The patrician families had gathered round them, under the name of _clients_, either foreigners, or a great portion of the plebeians. Dionysius of Halicarnassus even pretends that Romulus had required that each of these last should choose himself a patron.[15] The clients cultivated the fields and formed part of the family.[16] The relation of patronage had created such reciprocal obligations as amounted almost to the ties of kindred. For the patrons, they consisted in giving assistance to their clients in affairs public and private; and for the latter, in aiding constantly the patrons with their person and purse, and in preserving towards them an inviolable fidelity: they could not cite each other reciprocally in law, or bear witness one against the other, and it would have been a scandal to see them take different sides in a political question. It was a state of things which had some analogy to feudalism; the great protected the little, and the little paid for protection by rents and services; yet there was this essential difference, that the clients were not serfs, but free men. Slavery had long formed one of the constituent parts of society. The slaves, taken among foreigners and captives,[17] and associated in all the domestic labours of the family, often received their liberty as a recompense for their conduct. They were then named _freedmen_, and were received among the clients of the patron, without sharing in all the rights of a citizen.[18] The _gens_ thus consisted of the reunion of patrician families having a common ancestor; around it was grouped a great number of clients, freedmen, and slaves. To give an idea of the importance of the _gentes_ in the first ages of Rome, it is only necessary to remind the reader that towards the year 251, a certain Attus Clausus, afterwards called Appius Claudius, a Sabine of the town of Regillum, distinguished, according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, no less for the splendour of his birth than for his great wealth, took refuge among the Romans with his kinsmen, his friends, and his clients, with all their families, to the number of five thousand men capable of bearing arms.[19] When, in 275, the three hundred Fabii, forming the _gens Fabia_, offered alone to fight the Veians, they were followed by four thousand clients.[20] The high class often reckoned, by means of its numerous adherents, on carrying measures by itself. In 286, the plebeians having refused to take part in the consular comitia, the patricians, followed by their clients, elected the consuls;[21] and in 296, a Claudius declared with pride that the nobility had no need of the plebeians to carry on war against the Volsci.[22] The families of ancient origin long formed the state by themselves. To them exclusively the name of _populus_ applied,[23] as that of _plebs_ was given to the plebeians.[24] Indeed, although in the sequel the word _populus_ took a more extensive