If, as is probable, in the earliest period every one who had passed his sixtieth year was excluded from the centuries, this has no meaning, so far as they were intended from the first to form a representation of the burgess-community similar to and parallel with the curies.

Although, however, the organization of the centuries was introduced merely to enlarge the military resources of the burgesses by the inclusion of the -- metoeci-- and, in so far, there is no greater error than to exhibit the Servian organization as the introduction of a timocracy in Rome--yet the new obligation imposed upon the inhabitants to bear arms exercised in its consequences a material influence on their political position.

He who is obliged to become a soldier must also, so long as the state is not rotten, have it in his power to become an officer; beyond question plebeians also could now be nominated in Rome as centurions and as military tribunes.

Although, moreover, the institution of the centuries was not intended to curtail the political privileges exclusively possessed by the burgesses as hitherto represented in the curies, yet it was inevitable that those rights, which the burgesses hitherto had exercised not as the assembly of curies, but as the burgess-levy, should pass over to the new centuries of burgesses and -- metoeci--.

Henceforward, accordingly, it was the centuries whose consent the king had to ask before beginning an aggressive war.( 11) It is important, on account of the subsequent course of development, to note these first steps towards the centuries taking part in public affairs; but the centuries came to acquire such rights at first more in the way of natural sequence than of direct design, and subsequently to the Servian reform, as before, the assembly of the curies was regarded as the proper burgess-community, whose homage bound the whole people in allegiance to the king.