All the nations of antiquity lived in fixed forms, and their civil relations were always marked by various divisions and subdivisions. When cities raise themselves to the rank of nations, we always find a division at first into tribes; Herodotus mentions such tribes in the colonization of Cyrene, and the same was afterward the case at the foundation of Thurii; but when a place existed anywhere as a distinct township, its nature was characterized by the fact of its citizens being at a certain time divided into _gentes_ [Greek: gene], each of which had a common chapel and a common hero. These _gentes_ were united in definite numerical proportions into _curiae_ [Greek: phratrai]. The _gentes_ are not families, but free corporations, sometimes close and sometimes open; in certain cases the whole body of the state might assign to them new associates; the great council at Venice was a close body, and no one could be admitted whose ancestors had not been in it, and such also was the case in many oligarchical states of antiquity. All civil communities had a council and an assembly of burghers, that is, a small and a great council; the burghers consisted of the guilds or _gentes_, and these again were united, as it were, in parishes; all the Latin towns had a council of one hundred members, who were divided into ten _curiae_; this division gave rise to the name of _decuriones_, which remained in use as a title of civic magistrates down to the latest times, and through the _lex Julia_ was transferred to the constitution of the Italian _municipia_. That this council consisted of one hundred persons has been proved by Savigny, in the first volume of his history of the Roman law. This constitution continued to exist till a late period of the middle ages, but perished when the institution of guilds took the place of municipal constitutions. Giovanni Villani says, that previously to the revolution in the twelfth century there were at Florence one hundred _buoni nomini_, who had the administration of the city. There is nothing in the German cities which answers to this constitution. We must not conceive those hundred to have been nobles; they were an assembly of burghers and country people, as was the case in our small imperial cities, or as in the small cantons of Switzerland. Each of them represented a _gens_; and they are those whom Propertius calls _patres pelliti_. The _curia_ of Rome, a cottage covered with straw, was a faithful memorial of the times when Rome stood buried in the night of history, as a small country town surrounded by its little domain.