Other evidence for his hypothesis Niebuhr thinks he finds in a statement of Labeo,[178] that the curiate assembly was convoked by a lictor, the centuriate by a horn-blower; while Dionysius[179] says that the patricians were summoned by name through a messenger, the people by the blowing of a horn. Thus Niebuhr maintains that Labeo and Dionysius agree unequivocally in designating the curiae as the assembly of the patricians. But in fact these two sources refer to the customs of the historical age, when the curiate assembly was ordinarily attended by only three augurs and thirty lictors. Horn-blowing under these circumstances would have been absurd. The summoning of the patricians by their own name and that of their father, on the other hand, proves them too few to compose a popular assembly. These citations therefore are far from supporting his hypothesis. His last and greatest proof is the identification of the lex de imperio, passed by the curiae, with the patrum auctoritas. If these are merely two terms for the same act, the curiae must have been made up of patres. But by establishing the fact that the patrum auctoritas belonged to the senate or to its patrician members, Willems[180] and Mommsen[181] have deprived Niebuhr’s hypothesis of its main prop. Niebuhr evidently believed that the curiae continued exclusively patrician through the whole republican period.[182] This idea, however, must be dismissed for the following reasons: (1) Our sources agree that in the early republic the plebeians and clients continued to vote in the curiate assembly.[183] (2) The plebeians were in the curiae in 208 B.C., when the first curio maximus was chosen from the plebs.[184] (3) In the time of Cicero thirty plebeian[185] lictors represented the comitia curiata, and gave the votes.[186] (4) Arrogations by plebeians took place in this assembly; in the well-known case of Clodius it must be borne in mind that it was a plebeian who arrogated him. (5) The extinction of the patriciate did not involve the downfall of the comitia curiata.[187] (6) The confirmation by the curiae (lex de imperio) of elections in the centuriate assembly was conceived as a second vote of the community.[188] (7) The resolutions of the comitia curiata are always thought of as resolutions of the populus, which Latin literature nowhere restricts to the patrician body. (8) In all ancient literature there is nowhere the slightest hint of a change in the social composition of the curiae or of the comitia curiata in the whole course of their history. What the ancients believed to be true of either institution at any particular period will hold therefore for its entire history.[189]