centuria

Centuria, from Latin centuria meaning “a group of a hundred,” is a term used to describe several related concepts in ancient Rome and, in modern usage, to refer to groups or units of about one hundred.

In Roman military organization, a centuria was a unit of the legion commanded by a centurion. Its size varied over time, but the traditional concept referred to roughly 80 to 100 infantrymen. Ten centuries formed a cohort, the principal tactical unit of the legion, and the centuria operated as the basic fighting formation and recruitment unit within the Roman army.

In the political sphere, the comitia centuriata—the Centuriate Assembly—organized Roman citizens into centuries for voting. Citizens were grouped into centuries largely by wealth, and each century cast a single vote. Although the assembly included free male citizens, the voting weight favored the wealthier classes, and the centuriate assembly elected senior magistrates and could pass laws and decide on war and peace in various periods of the Republic.

In land administration, centuriation (centuriatio) refers to the systematic division of conquered lands into a grid of parcels called centuriae. Each centuria typically represented a standardized area and was used to organize colonization and tax assessment; the exact size varied by region and epoch. The grid-like plan produced straight roads and regular plots that often influenced landscape patterns for centuries.

The term persists in modern Romance languages to denote a hundred or a century in non-technical contexts, and in scholarly usage to describe Roman institutions and practices that organized people or land into hundreds.