In matters pertaining to legal marriage, as well as in higher affairs of state, religious superstition played a very prominent part. It remained for some decades the honest belief of the patricians that they alone had the right of holding communications with the gods or of taking correct auspices, maintaining further that any intermingling by marriage with plebeian blood would impair if not destroy this power of reading signs. According to them, auspices taken by plebeians, being of no value, always failed in their effect; hence there could be no question of appointing plebeians to offices which were so indissolubly connected with the taking of public auspices.
Thus it came about that not long after the foundation of the republic, the _populus_, _i.e._, the patrician body, and the plebeian stood arrayed against each other like two entirely unrelated races--between whom there cannot possibly be any unity of feeling or equality of rights. Through absorption of the Sabellian clan of Appius Claudius--who, at variance with his own people, had gone over to the side of the Romans and at the head of five thousand followers had settled on the opposite shore of the Anio--the patrician party was much the stronger and more numerous, and having alone the right to make appointments to civil office and to the priesthood, was the true guardian and promoter of the legal traditions and spiritual knowledge of the state.
The election of consuls was by no means carried on by free vote; rather, it appears, a list of nominees was made out beforehand by the presiding consul and the senate, from which the voters must choose, having the right at most to reject the candidates offered without that of substituting others in their places. Should the majority of votes fall to an opposition candidate, however, the presiding consul was neither obliged to recognise the votes nor to proclaim the candidate elected. The curiate assembly of the patricians alone had the right to confer by the passage of a _lex curiata de imperio_, the supreme power or _imperium_ upon the successful candidate. In the beginning of the republic the system of allowing colleges of the priesthood to appoint their own members was introduced, as was also that of appointing isolated priests and vestals through the pontifical college--an institution modelled doubtless on that of the pontifex maximus.