[958] IV. 3. 4.
[959] P. 17.
[960] IV. 4. 7; p. 24, n. 5, 200, n. 1; cf. Suet. Tib. 1: “Patricia gens Claudia ... in patricias cooptata.”
[961] Mommsen’s theory (Röm. Staatsr. iii. 29 and n. 2) that the patriciate was conferred through the coöperation of the king and the comitia appears accordingly to rest on a weak foundation. He gives no evidence, but bases his contention on the argument (1) that the community was sovereign, (2) that—the patriciate being in his opinion equivalent to the citizenship and the comitia curiata being a group of gentes—the downfall of the comitia made the reception of gentes impossible. Ground is taken against the theory of popular sovereignty in the following chapter. Against his second point it can be urged that the original comitia were neither patrician nor “gentile”; hence there is no occasion for speaking of the downfall of such comitia or of its sweeping consequences.
[962] Livy iv. 4. 7; p. 17, n. 5, 164, n. 6.
[963] Mommsen, Röm. Forsch. i. 74 ff.
[964] Gell. v. 19. 1-3.
[965] Such an examination was the only means by which the patricians could protect their order from being flooded by plebeians; cf. Mommsen, ibid. i. 77, who notices that no known instance of this kind of adoption took place before the admission of plebeians to the pontifical college through the Ogulnian law, 300; p. 309 below.
[966] Schrader, Reallexikon, 924; Spencer, Principles of Sociology, ii. 407.
[967] Il. i. 54; ii. 50; xix. 40 ff.; Od. ii. 6 f.