historians of the Roman constitution assert that owing to these facts they were called patres and their descendants patricians.” According to Plutarch,[92] “Romulus, after forming the army, employed the rest of the people as the citizen body (δῆμος); the multitude he called populus, and appointed a hundred nobles to be councillors, whom he called patricians, and their assembly the senate.”[93] There can be no doubt, therefore, as to the opinion of the ancient writers. They believed that from the beginning social distinctions existed naturally within the populus Romanus, and that these distinctions were made the basis of an official division of the people into nobles and commons, patricii and plebs, by the government. This view is not only reasonable in itself, but is supported, as we shall see, by analogies drawn from many other states. All the sources make the patriciate depend upon connection with the senate, Dionysius alone showing some inconsistency on this point.[94] Why the senators were called patres the ancients give various reasons. Cicero[95] thinks patres a term of endearment; Sallust[96] believes that the name was applied either because of age or because of the similarity of their duty; Livy[97] sets it down as a title of honor; Festus[98] thinks chiefly of their age and wisdom; Paulus,[99] his epitomator, suggests that they were so called because they divided their lands among the poorer class as fathers among children; Dionysius[100] gives three possible reasons, (1) greater age, (2) possession of children, (3) family reputation. The sources generally agree in representing the patres as men who in age, honor, authority and duty stood toward the rest of the citizens as a father toward his children, and in identifying these social-political patres with the senators.[101] An examination of the word itself will tend to confirm the ancient view. It seems to have originally signified “protector,” “keeper,” “nourisher,”[102] hence “owner,” “master.” Pater familias is nourisher, protector, and master of a household.[103] In late Roman law the term continued to refer not necessarily to actual parentage but rather to the legal position of the head of a household;[104] in fact it is only in a distantly derived sense that pater comes to signify the male parent. Ideas early attaching to the word, accordingly, are those of power or authority and age. The senate, as this word indicates, was originally made up of elderly men, senatores, maiores natu.[105] It would be natural to call them patres because of their authority over the community or of their age. As a designation of rank, pater, excepting in jest, is always plural—an indication that the authority and dignity did not attach to the individual noble but to the senators collectively; they were collectively patres of the community, not individually patres of children, clients or gentes.[106] But when in time a limited number of families monopolized the senate, the term could