the latter, which was directly composed of the whole
body of the burgesses, it was in some measure a representative
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 probably the rule that, when a senator died, the
king should call another experienced and aged man of
the same clanship to fill his place. It was
only, we may surmise, when the community became more
thoroughly amalgamated and inwardly united, that this
usage was departed from and the selection of the senators
was left entirely to the free judgment of the king,
so that he was only regarded as failing in his duty
when he omitted to fill up vacancies.