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Un'ipotesi sull'origine delle curiae

2019, R. Fiori (a cura di), Re e popolo. Istituzioni arcaiche tra storia e comparazione, Göttingen

The common idea that the curiae were divisions of the people created after the foundation of the city and strictly related to the gentes, is mostly due to the etymology cūria < *ko-wir-ia. However, the sources represent the curiae as divisions of the army, and up to Servius Tullius the meeting area of the comitia curiata was extra pomerium. These clues suggest the different etymology cūria < *koir-ia, which connects the word with a number of names of the army or of its units in the Indo-European languages ​​(*koryos: cf. Germ. Heer), and explains the theonym Quirīnus as the result of the deification of a homonymous title indicating the ‘head of the cūriae’ (*koir-yo/a-Hn-o-s). If the term cūria is not a Latin formation but can be traced back to the Indo-European past, it is likely that the institution of the curia did nor arise after the foundation of the city, but reproduced a precivic form of organisation. This leads to represent the foundation of Rome not as the result of an aggregative process of gentes, but as the establishing in an urban form of a pre-existing political entity, perhaps consisting in a league of curiae.