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Tribus
#1
I am curious, was the voting tribe necessary to the roman authorities? After all we know that their graves include information about their voting tribe right before their hometown. If it was known to those who issued the grave, does it mean that it was also important for the imperial bureaucracy, for example to check identity of a soldier?
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#2
As an administrative unit, the tribal affiliation, based on membership in one of the 35 tribes was largely a vestigial hold-over from the Republic; the only things that tribal affiliation determined were how you paid your taxes (defunct after 167 when "tribal" payments, tributum, was cancelled. Conscription based on tribal affiliation, described by Polybius, seems to be largely exist after the Social War. And finally voting through tribal units ceased to mean anything in the new Augustan monarchy, when elections were rigged, and was literally abolished in the Flavian period. So the tribe had been a critical unit in the Republican period, but persisted as a vestigial political feature into the Empire.

The main reason to list your tribal affiliation on your tombstone in the early empire: it showed that you enjoyed the distinction of Roman citizenship and were savvy enough to know what a proper name looked like.
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#3
I wonder if anyone knows if there was any particular tribe for the citizens of Pompeii. I tried to do a bit of research and it seems that many funerary inscriptions mention both Menenia (the most popular one) or Falerna with at least one mention of Oufentina, Cornelia, Romilia or Velina.
(-) Emil Petecki
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