TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 539
The size of the territory of the Roman Commonwealth was perhaps
hardly more than a third of the size of the territory of a contemporary
Athens at the time when, at some date in the fifth century B.C., the Ager
Romanus was divided into twenty districts in order to articulate a
national popular assembly into as many companies of voters, each con-
sisting of the citizens whose domicile lay in one of these 'tribal' districts ;r
and the maximum distance that any Roman citizen would have to travel
from his home to the capital in order to take part in national public
business remained well within Attic limits even after the territory of
Rome had been enlarged by the addition of one new district (the Tribus
Clustumina) up the left bank of the River Tiber2 and four further new
districts into which the territory of Veii, across the Tiber, was subse-
quently carved up after its conquest in 396 B.C.3 When in 358 B.C. two
more districts (the Pomptina and the Publilia) were carved out of con-
quered Volscian territory4 in the lowlands south-east of the Alban Hills,
Roman citizens now resident there might find it still just possible to

subsequent transaction in the popular assembly was controlled, by a grand jury, or
general purposes committee, of the citizen body which was, not elected, but picked by
lot on a representative system in which the quota allocated to each local administrative
district of Attica was proportionate to the fraction of the total citizen body that was
estimated to be represented by the citizens resident in that district. Since this committee
(the Bouis] was itself five hundred strong and was therefore, like the general assembly,
too unwieldly to dispatch executive business in plenary session, it was divided into ten
sections which took it in turns to serve as an executive sub-committee for periods of
thirty-six or thirty-five days each within the Boulfs twelve months* term of office. This
executr
hours.'

of their own," likewise picked b'y lot, from the nine sections of the Boull that were not
serving as the executive sub-committee at the moment (see Aristotle: The Constitution

i ThT'date of the division of the Ager Romanus into the twenty 'tribal* districts is
discussed by K. J. Beloch in his Rdmische Geschichte bis aunt Beginn der Puniscken Kriege
(Berlin and Leipzig 1926, de Gruyter), pp. 270-1 and 298-303. The only certain chrono-
logical facts are that these first twenty tribal' districts must have been instituted before
the addition of a twenty-first (the Clustumina), and that the territory of Crustumeniim,
out of which this twenty-first district was constituted, must have been annexed to the
Ager Romanus before the annexation, in 396 B.C., of the territory of Veii, on the opposite
bank of the river, which was subsequently carved up into four more districts (the twenty-
second to the twenty-fifth inclusive). It can also be deduced from the lie of the land that
the territory of Fidenae, along the left bank of the Tiber between the territory of Urus-
tumerium and Rome, must have been annexed to the Ager Romanus before the annexa-
tion of Crustumerium, and Beloch (in op. cit., pp. 298-302) gives reasons for thinking
that Fidenae was conquered by Rome in either 428 B.C. or 426 B.C. We do not know,
however, whether this conquered Fidenate territory was included in one of the first
twenty Roman 'tribal' districts or in the twenty-first district, i.e., the Chasrumina.

•xj-^a of the Ager «.iv*....*.«» _.,..- —________.....___,,—______________

metres, as against 8aa if at that time Fidenae was still independent (these figures will be
found in Beloch, op, cit., p. 178). On the other hand the area of Attica, within her
frontiers as they ran in the fifth century B.C., was as much as 2,440 square kilometres
according to Beloch's reckoning in his Die BevSlkerung der Griecfrisch-Rdmischen Welt
(Leipzig 1886, Duncker and Humblot), p. 56, if we include the island of Salamis, which
had been colonized by Athenian citizens, but omit the two districts of Oropus and
Eleutherae, adjoining the land-frontier between Attica and Boeotia. Thucydides
describes the Oropians as 'subjects of Athens' (Book II, chap. 23; cp. Book IV, chap.
09), while it is not certain that the Eleuthereis possessed the full Athenian franchise
(the status of the inhabitants of these two districts is discussed by G. de Sanctis in
his Atthis (Turin 1912, Bocca), p. 333, n. i).

z See Beloch, RSmische Geschischte, pp. 159, 174, 265, and 370.

3 See ibid., p. 607. + See ibid., pp. 265 and 356-8,