_curia_;[18] but it is probable that in the prehistoric period they became clients, immediately of the king to whom they had made their subjection, ultimately perhaps of patrician houses to which he chose to attach them as dependants.[19] In all these cases clientship may have been the original lot of the Plebeian; but this could hardly have been the fate of the immigrant who moved to Rome from a city which already possessed the _jus commercii_ with that state, and by the exercise of the right of voluntary exile from his native land (_jus exulandi_) claimed the Roman _civitas_. The existence of such relations between Rome and cities of the Latin league is attested for a very early period, and they may even have been extended to cities outside the league.[20] As the _jus commercii_ implies the right of suing and being sued in one’s own person before Roman courts, there seems no reason why such an immigrant should make application to a Roman patron;[21] but, if he did not, he was in the chief aspects of private law a perfectly free man, and illustrated a status to which the quondam-client must from an early period have tended to approximate. Where the right of intermarriage (_jus conubii_), as well as the right of trade, was guaranteed in a treaty between Rome and some other town, it is questionable whether this gift ever implied the possibility of matrimonial union with members of the Patriciate. It is at least certain that, at the time of the Twelve Tables (451 B.C.), and therefore probably from a very early period, a disability common to all the Plebeians was that they might not intermarry with members of patrician clans. Yet, although there was this great gulf parting the two orders, it was possible for either class to be transferred to the status of the other. We shall see that tradition represents a vote of the Patricians in their assembly as a means sufficient to recruit their order by the addition of a new family; while, after the Plebs had evolved an assembly of its own, a _transitio ad plebem_ might be effected by an act of that body.[22] Adoption from a patrician into a plebeian family produced the same result.