entative assembly of
persons acting for the people. Certainly that stage of independence
when each clan was virtually a state was surmounted in the Latin
stock at an immemorially early period, and the first and perhaps
most difficult step towards developing the community out of
the clan-organization--the setting aside of the clan-elders--had
possibly been taken in Latium long before the foundation of Rome;
the Roman clan, as we know it, is without any visible head, and no
one of the living clansmen is especially called to represent the
common patriarch from whom all the clansmen descend or profess to
descend so that even inheritance and guardianship, when they fall
by death to the clan, devolve on the clan-members as a whole.
Nevertheless the original character of the council of elders
bequeathed many and important legal consequences to the Roman
senate. To express the matter briefly, the position of the senate
as something other and more than a mere state-council--than an
assemblage of a number of trusty men whose advice the king found
it fitting to obtain--hinged entirely on the fact that it was once
an assembly, like that described by Homer, of the princes and rulers
of the people sitting for deliberation in a circle round the king.
So long as the senate was formed by the aggregate of the heads
of clans, the number of the members cannot have been a fixed one,
since that of the clans was not so; but in the earliest, perhaps
even in pre-Roman, times the number of the members of the council
of elders for the community had been fixed without respect to
the number of the then existing clans at a hundred, so that the
amalgamation of the three primitive communities had in state-law
the necessary consequence of an increase of the seats in the senate
to what was thenceforth the fixed normal number of three hundred.
Moreover the senators were at all times called to sit for life; and
if at a later period the lifelong tenure subsisted more -de facto-
than -de jure-, and the revisions of the senatorial list that
took place from time to time afforded an opportunity to remove the
unworthy or the unacceptable senator, it can be shown that this
arrangement only arose in the course of time. The selection of
the senators certainly, after there were no longer heads of clans,
lay with the king; but in this selection during the earlier epoch,
so long as the people retained a vivid sense of the individuality
of the clans, it was probab