With the same kind of reasoning we could conclude that because in the Homeric age of Greece chariots were used in war by nobles only, the infantry must also have been exclusively noble; whereas we know that the rank and file were common men.[208] That the Roman army before Servius was similarly composed is supported not only by this and many other analogies, but also by the unanimous testimony of the sources. As in other primitive states the warriors belonged to the assembly and were the citizens.
(3) Of the sixteen local tribes named after gentes it can be proved that ten have the names of patrician gentes, and not one name is known to be plebeian. This is evident proof that from the beginning the patriciate was not nobility but citizenship.[209]
His premises prove no more than that at the time when these tribes were instituted the patricians were influential enough to give their names to ten, probably to all sixteen. In all the three cases mentioned, Mommsen reasons that because the patricians alone enjoyed the honors, privileges, and influence usually considered appropriate to a nobility, they must therefore have constituted not the nobility simply but the whole citizen body.
(4) He identifies patres with gentiles and assumes that the primitive state was an aggregate of gentes, thus making the patres the only members of the state.[210]
These are not proofs but unsupported assumptions. The only connection of patres with gentes given in Latin literature is in the well-known phrases patres maiorum and minorum gentium; and Cicero[211] makes it clear that these patres were senators. The phrase means senators from, or belonging to, the greater or lesser gentes. Furthermore it has been proved (1) that the patricians were not the only gentiles,[212] (2) that the curia, and hence the state, was not an aggregation of gentes.[213]
(5) We are informed, says Mommsen, (a) that the body of full Roman citizens consisted originally of a hundred families, whose fathers, the patres, regarded more or less concretely as the ancestors of the individual gentes, composed the senate, and together with them their descendants, the patricians, made up the citizen body; or expressed in other words (b) patrician originally meant just what was afterward included under the term ingenuus.[214]
For (a) Mommsen cites those passages by which it has been shown[215] that the Romans looked upon the original hundred senators as the fathers neither of the “citizen body” nor of the “full citizens,” but of the nobility. His statement of the case is directly contradicted by the authorities he quotes. As regards (b) it has been sufficiently proved[216] that ingenuus when made equivalent to patricius most naturally signifies not “of free birth,” but “of respectable, noble birth.”
Most scholars have wisely avoided bringing the myth of the asylum[217] into the argument. Pellegrino,[218] however, identifies the refugees at that place with the entire plebeian body. As the asylum was not an Italian but a Greek institution,[219] the story connected with it is doubtless a myth. It seems to have been invented by the Greeks of southern Italy, most probably in the fourth century B.C. At that time they began to view with alarm the southward advance of the Romans, and to disparage them accordingly by falsifications representing their origin as obscure and disreputable.[220] Similar calumnies against other peoples were concocted by their Greek enemies.[221] Notwithstanding the fact that the story had not even a kernel of historical truth the Romans accepted it with more or less modification[222] and used it to some extent for partisan objects.[223] They could not oppose the plebs to patricians as foreigners to natives, however, for (1) they supposed that plebeians as well as patricians participated in the original settlement of Rome, (2) they derived patrician as well as plebeian families from foreign sources.[224] We are warranted in concluding that in adopting the Greek myth of the asylum they looked upon it as a cause of increase in the plebeian population without finding in it the origin of the plebeian class.
To the theory of an exclusively patrician populus the following objections may be summarily urged: (1) It is opposed by the unanimous testimony of the ancient authorities. (2) It rests upon a wrong explanation of the words patres, patricii, as designations of the nobles. (3) It is further propped up by reasons so feeble as to testify at once to its weakness, the more substantial basis having been overthrown partly by Mommsen himself. (4) The number of patricians is too small for the theory.[225] (5) It ignores the meaning of the word plebs, which evidently signifies “the masses,” in contrast with the few nobles, and hence could not apply to a class gradually formed by the liberation of clients, or by the admission of foreigners. No one who holds the theory has attempted to show what these liberated clients were called when they were but few compared with the patricians—before they became “the multitude.” (6) It is contradicted by everything we know of Rome’s attitude towards aliens. So far back as our knowledge reaches, she was extremely liberal in bestowing the citizenship, even forcing it upon some communities. Only when she acquired the rule over a considerable part of Italy did she begin to show illiberality in this respect. Down to 353 the citizenship thus freely extended included the right to vote.[226] (7) It assumes the existence of a community politically far advanced yet showing no inequalities of rank among the freemen—a condition outside the range of human experience. It aims to explain the origin of the social classes on purely Roman ground, ignoring the fact that distinctions of rank are far older than the city, and exist, at least in germ, in the most primitive communities of which we have knowledge.[227]