The Senate might under these influences have easily degenerated into a futile subservience to stereotyped forms and habits which would have rendered expansion impossible; it might have opposed a Chinese rigidity to necessary innovations; but the destinies of Rome had ordained that from the beginning the principle of modification should exist alongside with a strong conservative tendency. It may be left to the antiquaries to decide exactly how much truth survives in the legends which form the chief part of early Roman history, but even if it were not demonstrable that the population of Rome was a composite population at a very early time, the fact would remain that the Romans themselves believed it to be composed of three elements: they believed that Latins, Sabines and Etruscans had been welded together under the Kings, and that the titular distinction between patrician and plebeian families survived from a further process of incorporation of aliens; thus there was ancient authority for innovation in such an important matter as the admission of new citizens. Athens was in this respect more conservative than Rome; the citizens of the most democratic state of the ancient world boasted of their pure native descent, while the conservative Roman found in his history a continuous process of immigration to the hills by the Tiber, repeated coalition, continued absorption. While the Roman Senate was in one aspect a body of trained lawyers, in another it was a body of priests. The evolution of the priesthood as a separate profession is a comparatively modern process. In the history of Rome we see the first step in the process, the changes by which the men appointed to maintain the state religion or to conduct the ceremonial observances paid to particular gods became elected officials, after having been the representatives of certain families upon whom those obligations rested. The duties of religion which had previously been family duties became state duties; but this change did not relieve the Senate of its charge of the national religion. Just as the Senator was an expert in law, so he was an expert in ritual; he did not discuss questions of faith, but he decided points of ceremonial. Though the Colleges of Pontiffs and Augurs were not in the later days of the Republic necessarily drawn from the Senators, and though for a short period a restricted form of public election was applied to the former, practically the Senatorial families held these offices in their own hands, and the power which they thus wielded could only be taken from them by the expedient of combining in the person of the chief of the State the functions of chief Pontifex and chief Augur. Any public business could be suspended by the declaration of a Pontifex or Augur, that it was contrary to established ritual, or that the gods had by means of recognized signs and omens signified the occasion to be unfavourable.