The gentile system of Rome recalls the patriarchal, and the
relation that subsisted between the patron and his clients has a
striking resemblance to that which subsists between the feudal
lord and his retainers, and may have had the same origin. The
three tribes, Ramnes, Quirites, and Luceres, into which the Roman
people were divided before the rise of the plebs, may have been,
as Niebuhr contends, local, not genealogical, in their origin,
but they were not strictly territorial distinctions, and the
division of each tribe into a hundred houses or gentes was not
local, but personal, if not, as the name implies, genealogical.
No doubt the individuals or families composing the house or gens
were not all of kindred blood, for the Oriental custom of
adoption, so frequent with our North American Indians, and with
all people distributed into tribes, septs, or clans, obtained
with the Romans. The adopted member was considered a child of
the house, and took its name and inherited its goods. Whether,
as Niebuhr maintains, all the free gentiles of the three tribes
were called patres or patricians or whether the term was
restricted to the heads of houses, it is certain that the head of
the house represented it in the senate, and the vote in the
curies was by houses, not by individuals en masse. After all,
practically the Roman senate was hardly less an estate than the
English house of lords, for no one could sit in it unless a
landed proprietor and of noble blood.
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