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It was different with the auspices taken on behalf of the state (auspicia publica). It is the Patricians alone who have these auspices, and only a magistrate belonging to the order can exercise the right of looking for them (spectio).[138] This remains not only a purely magisterial, but a purely patrician privilege, and the so-called plebeian magistrates of later times, great as their power was, had not the gift. It is quite true that, after the Plebs had forced its way into the consulship, this right could not be denied to the plebeian holders of the supreme office. But the admission was based on the legal fiction that the holder of an office once reserved to the patres was, for religious purposes, a patrician magistrate.[139]

The enjoyment of full political rights in ancient Rome was conditioned only by membership of a patrician gens; full citizenship here, as in most ancient states, being dependent on birth, and the membership of a purely private association satisfying all the demands that the state made as a condition of the attainment of its rights. But there were other forms of association of a definitely political character, amongst which the citizens were distributed, and as members of which they exercised active political rights or were subject to personal burdens. These were the three patrician tribes of Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, and the thirty curiae. With reference to the question whether these were primary and natural associations of an ethnic character or artificial creations made by a supreme authority after the founding of Rome, we have already seen[140] that the tribus are probably an ethnic survival artificially employed; in the case of the curiae, it must remain far less certain whether they were of spontaneous growth or purely artificial creations, or (what is perhaps more probable) in the main natural associations, artificially regulated in number and grouping to suit a political purpose.