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We cannot trace the successive steps in the acquisition of power by the centuries or its growth from an army into a comitia. They must have been the chief political changes which filled the closing years of the monarchy and the early days of the Republic; for even the abolition of monarchy itself, revolutionary as it was, was less of an alteration in the structure of the constitution than this transference of the attributes of sovereignty from one assembly to another, from a single to a mixed order. The comitia curiata was not suddenly stripped of its powers; but the organising genius of a single supreme magistrate had prepared the way for a change, which was a prototype of the gradual insensible revolutions through which Rome was to pass.

The change which closes the history of this period, although not so radical, was far more sudden and violent. The monarchy itself was overthrown. History has tried to invest this revolution with all the legal grounds and legal forms which it could summon to its assistance. Servius had had it in his mind to complete his democratic work by laying down the full imperium;[311] and Tarquin the Proud, the last of the great Etruscan line, had broken through the constitutional usages of the monarchy[312] and had ruled without challenging the allegiance of the people.[313] That there was some fearful abuse of the kingly power, typified in the associations that gathered round the words rex and regnum and in the oath which made any one who aspired to monarchy an outlaw,[314] we may without hesitation allow; for Rome, as shown by the power she continued to entrust to her magistrates, had not outgrown the idea of royalty. But there was no constitutional mode of deposing a king. The auspices had returned to the fathers in unhallowed fashion, and the war waged by Tarquin and Etruria is a war for the maintenance of the principle of divine right. But yet Rome held that the divinity of the magistracy still remained; the auspices again left the fathers’ hands and were conferred on two citizens chosen from the patres.[315]