Un'ipotesi sull'origine delle curiae

On the basis of the etymology cūria < *ko-wir-ia, the curiae are generally reconstructed as divisions of the people arisen after the foundation of the city and strictly related to the gentes. However, the sources represent the curiae as divisions of the army, and up to Servius Tullius the assembly meeting area would have been extra pomerium. These attestations agree with the possibility that Lat. cūria derives from *koir-ia, to be connected with a series of denominations of the army or of its units in the Indo-European languages ​​(*koryos: see Germ. Heer), while the theonym Quirinus may be the result of the deification of a homonymous title indicating the ‘head of the curiae’ (*koir-yo-Hno-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.