AERARII (from

See also:

• LAT

Lat. aes, in its subsidiary sense of "

See also:

• POLL

poll-tax ")  , originally a class of Roman citizens not included in the thirty tribes of Servius Tullius, and subject to a poll-tax arbitrarily fixed by the censor . They were (1) the inhabitants of conquered towns which had been deprived of local self-government, who possessed the jus conubii and jus commercii, but no political rights; Caere is said to have been the first example of this (353 B.c.); hence the expression " in tabulas Caeritum referre " came to mean " to degrade to the status of an aerarius": (2) full citizens subjected to civil degradation (infamia) as the result of following certain professions (e.g. acting), of dishonour-able acts in private life (e.g. bigamy) or of conviction for certain crimes; (3) persons branded by the censor . Those who were thus excluded from the tribes and centuries had no vote, were in-capable of filling Roman magistracies and could not serve in the army . According to Mommsen, the aerarii were originally the non-assidui (non-holders of land), excluded from the tribes, the comitia and the army . By a reform of the censor Appius Claudius in 312 B.C. these non-assidui were admitted into the tribes, and the aerarii as such disappeared . But in 304, Fabius Rullianus limited them to the four city tribes, and from that time the term meant a man degraded from a higher (country) to a lower (city) tribe, but not deprived of the right of voting or of serving in the army . The expressions " tribu movere " and " aerarium facere," regarded by Mommsen as identical in meaning (" to degrade from a higher tribe to a lower "), are explained by A . H . J . Greenidge—the first as relegation from a higher to a lower tribe or total exclusion from the tribes, the second as exclusion from the centuries . Other views of the original aerarii are that they were:—artisans and freedmen (Niebuhr) ; inhabitants of towns united with Rome by a hospitium publicum, who had become domiciled on Roman territory (Lange); only a class of degraded citizens, including neither the cives sine suffragio nor the artisans (Madvig); identical with the capite censi of the Servian constitution (Belot, Greenidge) . See A .

H . J . Greenidge, Infamia in Roman

Law (1894), where Mommsen's theory is criticized; E . Belot, Histoire des chevaliers romains, i. p . 200 (Paris, 1866) ; L . Pardon, De Aerariis (Berlin, 1853); P . Willems, Le Droit public romain (1883); A . S., Wilkins in Smith's Diet. of Greek and Roman Antiquities (3rd ed., 1891); and the usual handbooks of antiquities .