5.  Besides the members of the gens, there were attached to it a number of dependents called clients, who owed submission to the chief as their patron, and received from him assistance and protection.  The clients were generally foreigners who came to settle at Rome, and not possessing municipal rights, were forced to appear in the courts of law, &c. by proxy.  In process of time this relation assumed a feudal form, and the clients were bound to the same duties as vassals[4] in the middle ages.

6.  The chiefs of the gentes composed the senate, and were called “fathers,” (patres.) In the time of Romulus, the senate at first consisted only of one hundred members, who of course represented the Latin tribe Ramne’nses; the number was doubled after the union with the Sabines, and the new members were chosen from the Titienses.  The Tuscan tribe of the Lu’ceres remained unrepresented in the senate until the reign of the first Tarquin, when the legislative body received another hundred[5] from that tribe.  Tarquin the elder was, according to history, a Tuscan Iticumo, and seems to have owed his elevation principally to the efforts of his compatriots settled at Rome.  It is to this event we must refer, in a great degree, the number of Tuscan ceremonies which are to be found in the political institutions of the Romans.

7.  The gentes were not only represented in the senate, but met also in a public assembly called “comitia curiata.”  In these comitia the kings were elected and invested with royal authority.  After the complete change of the constitution in later ages, the “comitia curiata"[6] rarely assembled, and their power was limited to religious matters; but during the earlier period of the republic, they claimed and frequently exercised the supreme powers of the state, and were named emphatically, The People.

8.  The power and prerogatives of the kings at Rome, were similar to those of the Grecian sovereigns in the heroic ages.  The monarch was general of the army, a high priest,[7] and first magistrate of the realm; he administered justice in person every ninth day, but an appeal lay from his sentence, in criminal cases, to the general assemblies of the people.  The pontiffs and augurs, however, were in some measure independent of the sovereign, and assumed the uncontrolled direction of the religion of the state.

9.  The entire constitution was remodelled by Ser’vius Tul’lius, and a more liberal form of government introduced.  His first and greatest achievement was the formation of the plebeians into an organized order of the state, invested with political rights.  He divided them into four cities and twenty-six rustic tribes, and thus made the number of tribes the same as that of the curiae.  This was strictly a geographical division, analagous to our parishes, and had no connection with families, like that of the Jewish tribes.