Note 460 — Chapter IV · THE CENTURIES AND THE CLASSES

That the phalanx was a comparatively late institution at Rome, or that it was slow in becoming the only military system, is indicated by the survival in tradition of a more primitive mode of warfare. Sometimes in the early republic a single gens with its clients took the field; for the Fabian gens, see Livy ii. 48 ff. Often the patricians threatened to arm their clients, to carry on a war without the aid of the troublesome plebeians; cf. Dion. Hal. x. 15, 27 f., 43. As there was no motive in later time for the invention of such stories, they must contain a kernel of real tradition; hence they could not go back to the sixth century, and it is difficult to believe that they are so old as the fifth.

Collateral evidence that the second and third divisions were instituted relatively late may be found in the circumstance that the scutum, the distinctive piece of armor of these divisions, was introduced no earlier than the age of Camillus—the period of the war with Veii and the Gallic conflagration; Livy viii. 8. 3; Müller-Deecke, Etrusker, i. 366. It was Samnite (Athen. vi. 106, p. 273 f.; cf. Sall. Cat. 51), and was therefore probably adopted in the fourth century when Rome first came into contact with that people.