Note 353 — Chapter XII · - THE ROMAN CURIA, TRIBE AND POPULUS.

This was substantially the opinion of Niebuhr. “We may go further and affirm without hesitation, that originally, when the number of houses [gentes] was complete, they were represented immediately by the senate, the number of which was proportionate to theirs. The three hundred senators answered to the three hundred houses, which was assumed above on good grounds to be the number of them; each gens sent its decurion, who was its alderman and the president of its meetings to represent it in the senate.... That the senate should be appointed by the kings at their discretion, can never have been the original institution. Even Dionysius supposes that there was an election: his notion of it, however, is quite untenable, and the deputies must have been chosen, at least originally, by the houses and not by the curiæ.”—Hist. of Rome, i, 258. An election by the curiæ is, in principle, most probable, if the office did not fall to the chief ex officio, because the gentes in a curia had a direct interest in the representation of each gens. It was for the same reason that a sachem elected by the members of an Iroquois gens must be accepted by the other gentes of the same tribe before his nomination was complete.