 76–7), an argument he sees no need to repeat in Roma triumphans in great detail, but rather takes for granted (73, 77, 78).Footnote 22 Other questions he wants to answer are how did people become candidates (II, 68), how the tribes were summoned to vote, and what and where the ‘pons’ was (II, 69, cf. 71). This last arises in connection with a passage from Suetonius, Iulius (80.4), and returns in Roma triumphans (78, 80). In Roma triumphans there is much on the candidates, and in particular on their whitened toga (76–7), but Biondo does not repeat from Roma instaurata his erroneous view that candidates had to seek permission to stand from the senate and people (for which he cited no authority).Footnote 23 In Roma triumphans Biondo maintains his interest in the large number of voters.Footnote 24 First, earlier in book III (63) when talking, in the section on the tribes, about the composition of the centuries (one of the voting units), he foreshadows a later explanation of how the marvellous voting procedure dealt with large numbers of voters in a few hours. This same concern later constitutes the main point of the introduction to the discussion of the comitia proper (73).
Biondo's discussion in Roma instaurata of the comitia in connection with the Comitium had an immediate impact. His contemporary, Giovanni Tortelli (c. 1400–66) was an early reader of the topographical work and used it particularly for the long entry under ‘Rhoma’ (composed 1446) in his lexicographical treatise, De orthographia, dedicated to Nicholas V (1451).Footnote 25 He begins his treatment of the comitia (56–9) with topography: the Antonine column, the place where Biondo (hidden under ‘ut multi volunt’Footnote 26 ) located them, next to Montecitorio (cf. Roma instaurata II, 70, 71, 76), itself joined to the Saepta by the pons (cf. II, 71). Some lexicographical commentary, taking off from Biondo (II, 68), leads to the location of the Comitium (see below). Tortelli ends with information on colonization and the extension of the vote, mostly citing the same sources as Biondo and some of his very words (II, 68, 77).Footnote 27 He eschews expressing any opinions about the elections' role or significance.
Given the length and the complexity of Biondo's more comprehensive discussion of the comitia in Roma triumphans book III, it is not possible to discuss all of it in equal detail. I propose to begin with a survey, as brief as possible, of the main topics Biondo includes in the section and then to focus on three of the more interesting, controversial and difficult topics: the Comitium, the three assemblies and the centuria praerogativa. I have given modern references for all the sources, some of which are discussed in my text, while others are recorded in the footnotes alone.Footnote 28 It is inevitable that a discussion of part of Roma triumphans becomes a study of its use (or misuse) of sources, as the work is composed mainly of excerpts. What interests me most, however, is their selection, arrangement and, at times, interpretation. When from time to time errors are noticed, this is in order to demonstrate the limitations under which a well-informed and intelligent scholar was working in the middle of the fifteenth century.Footnote 29
PRELIMINARY SURVEY
Biondo begins with the Comitium.Footnote 30 Next he tries to sort out the differences between the three main types of assembly: the curiata, centuriata and tributa.Footnote 31 He then notes some (rare) cases where consuls were elected with an interrex presiding and mistakenly assumes this was ‘sine comitiis’ (74).Footnote 32 When were the elections held?Footnote 33 Earlier he said that the time was set by the augurs, though customarily it was 1 January (73). On this question I suspect that Biondo had two sources that misled him: he is unsure whether to plump for 1 January or 1 March (74). The grammarian Placidus, whom Biondo does not cite by name but whom he uses elsewhere in Roma triumphans, seems to be alone in giving the date of 1 January,Footnote 34 while Macrobius says that in March (the first month in Romulus' calendar) ‘comitia auspicabantur’.Footnote 35 From this Biondo develops the notion that the augurs consecrated a number of possible days in the year on which the praetor, consuls or tribunes of the plebs could hold elections, for he recognizes that the days were movable.Footnote 36 There follow two misunderstood points on reforms affecting the composition of the tribes (74–5).Footnote 37 This leads to a long and not very well organized passage on how to campaign, including points on the difficulties of a candidacy and some of the things that helped,Footnote 38 and at the end some information on the candidate himself and his wearing of the whitened toga (75–7).Footnote 39 Here Biondo wants to know when the candidates assumed the white dress and proposes two possibilities: up to a year before for declared candidates and at the last moment for improvised or surprise ones.Footnote 40
At this point the account takes a new direction. Biondo declares that what he has said up till now have been generalities. Now he wants to draw a vivid picture of the ‘thing itself’, to bring it before our eyes in detail: ‘Quaecunque hactenus a nobis de comitiis, candidatis et petitione dicta sunt, generalia fuerunt. Ad ipsam rem nunc ante oculos ponendam particulariter descendamus’ (‘So far all that we have said about the elections, the candidates and the canvassing has been generalities. Let us now proceed to illustrating the matter itself in detail’, Roma triumphans, 77). Biondo begins with the candidates being escorted to the Campus Martius by their supporters, quoting passages that convey something of the atmosphere of rivalry.Footnote 41 When he describes the voting procedures (77–80), after setting the scene at the Saepta in the Campus Martius, Biondo gives greater emphasis to the voting of the centuries than to that of the tribes.Footnote 42 Most of the information on the pons comes in the description of the voting procedure that begins on p. 78 (especially in the citation from Nonius Marcellus, where the vote happens ‘before the bridge’Footnote 43 ) and at its conclusion on p. 80 as the place where the presiding magistrate(s) sat and declared the result.Footnote 44 Given Biondo's previously expressed interest in the pons it requires a brief digression.
Modern scholars believe that in the Saepta (Voting Pens) in the Campus Martius, the location in which Biondo describes the voting taking place, there were multiple ramps (pontes), needed to accommodate the large number of voters, at the beginnings and ends of which the votes were handed out and returned.Footnote 45 Each voter walked over a pons to vote. Biondo, however, does not cite here the passages in which plural pontes occurs in descriptions of voting in legislative assemblies.Footnote 46 By referring only to the singular uses in Nonius Marcellus 523M and Suetonius, Iulius 80.4,Footnote 47 he unknowingly conflates a possible but not certain mention of the voting platform with one to the tribunal or podium of the presiding magistrate, or ‘major pons’, as Lily Ross Taylor calls it.Footnote 48 By disregarding the multiple pontes Biondo here misses an opportunity of connecting them with a feature of the electoral procedure which he finds impressive: that is, the handling of the large numbers of citizens eligible to vote.Footnote 49 In Roma instaurata, II, 76–7 this observation led him to select a large space in the Campus Martius for the comitia, that is, near the Column of Marcus Aurelius, which in his time was called the Antonine Column. It is strange that there his clue for a space of the requisite size is the plan of an enormous portico attributed to the third Gordian (SHA, Gordiani tres 32.5–6)Footnote 50 and not the mile-long circumference of the projected Saepta Iulia (Cic. Att. 4.16.8), mentioned in Roma triumphans, 77.
The Saepta, however, make their first appearance in Biondo's oeuvre in Roma triumphans in the lead up to the voting proper (77). The place for voting in the Campus Martius was the Saepta.Footnote 51 Before voting, Biondo says, the centuries met separately in the Ovilia to consult. He bases this statement on an exceptional incident from the election for 209 bc, in which Livy says that the juniors of the Voturia tribe held a discussion with their elders in the Ovile (another name for the Saepta).Footnote 52 From this incident Taylor infers that there were special enclosures for each tribe within the voting enclosure.Footnote 53 It is not surprising that Biondo thinks that the Ovilia were somehow additional or parallel to the Saepta (‘totidem’) since the term is rare and occurs only here in Livy. The supposed separation of the centuries raises the question of how this was carried out. Biondo says each tribe had its dirimitores (or diremptores) and succenturiatores (77).Footnote 54 He sensibly suggests that the centuries were not made up anew for each single election, and to demonstrate their stability refers to a stone in Santa Lucia in Silice or ‘in Orphea’ (77–8) ‘inscribed with some centuries’.Footnote 55 To organize the centuries there were the concenturiatores (captains of centuries) (78).Footnote 56 At this point Biondo again prepares his readers, resuming and pointing ahead to his description of the vote: ‘Iam in campum et ad septa oviliaque ipsasque tribus et centurias usque pervenimus, candidatosque ad petitionem a suis deductoribus suffragatoribusque deduci videre videmur. Maiore igitur conatu deligendi formam ducimus explicandam’ (‘Now that we have reached the Field and come to the Voting Enclosures and Sheepfolds and the tribes and centuries themselves, we seem to see the candidates being escorted to the election by their sponsors and supporters. Therefore we think that a greater effort must be devoted to explaining the procedure of the election’, Roma triumphans, 78). The nexus of the citations from Livy, Nonius and Suetonius shows the consul sitting on the pons summoning the voters to it to cast their ballots.Footnote 57 Before this could happen the tribes had to be divided into centuries. The role of the centuria praerogativa is introduced but before explaining this Biondo mentions the inspectors of the ballot boxes (custodes) and their selection (78).Footnote 58 He then gives a brief account of the voting of the praerogativa, from the drawing of the lot to the withdrawal of this century to the Mons Citatorum (Montecitorio).Footnote 59 The result was announced and then the rest of the voting took place. To illustrate this Biondo now cites some passages from Cicero: Philippic Orations 2.82, and Pro Plancio 44, 49. These are then supplemented with some from Livy, in chronological order, concluding with selections from an episode in Livy 26, which Biondo regards as valuable in that it ‘in many respects fully meets the requirements of our purpose’.Footnote 60
A pendant to the account of the voting so far is a series of footnotes. First is the nature of the vote itself: ‘Reliquum est nobis hac <in> comitiorum parte qualia centuriae, aut tribus ipsae aliter suffragia ferrent ostendere. Duobus enim modis, sed diversis temporibus id factitatum fuit’ (‘It remains for us in this part dealing with the Voting Assemblies to indicate how the centuries or the tribes themselves used to cast their votes differently. This used to be done in two ways, but at different times’, Roma triumphans, 79).Footnote 61 Biondo is aware that there had been a shift from the original method of oral voting to the secret ballot. He quotes at some length from Cicero, De legibus 3.33–9 (‘the major source on oral and written voting’Footnote 62 ) where the respective proposers of the four leges tabellariae are mostly put in a bad light.Footnote 63 Biondo recognizes that the matter was disputed (and that Cicero was arguing one side of the case), without disclosing his own opinion.
The written ballot method requires a receptacle for the voting-tablets, which appear for the first time in Biondo's discussion in the quotation from Cicero's De legibus. The word for this vessel was cista, which Biondo does use in book IV when he is describing voting on written tablets in the courts.Footnote 64 Here instead he mentions the sitella and the urna which were used for drawing lots and are therefore not relevant (80).Footnote 65 The waxed voting-tablets now require an explanation, which Biondo puts off to his discussion of the jurors’ recording their verdict (IV, 105). He nevertheless inserts a brief general passage on tabellae as recipients of writing.Footnote 66
A few lines on the announcement of the results bring Biondo's account of the electoral procedures to an end, but he has not yet finished. The thought that an inherently sound system was often corrupted by illicit practices, especially bribery, which could bring about undeserved defeats, leads to these last two topics, and a return to aspects of the candidacy. The examples of bribery and corruption include the delightful but unfortunately unfounded picture of mimes apprehended in the Circus Flaminius that comes from a false reading of Cicero, Pro Plancio 55.Footnote 67 The final examples of famous defeats, mostly culled from Valerius Maximus, move away from the topic of bribery to other causes, specifically the failure of some great men to show sufficient self-abasement in their requests for votes.Footnote 68
What I hope has emerged from this survey is the plan of the overall arrangement of Biondo's treatment of the comitia. After dealing with some basic preliminaries Biondo takes us through the electoral process from beginning to end in the order in which it happened with the aim of bringing it vividly to life before the reader's eyes, occasionally adding explanatory footnotes, as it were. Again, this imaginative conception is an indication of his interest in the topic. I now return to the three topics selected for closer discussion.
THE COMITIUM
In Roma triumphans Biondo's way into the topic of the elections is, as usual, through the terminology. He turns first to Varro on the etymology of the word comitium (Varro, Ling. 5.155).Footnote 69 Biondo in Roma instaurata was the first humanist topographer to single out a category of ‘buildings for the purposes of government’ (II, 39) and explicitly to use Varro's De lingua Latina as a guide to the public buildings of the Forum and their topographical relationships (II, 60, 62, 63).Footnote 70 A site (locus) that catches his attention particularly in this connection is the Comitium, now, to his dismay, the location of a publicly sanctioned pig market (II, 67). In early Rome this open space, associated in the Republic with the Curia and the Rostra, was a consecrated meeting place for the comitia curiata and, perhaps, the comitia tributa, but with the passage of time and the need for more space other solutions were found.Footnote 71
Before the middle of the fifteenth century the Comitium receives little notice. Late antique and medieval topographical works do not mention it.Footnote 72 The first sign of interest I have found is in Giovanni Cavallini's Polistoria de virtutibus et dotibus Romanorum (post 1345), and that is an authorial marginal annotation in MS G (Guelpherbytanus Gudianus Latinus 47): ‘Comitium est locus ubi consules eliguntur’ (‘The Comitium is the place where the consuls are elected’).Footnote 73 Cavallini's Polistoria is a ten-book compilation in praise of Rome, much of which is devoted to the topography and history of Rome, so it is not surprising that he wonders about the Comitium, but he does not get very far with it. One hundred years later, in the context of the growing interest in Roman history and the topography of Rome in the early-fifteenth century, the Comitium becomes something to talk about. Indeed Poggio Bracciolini claims to have seen extant remains: ‘Extat tamen Comitii portio quaedam murorum insigni structura, in quibus adhuc duo signa marmorea togata in summo collocata resident’ (‘Yet a certain part of the Comitium is extant with a notable structure of walls, on which there still sit two marble togate statues placed on the top’).Footnote 74
After the completion of Biondo's Roma instaurata, and influenced by it, as we have seen, Giovanni Tortelli included a topographical description of Rome in his De orthographia. What he says about the Comitium is embedded in a treatment of the comitia. On it Tortelli has a ‘new’ snippet from pseudo-Asconius Pedianus’ commentary on Cicero, Verr. 2.1.58: ‘Comitium, locus propter senatum quo coire equitibus Romanis et populo Romano licet’ (‘The Comitium, a place near the senate where the Roman knights and the people are allowed to assemble’).Footnote 75 Another ‘new’ reference to the Comitium used by Tortelli is that in Plutarch's Life of Romulus (19.10), translated by Lapo da Castiglionchio by 1437.Footnote 76 Later, Leon Battista Alberti in his De re aedificatoria (c. 1452) commented on the poor quality of the foundations of the Comitium, ‘apud comitium frustris atque glebis ex lapide ignobili substruxere’ (‘at the Comitium they built underneath with pieces and lumps of common stone’, 3.5), and gave a definition, ‘Romae comitiorum proprius erat dicatus locus’ (‘At Rome a special place was dedicated for the elections’, 8.9).Footnote 77
In order to understand what Biondo says about the Comitium in Roma triumphans one needs to have in mind the effort he has put in Roma instaurata into locating the Comitium ‘in the Forum’ with the Graecostasis ‘in montis Palatini angulo’ opposite San Lorenzo in Miranda and, concomitantly, the elections both there and in the Campus Martius, specifically in the area around the Antonine column beneath Monte Citorio (II, 69–71).Footnote 78 When he wrote Roma instaurata there were ruins to be seen in the ‘vigna’ near the Palatine. In Biondo's wake Tortelli, addressing the question of where it was, concludes from Varro, Ling. 5.155 that it was near the Curia Hostilia, at the foot of the Palatine. In Roma triumphans Biondo shifts the vanished ‘locus’ a little away from the Palatine to the eastern side of the Forum, where, he says, for ten years he has watched ruined buildings and their foundation stones being removed for lime between the basilicas of Sant'Adriano and San Lorenzo in Miranda and between the Great Forum and the Forum of Nerva (roughly the area of the Basilica Paulli).
The account of the Comitium in Roma instaurata is much clearer than that in Roma triumphans. In the later work one gets the impression that Biondo is supplementing what he has said earlier with further thoughts put together in a rather jumbled fashion. In Roma instaurata, II, 68 Biondo begins with a statement, falsely attributed to Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights, that the word comitium is common to the place and the activity. From the place, or rather the two places, of the elections, the Forum and the Campus Martius, he moves quickly to the activity. In Roma triumphans the order is the place, the time and the activity, with a return to two points about the place (the Campus Martius is the sole voting place recognized in Roma triumphans), before the move to the activity. Here Biondo's treatment of the Comitium is subordinated to that of the comitia.
Accordingly, in Roma triumphans Biondo begins by saying that the elections were called comitia. There follows the citation from Varro: ‘Comitium quod ibi coibant comitiis curiatis et litium causa’.Footnote 79 The relevance of this, and how it shows (‘unde patet’) that elections took place in the Campus Martius, is unclear. To modern scholars it shows that meetings of the comitia curiata took place in the Comitium. Next comes the ‘Gellian’ statement that by the very same word comitium is meant the place and time of coming together and the activity.Footnote 80 Biondo signals the transition from place to activity, and to his main account of the comitia, with ‘actum comitii describere aggrediamur’ (‘let us begin to describe the activity of the assembly’, 73). It seems perhaps that Biondo is struggling with the terminology and the distinction between singular comitium and plural comitia. His own usage is consistent (the voting assemblies are always comitia) but the ‘Gellian’ statement, whatever its origin, has confused him.
Others found this a matter requiring clarification too. In his ‘Rhoma’, Tortelli quotes the ‘Gellian’ statement from Roma instaurata, II, 68 but explains that, according to others, singular comitium means the place and the plural form comitia was used for the elections.Footnote 81 The ‘others’ may be Lorenzo Valla, if not Tortelli himself. In two versions of his Raudensiane note Valla comments on Antonio da Rho's entry on comitium in his De imitatione eloquentiae of the early 1430s:Footnote 82 in the first, Valla says ‘Comitium est tantum locus vel actus creandorum magistratuum, ut “in comitio sedebam”; item “actis comitiis”’ (‘The Comitium is only the place or the activity of electing the magistrates, as “I was sitting in the Comitium”; likewise “when the assembly had been held”’); in the second, he clarifies the difference between the singular and plural uses and adds part of the sentence from pseudo-Asconius Pedianus' commentary on Cicero Verrines 2.1.58, cited more fully by Tortelli: ‘Comitium, locus propter senatum quo coire equitibus Romanis et populo Romano licet’.Footnote 83
THE COMITIA
A section of Aulus Gellius (NA 15.27) provided the humanists' main guide for the differences between the three comitia. Fiocchi had based on this most of his treatment of the elections, the only one before Biondo's.Footnote 84 Similarly Biondo begins with it in both works. In Roma triumphans Biondo repeats the key point from Roma instaurata, II, 68, here introduced as ‘necessariam … divisionem’: ‘Cum de generibus omnium fertur suffragium, curiata comitia; cum ex censu et aetate, centuriata; cum ex regionibus et locis, tributa’ (‘When the vote is cast according to the family origins of all, the assembly is “curiate”; when it is according to property and age, “centuriate”; when it is according to regions and localities, “tribal”’).Footnote 85 Immediately following is a vexed statement from Pompeius Festus that implies an equivalence between the comitia centuriata and the comitia curiata, in that in both the Roman people was divided into groups of a hundred each, and this, Biondo comments, has given rise to a gross error, for they were not the same.Footnote 86 The difference, according to Biondo, is that the centuries of the curiae (‘id est, tribubus’) were not based on census and age. (Biondo wrongly believed that the curiae (wards) were the tribes.)Footnote 87 Each tribe, he says, was divided into centuries separately, and there was no specific criterion for making up the centuries. In fact, in the case of the comitia tributa (much better known than the comitia curiata) centuries were irrelevant as the whole tribe voted. Biondo is right to say that in the comitia tributa the winning result had to come from a majority of the tribes.Footnote 88 In the comitia centuriata, on the other hand, he says, there were centuries in five classes, and they were of the men of military age or older. According to Biondo, the result came from a majority of the centuries ‘when all the centuries had been dispatched to vote’. (This was not always the case as a majority of the centuries could be reached before all the classes had voted.)Footnote 89 He concludes: ‘Haecque comitia semper graviora, et illa magis popularia fuerunt habita’ (‘The latter assembly was always considered more authoritative, and the former more democratic’, 73).
Some examples intended to demonstrate the distinguishing characteristic of the comitia curiata as massive popular participation follow, not all of which have to do with elections. The example from Livy of Camillus' recall from exile and appointment as dictator ratified by the comitia curiata (Livy 5.46.10) is far from typical,Footnote 90 yet it seems to have guided Biondo's thinking about the nature of the assembly. Biondo abbreviates Livy and speaks only of the ratification of the recall of Camillus from exile, omitting his appointment as dictator. Before his explicit turn to the comitia centuriata (74) Biondo brings forward some other cases, also problematic to modern eyes. The unanimous vote of the Roman people to restore Cicero's house, Biondo says, was in the comitia curiata, a mistake for centuriata (Cic. Har. resp. 11). He can include an anecdote about the election of Publius Cornelius Scipio (later Africanus) as aedile in 213 bc when he was under age owing to his popular support in the comitia tributa because he mistakenly believes the curiae were the same as the tribes (Livy 25.2.6). Similarly Livy 26.18.7 is another example of unanimous popular support: the same Publius Cornelius Scipio was voted proconsular imperium in Spain (210 bc) by ‘not only all the centuries but also all the tribes’. There are no ‘tribes’ here in Livy. The centuriate vote in this case is anomalous and Biondo may have been influenced by other cases where the tribes voted on appointments with proconsular imperium (Livy 29.13.7). There follows an extract from Livy 28.38.6 on Scipio's unanimous election by the centuries as consul in 205 bc. Here Biondo has in mind Livy's description of the great numbers who flocked to the elections (28.38.7–8).Footnote 91
To show that the comitia centuriata were, ‘pro maxima parte’, the proper elections for the consuls and ‘other magistrates’, Biondo now adduces the case of the first consuls (Livy 1.60.3, 2.2.11) and then quotes Cicero, who himself presided over the election to the consulship of Licinius Murena (Cic. Mur. 1) at the comitia centuriata. In order to demonstrate the difference between the comitia tributa and the comitia centuriata, Biondo returns to an episode from early history (the passing of the Lex Publilia) during the struggle between the plebs and the patricians which led to the tribunes of the plebs being elected at the comitia tributa.Footnote 92 Using the same episode Biondo had made this point more fully at Roma instaurata, II, 68, where he emphasized the participation of all the people at the comitia tributa, contrasting it with the power of the upper classes in the comitia centuriata.
Coming to Aulus Gellius' third kind of comitia, the comitia tributa, Biondo states that it was the same as the curiata. Why then were there three? Gellius is systematizing a temporal development: the three were not in operation at the same time and furthermore no two of the comitia took place simultaneously. The example is Cicero's description in Familiares 7.30.1 of a meeting of the comitia tributa which had begun in the Campus Martius with the purpose of electing a quaestor being transformed into a meeting of the comitia centuriata by Caesar as dictator to elect a consul on the report of the suffect consul's death.Footnote 93 This was the infamous occasion of the election of Caninius Rebillus for less than a day and in fact demonstrates Caesar's contempt for proper procedure. It is true, as Biondo properly notes, that the age of Cicero was very different from Livy's early Rome. The old comitia curiata soon came to have a very circumscribed role, but Biondo is wrong to say that this assembly turned into the comitia tributa.Footnote 94 Elections of magistrates were confined to the comitia (populi) tributa (curule aediles and quaestors), the comitia (plebis) tributa (tribunes and aediles of the plebs)Footnote 95 and the comitia centuriata (consuls and praetors).
THE CENTURIA PRAEROGATIVA
Having brought the reader to the brink of his description of the actual voting, and girding himself for the effort this requires (‘Maiore igitur conatu deligendi formam ducimus explicandam’), Biondo reminds his readers of his earlier explanation of the system of classes based on property qualification (61–2)Footnote 96 and foreshadows the topics of the centuria praerogativa, the drawing of the lot, and the ‘Veturia’. In itself the idea of the centuria praerogativa is not difficult to understand. As Biondo says: ‘Praerogativa quid esset, verbum significat’ (‘What the “praerogativa” [the one asked first] was, the word indicates”) (78). Its history, however, and the scattered (and occasionally corrupt) nature of the evidence for it, make it hard for Biondo to grasp.
From about 241 bc, in the comitia centuriata one century of members of the first class of one of the tribes was selected by lot to vote first. Its vote was made known and taken as indicative of the final result. Before this time the centuries of equites voted first as the praerogativae, to guide the vote of the others.Footnote 97 Biondo, it seems, believes that plural praerogativae centuriae continued to be drawn from the pedites. He says that centuries, called the praerogativa iuniorum or seniorum, were chosen from all the centuries of the iuniores and seniores, and from these a further selection was made of a century consisting of the more outstanding men, called the Veturia.
The Veturia remained a live question in Livy commentaries for centuries, despite Carlo Sigonio's clear demonstration of the state of the case.Footnote 98 In Livy 26.22.2–14 Veturia (or Voturia) is the name of the tribe from which the centuria praerogativa of the iuniores was chosen by lot and then had to vote for a second time when its first choice for consul, T. Manlius Torquatus, said he could not carry out the military demands of the position. They did this after consultation with the seniores of their tribe. Because Biondo did not know that Veturia was the name of a tribe, he could not see that in the Livy passage the ‘Veturia’ was the centuria praerogativa of that tribe.
When he comes to the lot by which the centuria praerogativa was chosen from the first class of all the tribes, Biondo continues to talk about centuriae praerogativae because, it appears, each candidate had his own. In a difficult sentence he seems to say that the candidates could select from which tribe they wished the centuriae praerogativae to be chosen by lot.Footnote 99 (He also seems to think that voting by classes was done within the tribes, not across them.) The candidates had the privilege of choosing the tribe, he thinks, because of the influential role the praerogativae, especially iuniorum, had in forecasting the result. On this last point Biondo is on safer ground, citing Cicero, Pro Murena 38 on the efficacy of the ‘omen praerogativum’.Footnote 100 To illustrate the order of voting more clearly Biondo quotes several passages from Cicero,Footnote 101 which are still important in discussions of the comitia, especially the account of Dolabella's election in Cicero, Philippic Orations 2.82:
Ecce Dolabellae comitiorum dies, sortitio praerogativae exit. Renunciatur, tacet, prima classis vocatur, renunciatur, deinde ut assolet suffragia, tum secunda classis vocatur; quae omnia celerius sunt facta quam dixi. (Roma triumphans, 78)
Here is the day of Dolabella's election. The lot taken for the praerogativa comes out, it is announced, he is silent. The first class is called to vote, its vote is announced, then as usual, the ‘six votes’, then the second class is summoned, all of which was done more quickly than my speaking of it.
To give fuller information there follows a series of passages from Livy, all of which touch on the influence of the centuria praerogativa.Footnote 102 The episode from Livy 26 is allowed the greatest length, Biondo ending his quotation with the words: ‘auctoritatem praerogativae omnes centuriae secutae sunt’ (‘all the centuries followed the authority of the “praerogativa”’).Footnote 103
CONCLUSION
A brief comparison with the treatments of the comitia after Biondo and before Grouchy will demonstrate the influence of Biondo's account.Footnote 104 Raffaele Maffei Volaterranus's very short section on comitia in his encyclopaedic Commentaria Urbana (1506), in book XXIX (‘Philologia’) under ‘Roman magistrates’, would hardly be worth mentioning, except for the fact that much of what he says comes straight from Biondo: chiefly, some sentences on the praerogativa, election of consuls by an interrex ‘non in comitiis’, and the candidate's white dress ‘sine toga’.Footnote 105 The erudite Guillaume Budé (1467–1540), in contrast, is more independent-minded. The main aim of his commentary on Dig. 48.14, De lege Iulia ambitus, is to determine whether this law had any relevance in the Imperial period, but he includes matter that is not strictly relevant to this question.Footnote 106 He gives a brief and clear initial sketch of the conduct of the elections, and then discusses more general questions about them, pausing from time to time on key terms, such as divisor (the distributor of bribes). Like Biondo, he essentially reduces the comitia to two: for him, the centuriata and curiata.Footnote 107 His treatment of the centuria praerogativa goes beyond Biondo's, for he discusses the difference between the earlier centuriae praerogativae of the equites in the Servian constitution and the praerogativae (still plural) drawn by lot in the late Republic, also using Cic. Phil. 2.82 (but in an uncorrupted form).Footnote 108 The word praerogativus was used in various extended senses, as he shows. He concludes by discussing evidence for comitia under the Empire.
Alessandro D'Alessandro (1461–1523) gives his chapter the Gellian heading ‘Quae fuerunt Romanis comitia centuriata, quae curiata, quae tributa, et quae calata’, and it is indeed the fullest treatment of the comitia so far, recognizing their other functions apart from the electoral.Footnote 109 Nevertheless, it too begins with a detailed narrative of the electoral procedures, which shows acquaintance with Roma triumphans. D'Alessandro's chapter is too long to analyse here. Suffice it to say that he seems to accept Biondo's view that ‘Veturia’ is a term of honour given to the centuries of the ‘praestantiores’ (‘more distinguished men’) which voted first in turn, each for its own candidate. No less than Biondo's treatment, D'Alessandro's is a mosaic of ancient sources. D'Alessandro, however, hardly ever identified by name the authors he was excerpting,Footnote 110 and the Semestria of his sixteenth-century commentator, André Tiraqueau (1488–1558), a fellow-jurist, do not always remedy the situation. None of the three follow Biondo in his characteristic interest in the physical setting of the comitia.Footnote 111
These successors of Biondo's had two great advantages. Biondo had invented the topic, set its parameters, and collected and begun to fit together many of what are still regarded as the chief sources. They also had the benefit of working with printed texts, not manuscripts, and were thus able to avoid Biondo's more striking misreadings.Footnote 112 Despite this, and the fact that all works from the ancient world were better understood by their time, including the Greek texts for which Biondo had to use translations, none of the early sixteenth-century writers significantly changes the picture. This would require a new approach to ancient historical research. Biondo's real strengths and weaknesses here stem from his choice of underlying format: a ‘narrative’ description of the elections in the time of Cicero, in which evidence from other time periods is occasionally inserted to show an origin or to chart historical development, without the essential synchrony being disturbed.Footnote 113 This provides the reader with a fairly clear and graspable account but does not allow a deeper investigation into any aspects of the topic, or give any sense of the major reforms to assembly procedure which took place over the period to which his sources refer, some of which are still not well understood.
What is striking about Biondo's account of the comitia is his tenacious pursuit of the facts.Footnote 114 The ideological and political, let alone philosophical, contexts and sub-texts of his ancient sources are allowed to intrude as little as possible.Footnote 115 There is little probing of causes, and there are no comparisons with the institutions or circumstances of Biondo's own day, something Biondo is happy to indulge in elsewhere.Footnote 116 The fact that Biondo's aim is historical reconstruction, however, does not mean that he does not use his imagination, or appeal to the reader's, by his choice of vivid and telling anecdotes. His treatment is based on long engagement with, and intelligent thought about, his material.
In Roma instaurata the topic of the elections was one of the few institutional matters touched on in that treatise where an irresistible urge to admire or condemn uncharacteristically broke through. In Roma triumphans the same topic is signalled as one that has especially engaged the historian's interest and prompted much research on his part, but its importance is taken as evident and in no need of underlining. As a fundamental part of the Roman system of government which Biondo has called ‘prope divinam’ (‘almost divine’) at the beginning of the book (54), it requires description, not justification.
