The exclusion of this multitude from the public assembly, although it bore part of the public burdens, might be tolerated as long as that public assembly itself had no very material share in the working of the state machine, and as long as the royal power by the very fact of its high and free position remained almost equally formidable to the burgesses and to the -- metoeci-- and thereby maintained equality of legal redress in the nation.

But when the community itself was called regularly to elect and to decide, and the president was practically reduced from its master to its commissioner for a set term, this relation could no longer be maintained as it stood; least of all when the state had to be remodelled on the morrow of a revolution, which could only have been carried out by the co-operation of the patricians and the -- metoeci--.

An extension of that community was inevitable; and it was accomplished in the most comprehensive manner, inasmuch as the collective plebeiate, that is, all the non-burgesses who were neither slaves nor citizens of extraneous communities living at Rome under the -ius hospitii-, were admitted into the burgess-body.

The curiate assembly of the old burgesses, which hitherto had been legally and practically the first authority in the state, was almost totally deprived of its constitutional prerogatives.

It was to retain its previous powers only in acts purely formal or in those which affected clan-relations -- such as the vow of allegiance to be taken to the consul or to the dictator when they entered on office just as previously to the king,( 9) and the legal dispensations requisite for an -arrogatio- or a testament--but it was not in future to perform any act of a properly political character.