The various contradictory statements of the ancients regarding the original number of Servian tribes can now be appreciated at their respective values. In the course of the discussion it has become evident, too, that Fabius and Cato, the sources of later annalists, had no tenable ground for their assumption of thirty original tribes. Had they examined the records, perhaps the succeeding parts of their own chronicles, they would have found that before 387 there could have been only twenty-one tribes in all.[296] A less certain indication of the admission of one or possibly two tribes still earlier in the republic may have existed;[297] but here we reach the extreme limit of their knowledge. Any investigation of the number in the regal period, whether by the ancients or by the moderns, must rest not upon contemporary records but upon inference pure and simple. We may inquire, accordingly, whether the view of Mommsen[298] and Meyer[299] that the four city tribes were created first and existed for a time before the institution of the rural tribes, having no trustworthy foundation in the sources, can be deduced from our knowledge of the general conditions of the time. We must by all means avoid the supposition of Mommsen[300] that in the time of Servius there was no private property in land outside of the city.[301] If then we bear in mind two points which Mommsen has himself established, (1) that the local tribe was an aggregate of private estates,[302] (2) that the four urban tribes of Servius were limited to the city,[303] we must conclude that in the time of Servius the country estates were registered in rural tribes—in other words that Servius instituted rural as well as urban tribes.[304] The view of Meyer that all the citizens lived in the city and the dependents in the country[305]—which would afford a ground for assuming the urban tribes to have been earlier than the rural—has no basis either in institutions or in tradition. If originally the country was all-important,[306] and if at the dawn of history we find the country and city politically equal, as is actually the case, we have no motive for the insertion of an intermediate stage in which the city was all-important. There was indeed a tendency toward the concentration of political power within the city, but it did not advance beyond the equalization of city and country.[307] To maintain Meyer’s view we should be obliged to complicate the early history of Rome with two revolutions—one by which the city gained supremacy over the country, and the other in which the supremacy was lost. It is mainly to defend the early history of the comitia, and of the constitution in general, against this complication that the present discussion of the early land tenure and of the origin of the Servian tribes is offered.