All civil communities had a council and an assembly of burghers, that
is, a small and a great council; the burghers consisted of the guilds or
_gentes_, and these again were united, as it were, in parishes; all the
Latin towns had a council of one hundred members, who were divided into
ten _curiae_; this division gave rise to the name of _decuriones_, which
remained in use as a title of civic magistrates down to the latest
times, and through the _lex Julia_ was transferred to the constitution
of the Italian _municipia_. That this council consisted of one hundred
persons has been proved by Savigny, in the first volume of his history
of the Roman law. This constitution continued to exist till a late
period of the middle ages, but perished when the institution of guilds
took the place of municipal constitutions. Giovanni Villani says, that
previously to the revolution in the twelfth century there were at
Florence one hundred _buoni nomini_, who had the administration of the
city. There is nothing in the German cities which answers to this
constitution. We must not conceive those hundred to have been nobles;
they were an assembly of burghers and country people, as was the case in
our small imperial cities, or as in the small cantons of Switzerland.
Each of them represented a _gens_; and they are those whom Propertius
calls _patres pelliti_. The _curia_ of Rome, a cottage covered with
straw, was a faithful memorial of the times when Rome stood buried in
the night of history, as a small country town surrounded by its little
domain.

The most ancient occurrence which we can discover from the form of the
allegory, by a comparison of what happened in other parts of Italy, is
a result of the great and continued commotion among the nations of
Italy. It did not terminate when the Oscans had been pressed forward
from Lake Fucinus to the lake of Alba, but continued much longer. The
Sabines may have rested for a time, but they advanced far beyond the
districts about which we have any traditions. These Sabines began as a
very small tribe, but afterward became one of the greatest nations of
Italy, for the Marrucinians, Caudines, Vestinians, Marsians, Pelignians,
and in short all the Samnite tribes, the Lucanians, the Oscan part of
the Bruttians, the Picentians, and several others were all descended
from the Sabine stock, and yet there are no traditions about their
settlements except in a few cases. At the time to which we must refer
t