The study pursued thus far will enable us to understand how there came to be social classes at Rome before the beginning of conquest. But for a long time after the Romans began to annex territory we may seek in vain for a distinction between conquerors and conquered, like that which we find in Laconia. We are forbidden to identify the plebs with the conquered and the patricians with the conquerors by many considerations mentioned above—for instance, by tradition,[258] by the derivation of several patrician gentes from various foreign states,[259] by the fewness of the patricians,[260] and by the fact that the latter show no differentiations of rank, such as we find among the conquering Spartans; they were not a folk but a nobility pure and simple. We are to regard Rome’s early annexations of territory and of populations not as subjugations, but as incorporations on terms of equality. The people incorporated were of the same great folk, the Latins, or of a closely related folk, the Sabines. Accordingly they were not reduced to subjection, but were admitted to citizenship, to the tribes and the curiae, and their nobles were granted the patriciate.[261] Only communities of alien speech, like the Etruscan, or distant Italian communities like the Campanian, were ordinarily given the inferior civitas sine suffragio; and this restricted citizenship does not appear in history before the middle of the fourth century B.C. The analogies offered in this chapter, by proving that the conditions they illustrate are possible for early Rome, tend to confirm the authority of the sources. By similar comparative study it would be practicable to illustrate in detail and to corroborate the statements of ancient writers as to the organization of the plebs, as well as of the patricians, in tribes and curiae, the participation of the clients and plebeians in war and politics, and the deterioration of the free commons through the strengthening of the nobility—all of which are rejected by eminent modern historians, who merely imagine them incompatible with primitive conditions or with a rational theory of constitutional development. The inquiry has been pursued far enough, however, to indicate that from a comparative-sociological point of view the conception of early Rome handed down to us by the ancients is sound and consistent, and that the method of subjective reconstruction of history introduced by Niebuhr and still extensively employed by scholars is unscientific.