This chapter[83] is primarily an inquiry into the social composition of the comitia curiata. At the same time it seeks to solve a problem which is doubtless the most fundamental in the early political and constitutional history of Rome. The result we reach will determine our conception of the whole course of constitutional development, and of the accompanying political struggles, to the complete equalization of the social ranks. For if we believe, as do many of the moderns,[84] that the primitive Roman state was made up exclusively of patricians, we are forced to the conclusion that the constitutional development to the passing of the Hortensian laws centred in the gradual admission of the plebeians and the clients to citizenship—perhaps even in the amalgamation of two distinct peoples. If on the other hand we take the ground that from the beginning the plebeians and the clients were citizens and voted in the comitia curiata, we must think of these inferior classes as struggling through the early history of their country for the acquisition not of citizenship but of various rights and privileges, social, economic, religious, and political, formerly monopolized by a patrician aristocracy. In attempting to solve the problem here proposed it will be advantageous to consider (1) the ancient view, (2) the conventional modern view, (3) the comparative-sociological view. I. _The Ancient View_ The three social classes of freemen—plebeians, patricians, and clients—were formed within the citizen body by official recognition of existing distinctions not of nationality but of worth. The first step in the process was the differentiation of the patricians from the plebeians. According to Cicero, Romulus constituted a number of chief men into a royal council, the senate, whose members he so highly esteemed as to have them called patres, and their children patricians.[85] Cicero thinks of the multitude as existing at first without a politically recognized nobility, yet showing natural distinctions of worth. By calling into the senate the ablest and best men, the state ennobled them and their families.[86] Livy’s[87] view is similar: Romulus selected from the multitude a hundred senators, whom he named patres, and whose descendants were called patricians. They were chosen because of their wisdom;[88] on that ground the state granted them nobility,[89] which accordingly in Rome, as in every early community, was founded on personal merit.[90] In the more detailed theory of Dionysius,[91] Romulus “distinguished those who were eminent for their birth and celebrated for their virtue, and whom he knew to be rich in the account of those times and who had children, from the obscure and mean and poor. The lower class he called plebeians, Greek δημοτικοί, and the higher patres, either because they were older than the others, or had children, or were of higher birth, or for all these reasons.... The most trustworthy