Sorting out the Lot in Republican Rome

Abstract

Remarkably, no general study illuminates sortition in Republican Rome despite the lots' prominence in the city's public affairs. Most scholars are aware that the sortes picked the highly influential centuria praerogativa and apportioned provinces, armies, and a variety of other tasks among consuls and praetors, but the lots did a lot more than that.' They matched quaestors with magistrates and scribes with quaestors, determined which censor would choose the princeps senatus and found the lustrum, and were even selecting the Senate's emissaries by the end of the Republic.2 At the comitia tributa or the concilium plebis, the lots established the sequence in which the tribes voted on legislation and picked the tribe where the Latins exercised their right to vote when in Rome.3 When these same assemblies elected minor magistrates, sortilege determined the order in which the presiding officer announced each tribe's choice.4 It even served as a tie breaker when candidates