To qualify as a Roman citizen you had to be 25 or older, a male and freeborn (not born a slave). Whether or not you were classed as a slave depended on the status of your mother: if she was freeborn, so were you. Citizens could vote on the way Rome was ruled. They were also protected by Roman laws.

Roman citizens were divided into two classes — patricians and plebeians. Patricians came from the small number of aristocratic families that had founded the Republic and tended to have both wealth and influence. Everyone else was a plebeian. This didn't stop some plebeians becoming very rich, but they rarely won the same influence as patricians.

187There were many more plebeians than patricians, though, and in the fourth century the plebeians even went on strike to force the patricians to surrender some of their power!

One thing the plebeians won from this strike was the right to elect 10 men every year as tribunes, or ‘protectors of the people’. The tribunes could veto (Latin for ‘I forbid’) what any other politician was trying to do. In theory, this veto was used to protect the interests of the ordinary people.

Every year, Rome would elect more than 50 men to run the city. These men were known as magistrates, but they held office for only one year, and they always had one or more colleague with the same degree of power. Roman politicians competed to get elected as more and more powerful magistrates. Once a man had held office as a magistrate, he became a member of the Senate. (The word Senate derives from the Latin senex, meaning ‘old man’.) In theory, the Senate acted as a council of advisers to the consuls, but in reality they held much direct power. Meetings of the Senate were controlled by the consuls, the most senior magistrates.

All citizens had the right to express their opinion by voting in one of several assemblies (similar to a modern parliament). These assemblies also elected the magistrates every year. Originally voting was by a show of hands, but eventually this public expression was replaced by a secret ballot. Citizens carved either ‘V’ (disagree) or ‘A’ (agree) on a small piece of wax. The pieces were then put in a container to be counted.

Although it might seem that the Roman Republic was a democracy, this was not so. When the republic first started, the plebeians, although citizens, had no real say, as their votes did not count as much as those of the patricians. This made the plebeians angry. In time, they set up their own assembly. The patricians were worried by this, as they knew that the plebeians (who had far greater numbers) could revolt and overrun them. So, eventually, the patricians let them elect tribunes to put forward their views. In 366 BCE a tribune became a consul for the first time; consul was the highest rank in the Republic. By 287 BCE all decisions of the plebeians' assembly were seen as lawful. Even so, the plebeians only ever had limited power compared with that of the patricians.