Tribus Congress

The Comitia Tributa was one of two distinct Roman legislative bodies invoked to defend the possibility of concurrent political authority. In the comparison, it represented the plebeian interest and gave predominance to numbers, while the Comitia Centuriata favored the patrician interest through voting by centuries. Their coexistence for ages, the argument maintains, shows that apparently contradictory legislatures need not make shared government impossible.

Institutional Character

The Comitia Tributa appears as an independent legislature, not as a branch of the same legislature as the Comitia Centuriata. The two bodies each possessed authority to annul or repeal the other’s acts, a seeming contradiction that could have prompted arguments about their unfitness. The text nevertheless insists that their existence was an established fact: anyone attempting to deny it at Rome would have been regarded as frantic.

Representation and Political Contrast

The distinction between the assemblies lay in how their voting systems distributed influence. In the Comitia Centuriata, citizens voted by centuries, an arrangement that gave superiority to the patrician interest. In the Comitia Tributa, numbers prevailed, and the plebeian interest held entire predominance. The comparison therefore makes the assemblies more than duplicate institutions: each gave a different political interest a distinct institutional venue.

Coexistence and Argument

The assemblies coexisted for ages, and the Roman republic attained what the text calls the utmost height of human greatness during their coexistence. Their example answers an objection to the proposed Constitution’s allocation of revenue authority between the federal government and the states. The argument treats the Roman arrangement as evidence that two independent authorities may overlap in practice even when theorists can marshal reasons against such a structure. It also distinguishes the Roman case from the proposed federal arrangement: in the latter, neither side had power to annul the acts of the other. The analogy thus supports the possibility of concurrent authority without claiming that the institutional designs were identical.