Page:Historical introduction to the private law of Rome (IA historicalintrod00muiriala).pdf/36

6 name of, the law of the Spearmen. The were the members of the gentile houses, organised in their curies, primarily for military, and secondarily for political purposes. They alone of the settlers around the ranked as citizens, down at least to the time of Servius Tullius. They alone could consult the gods through the medium of, and participate in the services offered by to the tutelary deities of Rome. From their number the king drew his council of elders, and they alone could take part in the curiate comitia, the assembly of warriors. They alone could contract a lawful marriage and make a testament; in a word, it was they alone that were entitled directly to the benefit of Rome's peculiar institutions.

But those prerogatives of the patrician burgesses were theirs as members of the gentile houses. Patrician Rome was a federation of or clans; the clans aggregations of families, bearing a common name, and theoreticaly at least tracing their descent from a common ancestor. Whether or not the traditional account of the numerical proportion of families to clans and of clans to curies have any substantial historical foundation, and whatever may be the explanation of the method by which the symmetry on which the old writers dwell with so much complacency was attained, it is beyond doubt that the gentile organisation was common to the two races at least that contributed most largely to the citizenship of Rome, and that it was made the basis of the new arrangements. Federation necessitated the appointment of a common chieftain, and common institutions, religious, military, political, and judicial. But it was long before these displaced entirely the separate institutions of the federated. Every clan had its own cult, peculiar to its own members; this was the universal bond of association in those early times. It had its common property (p. 38) and its common burial-place. It must have had some common