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 the position of senator could not have been a life-office; there could neither have been any definite mode of attaining the dignity, nor any claim on the part of an individual to retain it. A new king might decline to summon some of his predecessor's councillors; he might even, perhaps, change the personnel of his advisers during the course of his reign. It was in later times believed that the freedom of selection was so great that no stigma attached to members who were "passed over" (praeteriti) by the king.

Yet tradition attributes a definiteness to the Senate which is not consistent with the idea of a purely arbitrary selection. Its numbers at any given time are fixed, and it is to some extent made representative of the whole patrician community—for an increase in the number of full burgesses involved a corresponding increase in the numbers of this body. The number, originally 100, was raised by successive steps to 300 before the close of the monarchy. The two obvious units of representation were the curiae and the clans; but the latter, from their larger numbers, formed a better basis for reflecting the opinion of the whole community, and tradition does seem to have imposed a kind of constitutional necessity on the king of distributing his councillors as evenly as possible amongst the patrician gentes. It was thus that the distinction between the older and the newer clans was perpetuated in the procedure of the Senate; but the clan-influence left its strongest mark by giving a name to the members of the body itself. It was the leading heads of families (patres familias seniores) that the king summoned; and, in asking their advice, he addressed them as "heads of houses" (patres).

The primitive Senate is credited with two standing powers—the patrum auctoritas and the initiation of an interregnum. Neither of these prerogatives was directly contemplated by the constitution, and the Senate never becomes a corporation possessing powers in its own right until the time of the Empire.