[131] E.g. senatui populo plebique Romanae; Cicero, Fam. x. 35 (address).
[132] Mommsen, Röm. Staatsr. iii. 6, n. 4; Soltau, Altröm. Volksversamml. 84.
[133] For the division of the populus into tribes and curiae, see Cic. Rep. ii. 8. 14; Livy i. 13. 6; Dion. Hal. ii. 7. 2; App. B. C. iii. 94. The author of Vir. Ill. 2. 12, in supposing that the plebs alone were assigned to the tribes is certainly wrong; but his mistake is pardonable in view of the general agreement among our sources that the populus, πλῆθος, contained in the curiae were mainly plebeian.
[134] Cic. Rep. ii. 7. 13; 8. 14; 18. 33; Livy i. 13. 4; 13. 6; 28. 7; 30. 1; 33. 1-5; Dion. Hal. ii. 46. 2 f.; 47. 1; 50. 4 f.; 55. 6; iii. 29. 7; 30. 3; 31. 3; 37. 4; 48. 2; iv. 22. 3.
[135] Cf. Dion. Hal. ii. 8. 4.
[136] Livy i. 17. 11; 35. 2; 43. 10; 46. 1; Dion. Hal. ii. 10. 3; 14. 3; 60. 3; 62. 3; iv. 12. 3; 20. 2.
[137] Cf. Lectures on the History of Rome, i. 80, 83: “I beg you to mark this well ... that even ingenious and learned men like Livy and Dionysius did not comprehend the ancient institutions and yet have preserved a number of expressions from their predecessors from which we, with much labor and difficulty, may elicit the truth.”
[138] The school of Mommsen, which still clings to Niebuhr’s theory of an exclusively patrician populus, has abandoned the attempt to support it by a reconstruction of lost sources.
[139] The late regal period may have left a few documents which, if used by the annalists, might have thrown light on the condition of that time. It has not yet been determined whether the inscription recently found in the Roman Forum belongs to the late regal or to the early republican period.
[140] Mommsen, Röm. Staatsr. iii. 69, grants to the ancients far more knowledge of their own history, but claims a “wider horizon.”