Definition
In Roman law, diribitores (singular: diribititor) were public officers responsible for distributing voting tablets or ballots to citizens assembled for electoral or legislative purposes. They served a logistical and procedural function within the Roman comitial system, ensuring that each voter received the physical means to cast a vote before the count was conducted. The office was a recognized component of the Roman voting apparatus, distinct from the officers who subsequently collected or tallied the tablets.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources treating Roman civil law and Roman constitutional procedure. Researchers will encounter it in annotated editions of Roman law, treatises on civil law history, and comparative law scholarship — not in common law materials or modern statutory sources. Its appearance in American legal dictionaries reflects the nineteenth-century tradition of including Roman law terminology as background to civil law concepts that influenced Louisiana, Quebec, and other mixed or civil law jurisdictions.
The consistent citation across all three source dictionaries to Taylor's Civil Law (page 192) identifies John Taylor's Elements of the Civil Law as the primary English-language authority behind these definitions. Researchers tracing the term beyond dictionary entries should consult that treatise directly. Taylor's work was widely relied upon by American legal lexicographers of the nineteenth century for Roman law vocabulary, and the near-identical wording across Black's (both editions) and Burrill's suggests all three drew from Taylor rather than from independent Roman sources.
For researchers working in the Law Mind corpus on Roman electoral procedure, the diribitores functioned alongside other comitial officers: the rogatores (who solicited or recorded votes) and the custodes (who supervised the ballot boxes). Understanding where the diribitores fit in that sequence — distribution, not collection or tallying — prevents misreading period sources that use these titles interchangeably in loose translation.
No modern legal relevance attaches to this term outside historical and comparative scholarship.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries are in near-complete agreement, and the convergence is unsurprising given that each traces to the same underlying authority. Black's first edition, Black's second edition, and Burrill's all define diribitores as officers who distributed ballots to the people for use in voting, and all cite Taylor's Civil Law at the same page. The minor variation in word order across the three entries reflects editorial paraphrase rather than any substantive difference in understanding.
None of the source dictionaries elaborate on the broader institutional context — the nature of the comitia, the types of votes at which diribitores operated, or the distinction between the diribitores and other comitial officers. Researchers seeking that context must go beyond these dictionary entries to primary treatments of Roman public law.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Roman Law; Electoral Procedure in the Roman Republic