oughout in the earliest tradition regarding the
tripartite Rome, which assigns to it thirty curies, three hundred
horsemen, three hundred senators, three thousand foot-soldiers.

Nothing is more certain than that this earliest constitutional
scheme did not originate in Rome; it was a primitive institution
common to all the Latins, and perhaps reached back to a period
anterior to the separation of the stocks. The Roman constitutional
tradition quite deserving of credit in such matters, while it
accounts historically for the other divisions of the burgesses,
makes the division into curies alone originate with the origin of
the city; and in entire harmony with that view not only does the
curial constitution present itself in Rome, but in the recently
discovered scheme of the organization of the Latin communities it
appears as an essential part of the Latin municipal system.

The essence of this scheme was, and remained, the distribution
into curies. The tribes ("parts") cannot have been an element of
essential importance for the simple reason that their occurrence
at all was, not less than their number, the result of accident;
where there were tribes, they certainly had no other significance
than that of preserving the remembrance of an epoch when such
"parts" had themselves been wholes.(7) There is no tradition that
the individual tribes had special presiding magistrates or special
assemblies of their own; and it is highly probable that in the
interest of the unity of the commonwealth the tribes which had
joined together to form it were never in reality allowed to have
such institutions. Even in the army, it is true, the infantry had
as many pairs of leaders as there were tribes; but each of these
pairs of military tribunes did not command the contingent of a
tribe; on the contrary each individual war-tribune, as well as all
in conjunction, exercised command over the whole infantry. The
clans were distributed among the several curies; their limits and
those of the household were furnished by nature. That the legislative
power interfered in these groups by way of modification, that it
subdivided the large clan and counted it as two, or joined several
weak ones together, there is no indication at all in Roman tradition;
at any rate this took place only in a way so limited that the
fundamental character of affinity belonging to the clan was not
thereby altered. We may not therefore conceive the number of the
clans,